872 Life poems

How much grit do you think you’ve got? Can you quit a thing that you like a lot? You may talk of pluck; it’s an easy word, And where’er you go it is often heard; But can you tell to a jot or guess Just how much courage you now possess? You may stand to trouble and keep your grin, But have you tackled self-discipline? Have you ever issued commands to you To quit the things that you like to do, And then, when tempted and sorely swayed, Those rigid orders have you obeyed? Don’t boast of your grit till you’ve tried it out, Nor prate to men of your courage stout, For it’s easy enough to retain a grin In the face of a fight there’s a chance to win, But the sort of grit that is good to own Is the stuff you need when you’re all alone. How much grit do you think you’ve got? Can you turn from joys that you like a lot? Have you ever tested yourself to know How far with yourself your will can go? If you want to know if you have grit, Just pick out a joy that you like, and quit. It’s bully sport and it’s open fight; It will keep you busy both day and night; For the toughest kind of a game you’ll find Is to make your body obey your mind. And you never will know what is meant by grit Unless there’s something you’ve tried to quit.

because a box is a box: humans are cultivated into said box without choice or clarification, specimens only existing—as in: (you—i—us). flesh & frame— restricted bone matter comprising a box reluctant not to be a box. but nurtured inside the box, let’s say form which is shaped by & indigenous, to, the box & the creator of the holy box—only leading to another question about, of course, the infamous box—form turns deceitful inside the box like any [thing] caged, leaning to a non-empathetic approach steeped in revolt —is judas in waiting. note: the box is not universal nor the universal. whatever hopes of otherworldliness lies in the box itself. the box will not elongate, dissolve or vanish without reaction to an action & here within lies problem of perspective as in—there is none—zero. along time’s continuum, color, too, is encouraged for the sake of the construction of the box, which is precious as flickering light, but cannot be verified since darkness is the original concept of all things human.

The heavy, wet, guttural small-plane engine fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness about where the airport should be. I take a lot for granted, not pleased to be living under the phlegm- soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets and live elsewhere in Clean Zones, but figuring the air is full of sorrows. I don’t blame the quick use of the entire earth on the boozy pilot come down to get a dose of cobalt for his cancer. He’s got a little life left, if he doesn’t have to take all day to reach it. With the black patches inside him, and the scars and the streaks and the sick stomach, his life is more and more like that of the lowliest child chimney sweep in the mind of the great insensible, William Blake. William Blake, the repeated one, Blake, half mad, half remembered, who knew his anatomy, down to the little-observed muscle in the shoulder that lifts the wing. The little London chimney sweeper reaches up and reaches down. In his back, every vertebra is separated from the long hours of stretching. With one deep, tired breath, the lungs go black. By the Holiday Company crane, adding a level to the hospital, on the highest land in the county, heavy sits the pure-white Air Care helicopter, with its bulging eye. It has kept many going, a good buy, something. Now someone I know says Blake in anger, angry for his brother in the factory and his sister on the ward, but tonight I have no more anger than the muscle that lifts my knee when I walk. Another pleads with the ocean that the words for suffering and trouble take place in a sound that will be all sounds and in the tidal roll of all our lives and every event, but I am silent by water, and am less to such power than a failed lung. And I think it is only a clever trick to know that one thing may be contained in another. Hence, Blake in the sweep, one in the ground in one in the air, myself in the clinic for runaway cells, now and later.

“So this is it, experience,” I thought, lugging tin buckets from the ice machines to rooms of real adults with cigarettes, mixed drinks in plastic cups, and proffered coins. I reached out for their blessings, but the tips were nothing next to rumpled, unmade beds at four in the afternoon, women in slips and men in t-shirts while the TV played. Down in the laundry room, I counted sheets, stunned by the musk that vanished in the wash, and balled up soggy towels that down the chutes exploded in bins. Before the evening rush, avid and timid for what I glimpsed at work, I left, hanging my gold vest on a hook.

