872 Life poems

—spring wind with its train of spoons, kidney-bean shaped pools, Floridian humus, cicadas with their electric appliance hum, cricket pulse of dusk under the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s finish, snow’s white afterlife, death’s breath finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl you carved the word because you craved the world—

Shoes, secret face of my inner life: Two gaping toothless mouths, Two partly decomposed animal skins Smelling of mice nests. My brother and sister who died at birth Continuing their existence in you, Guiding my life Toward their incomprehensible innocence. What use are books to me When in you it is possible to read The Gospel of my life on earth And still beyond, of things to come? I want to proclaim the religion I have devised for your perfect humility And the strange church I am building With you as the altar. Ascetic and maternal, you endure: Kin to oxen, to Saints, to condemned men, With your mute patience, forming The only true likeness of myself.

I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar In a war movie on the arm Of a young actor. He has just swum Across a river somewhere in Normandy Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades. Of course, the river’s in California, And the actor is dead now. Nevertheless, This is the first of many hotels this trip, And I find myself preferring wars To smut on the networks, Even as I find myself reading The Pisan Cantos for the umpteenth time Instead of the novel in my bag. The poet helps me to the question: Does anything remain of home at home? Next day is no way of knowing, And the day after is my favorite, A small museum really perfect And a good meal in the middle of it. As I’m leaving, I notice a donkey on a vase Biting the arm of a young girl, And outside on the steps A silver fish head glistens beside a bottlecap. Plenty remains. The work of poetry is trust, And under the aegis of trust Nothing could be more effortless. Hotels show movies. Walking around even tired I find my eyes find Numberless good things And my ears hear plenty of words Offered for nothing over the traffic noise As sharp as sparrows. A day and a day, more rivers crossing me. It really feels that way, I mean I have changed places with geography, And rivers and towns pass over me, Showing their scars, finding their friends. I like it best when poetry Gleams or shows its teeth to a girl Forever at just the right moment. I think I could turn and live underneath the animals. I could be a bottlecap. Going to the airport going home, I stop with my teacher, now my friend. He buys me a good breakfast, berries and hotcakes. We finish and, standing, I hear One policeman saying to another Over the newspaper in a yellow booth "Do you know this word regret, Eddie? What does it mean?" Plenty of words over the traffic noise, And nothing could be more effortless. Catching a glimpse of eternity, even a poor one, says it all.

The autumn-time has come; On woods that dream of bloom, And over purpling vines, The low sun fainter shines. The aster-flower is failing, The hazel’s gold is paling; Yet overhead more near The eternal stars appear! And present gratitude Insures the future’s good, And for the things I see I trust the things to be; That in the paths untrod, And the long days of God, My feet shall still be led, My heart be comforted. O living friends who love me! O dear ones gone above me! Careless of other fame, I leave to you my name. Hide it from idle praises, Save it from evil phrases: Why, when dear lips that spake it Are dumb, should strangers wake it? Let the thick curtain fall; I better know than all How little I have gained, How vast the unattained. Not by the page word-painted Let life be banned or sainted: Deeper than written scroll The colors of the soul. Sweeter than any sung My songs that found no tongue; Nobler than any fact My wish that failed of act. Others shall sing the song, Others shall right the wrong,— Finish what I begin, And all I fail of win. What matter, I or they? Mine or another’s day, So the right word be said And life the sweeter made? Hail to the coming singers! Hail to the brave light-bringers! Forward I reach and share All that they sing and dare. The airs of heaven blow o’er me; A glory shines before me Of what mankind shall be,— Pure, generous, brave, and free. A dream of man and woman Diviner but still human, Solving the riddle old, Shaping the Age of Gold! The love of God and neighbor; An equal-handed labor; The richer life, where beauty Walks hand in hand with duty. Ring, bells in unreared steeples, The joy of unborn peoples! Sound, trumpets far off blown, Your triumph is my own! Parcel and part of all, I keep the festival, Fore-reach the good to be, And share the victory. I feel the earth move sunward, I join the great march onward, And take, by faith, while living, My freehold of thanksgiving.

The wind is fitful now: soot piles in the corners of new buildings, gulls stumble out of place in ragged branches to skim against a rise of pond water.

Afternoon darkens into evening. A man falls deeper and deeper into the slow spiral of sleep, into the drift of it, the length of it, through what feels like mist, and comes at last to an open door through which he passes without knowing why, then again without knowing why goes to a room where he sits and waits while the room seems to close around him and the dark is darker than any he has known, and he feels something forming within him without being sure what it is, its hold on him growing, as if a story were about to unfold, in which two characters, Pleasure and Pain, commit the same crime, the one that is his, that he will confess to again and again, until it means nothing.

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime, the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail: that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls. Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath, mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand, feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed; the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ... No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here; it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen, something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast; as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale, a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail, drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

1. Cross-hatchings, palm and rain, clapboard faded to the grain, half-shutters open to old vines and mangroves draining their own shadows; recollecting what the body knows suspended between coral and shifting images of cloud ... After death, after the knowledge of death, his death, his face, unwrapped, already yellowed, papery, recovered with a small white cloth then lowered away and shut to the earth; So pierced, so mute, these words re-opening: Not this. 2. The rain had gone. I swam against the current, harnessed by water till I turned and swung out with the tide, shouldering deep into a rhythm of my own, long strokes pulled under the body and returning past the glinting crease in which I breathed, the sea half-woken like another body bedded into sheer transparency, the outer reaches granular with light. Comebacks. Chains of radiance. Far more than meet the eye. What do they meet then, intimate but otherworldly, mimicking the world? I looked back at the land’s thin edge, pines along the shoreline near a fort where cannons rust, mouths left open among thistleweed around the dozing moat. Far back among fallen needles, pigeons shuffle through shade, their feathers iris underlight, soft flares bob the dark. The land had disappeared. The sun had followed it. From either wrist, half-mingled with my breath into the night, a trail of ungloved phosphor travelled back. 3. Sounds too have their surfaces: within the mortal frame, particles of blood revolve as in a sort of heaven where breath moves through us as an unseen light; but when the marrow bonds are parted they in turn set loose what has been called the soul ...

She’s got a hundred & two temperature, delivery room nurses said. You’re gonna live, though — long enough to know you’re going to go as quickly as you came, gonna make your mother swear by you, going to shake your Bible with red-tipped nails before you vanish into Chicago South Side skies that bleed — not like watercolor, not like a wound, not like a fat, bitten plum — not necessarily. No, not necessarily. Nothing that precious or predictable.Speak nicely to others & they will nicely speak to you, your mother said. No, not so, you said fairly close to the end. No time to wait for mother’s ride home or for saviors, coming soon.

In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses. Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness. Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles. Name after name, sinking me farther beneath waking's buoyancy. House, this morning, is pale with the rush of what night siphoned off. Objects, still emptied of resemblance, hum their chord-less cantos. Bloodless, my knuckles knock on walls without echo, testing singularities. Sun on the cutlery offers an ageless sheen. Though it ages the silver relentlessly. New, but still rudimentary tools to be gleaned from my over-used weaponry.