My cuticles are a mess. Oh honey, by the way, did you like my new negligee? It’s a replica of one Kim Novak wore in some movie or other. I wish I had a foot-long chili dog right now. Do you like fireworks, I mean not just on the 4th of July, but fireworks any time? There are people like that, you know. They’re like people who like orchestra music, listen to it any time of day. Lopsided people, that’s what my father calls them. Me, I’m easy to please. I like ping-gong and bobcats, shatterproof drinking glasses, the smell of kerosene, the crunch of carrots. I like caterpillars and whirlpools, too. What I hate most is being the first one at the scene of a bad accident. Do I smell like garlic? Are we still in Kansas? I once had a chiropractor make a pass at me, did I ever tell you that? He said that your spine is happiest when you’re snuggling. Sounds kind of sweet now when I tell you, but he was a creep. Do you know that I have never understood what they meant by “grassy knoll.” It sounds so idyllic, a place to go to dream your life away, not kill somebody. They should have called it something like “the grudging notch.” But I guess that’s life. What is it they always say? “It’s always the sweetest ones that break your heart.” You getting hungry yet, hon? I am. When I was seven I sat in our field and ate an entire eggplant right off the vine. Dad loves to tell that story, but I still can’t eat eggplant. He says I’ll be the first woman President, it’d be a waste since I talk so much. Which do you think the fixtures are in the bathroom at the White House, gold or brass? It’d be okay with me if they were just brass. Honey, can we stop soon? I really hate to say it but I need a lady’s room.

The first act of love in a new house is not private. Loving each other we are half-aware of door and mirror. Our ecstasy includes the bedside chair, the air from the landing. Street-lamp and elm utter leaves on walls as in no room ever. Theirs is the tongue our tongues join in translating. Their message is clear: tonight you cannot ignore the world at the window. So we love in the knowledge of a city at a different angle. And sharing our bed with furniture and tree we claim their perspective, merging our lives here in their established frame.

My aunts mentioned her just once, calling her my aunt, their sister, though she wasn’t. They mentioned the vinyl recliner in the kitchen, the “I Like Ike” poster, the Sacred Heart, cabbage smells, sulfur, and shame. Before jolted by the gift that called through but never really for her, she became unpleasantly calm. Moments later, after she said “I don’t want this please,” God’s love raced down the pulse into her look. It was as if her things spoke back: a table leg scraped the floor, a fork wobbled in a drawer, knickknacks fell. She nearly died each time it happened. They said her mind just wasn’t there, or she wasn’t in it anymore. She sat helpless afterward, papery when they lifted her from vision seat to bed. The might to move what her eye fell upon is the image of her I keep, her iridescent readiness.

You are sitting in Mrs. Caldera’s kitchen, you are sipping a glass of lemonade and trying not to be too curious about the box of plastic hummingbirds behind you, the tray of tineless forks at your elbow. You have heard about the backroom where no one else has ever gone and whatever enters, remains, refrigerator doors, fused coils, mower blades, milk bottles, pistons, gears. “You never know,” she says, rummaging through a cedar chest of recipes, “when something will come of use.” There is a vase of pencil tips on the table, a bowl full of miniature wheels and axles. Upstairs, where her children slept, the doors will not close, the stacks of magazines are burgeoning, there are snow shoes and lampshades, bedsprings and picture tubes, and boxes and boxes of irreducibles! You imagine the headline in the Literalist Express: House Founders Under Weight Of Past. But Mrs Caldera is baking cookies, she is humming a song from childhood, her arms are heavy and strong, they have held babies, a husband, tractor parts and gas tanks, what have they not found a place for? It is getting dark, you have sat for a long time. If you move, you feel something will be disturbed, there is room enough only for your body. “Stay awhile,” Mrs. Caldera says, and never have you felt so valuable.

The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so I’m told — that I used to live with, she’d follow me everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s more the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — that I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty, like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s taken me, just to half-understand that. Pretty much my whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably, gets stripped away: what hope, otherwise, for suffering? When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay inside of, I’m not saying forever, I could last a fair time on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose command through a summer garden. Let those plants that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.

Even at my favorite coffeeshop downtown, Redford is a hard man to feed. This morning, he picks at his Grilled Asiago Mastercrust with a slow, disdainful frown. Could they spare the fromage on this so-called "treat?" He takes a sip of hazelnut coffee, then winces delicately into the neck of his sweater vest. I bite powerfully through my Cinnamon Frenchroll:Well, if you really don't think you got enough—"fromage"—you should just go back up there & tell the girl