872 Life poems

What do we need for love—a midnight fire Flinging itself by fistfuls up the chimney In soft bright snatches? Do we need the snow, Gentle as silence, covering the scars Of weeks of hunger, years of shabby having? Summer or winter? A heaven of stars? A room? The smiling mouth, the sadness of desire Are everywhere the same. If lovers go Along an unknown road, they find no less What is familiar. Let them stay at home, And all will still be strange. This they know Who with each heartbeat fight the fear of change.

Always fatal, Tay-Sachs disease affects only Eastern European children. For R.N.B. Over the waves of his chest, you watch the sun go up, again. How accidentally the birds cross it! How seemingly accidental. What random choices led you to him—your darling from the same steppes as Zhivago's, and your own. Then he's dressed, and you're almost. Leaning over, he pulls your slip up to put his hand over that fat part of you, where swims the swimmer. Enter Tay and Sachs, two men good at identifying a certain kind of certain death due to a certain mix of genes of children with certain parents. Today you go to determine your chances, rather, its chances, all euphemism unable to cover the chance red spot on the growing retina. After your doctor has his way, you can see on the screen the little swimmer trying to escape, holding the needle with both hands, just reflex. The verdict takes time to swell and ripen. The doctor offers his only balm, a curse: knowledge without antidote. All you know is that the immortals throw no bones, that you inherit nothing but genes and bravery, both faltering. You trot back to work and your new belly swirls with the fetal pig you took the eyes from, grade ten. To market, to market. You pull your goddamn shrinking coat around you. Nothing like the stir of life that has no chance. You shrug. It’s only the size of your finger, you don’t care— But knowing at the end of ten hours’ pitched screaming, your insides reversing, you get nothing— What goes where with death? You know all about life. You majored in biology, pirouetted through the wedding night. Does it make sounds yet? Choose happiness but accept the truth: the child might die, you tell your husband. Suffer and die. In the three-week wait you type and each hammer moves the days along. Waiting, every word from everyone hurts, every Good day, careless or concerned, every word. The only sympathy you want is the same cruelty shared, all else grates. Inside, it spins—in fear? What you must swallow is the sugar cube of your continuing, the inescapable desire to pee that stirs you mornings, hours before dawn. But if, at the end of these weeks of waiting, the white-masked priests come back bearing no news, which is their best, you will have brushed off death, rimed him bright and acceptable and seen it slant. Either way. That is, what happens doesn’t matter. You eat. You lie down. The sun shrinks. The daily din you’re thankful for rescinds its paper currency that nothing backs up. Your husband puts on a pot to boil, and another. He can’t feel it inside, though he’s eaten the same sour apple, bearing half the genes, those underclothes, the bra, the brief of the body. You are dumb before his helplessness. The cord to belly to cord will not be broken, ripped untimely as it may be. Mama has happened and the rocking horse of your heart heaves on.

Wake to find everything black what was white, all the vice versa—white maids on TV, black sitcoms that star white dwarfs cute as pearl buttons. Black Presidents, Black Houses. White horse candidates. All bleach burns clothes black. Drive roads white as you are, white songs on the radio stolen by black bands like secret pancake recipes, white back-up singers, ball-players & boxers all white as tar. Feathers on chickens dark as everything, boiling in the pot that called the kettle honky. Even whites of the eye turn dark, pupils clear & changing as a cat's. Is this what we've wanted & waited for? to see snow covering everything black as Christmas, dark pages written white upon? All our eclipses bright, dark stars shooting across pale sky, glowing like ash in fire, shower every skin. Only money keeps green, still grows & burns like grass under dark daylight.

two divisions. one) knowing. nothing. into. understand. two) something. touched. someone. 1)     sequences outside of the categories labelled ‘telephones’ e.g. the milk arrived. 2)    the things all found a personal vocabulary. every word insulted everyone without looking. 1)    knowing nothing into understand.   and this almost said solemnly was the one that least occurred to me. ii) i sent my heart in the upper pocked or perhaps we made the bed in two seconds after we eliminated the third floor. and nothing else to risk but to hear her drinking.   1) something solemn touched something in the upper pocket. 2) knowing something touched nothing without drinking.  1) (i love onions 2) i told her so one. in one second 2. in two seconds flat the things that change conceal a system of ideas for instance the trains went by to come back on a roll of film they were both standing in the courtyard when i came she was 2)    sitting on the steps in a mans handwriting shutting my eyes to what remains to be said. 1)    an immense silence which had nothing to do with silence. 2)    for a long spell a spell of weeping begins to come.

A man hauling coal in the street is stilled forever. Inside a temple, instead of light a slow shutter lets the darkness in. I see a rat turn a corner running from a man with a chair trying to smash it, see people sleeping at midnight in a Wuhan street on bamboo beds, a dead pig floating, bloated, on water. I see a photograph of a son smiling who two years ago fell off a cliff and his photograph is in each room of the apartment. I meet a woman who had smallpox as a child, was abandoned by her mother but who lived, now has two daughters, a son, a son-in-law; they live in three rooms and watch a color television. I see a man in blue work clothes whose father was a peasant who joined the Communist party early but by the time of the Cultural Revolution had risen in rank and become a target of the Red Guards. I see a woman who tried to kill herself with an acupuncture needle but instead hit a vital point and cured her chronic asthma. A Chinese poet argues that the fundamental difference between East and West is that in the East an individual does not believe himself in control of his fate but yields to it. As a negative reverses light and dark these words are prose accounts of personal tragedy becoming metaphor, an emulsion of silver salts sensitive to light, laughter in the underground bomb shelter converted into a movie theater, lovers in the Summer Palace park.

Back in those days, when he told me about his adventures in sex clubs it wasn't the whys and wherefores but technical details, like going rafting down the Colorado River; and when he wrote about a gay male friend whose first sexual experience was with his stepfather, the friend told him it wasn't weird, but the best possible thing that could have happened . . . I saw then that God, who I never believed in, was dwelling in my heart as a negative: that the negative had been developed into a picture of a man who stares up at the sky on a day so clear he sees through the mountain's shadows to the divinely human-seeming form that climbs it— a neighbor in running shoes and sunglasses jogging up the slope with his dog, tongue panting and slavering, an acute look of happiness in its eyes that could turn at any moment into exhaustion or pain as in a maze of cubicles called Asshole Alley, little pyramids of canvas called Lust of the Pharaohs, different pricing for what you want, depending on the equipment, the air thick with a sour, acidic, head-fogging reek of come. . . . And my pal the poet, who believed in infernal chemistry, in the spirit as a kind of "spooky action at a distance," he communed with this God, this eternally dying father of all matter who made out of our bodies his own maze of cubicles where he hides himself away—his sanctuary Asshole Alley where God's own unholy loves bubble all around him like a cauldron in his ears— and my poet pal heard the bubbling, he stirred the pot, he showed me the holy city, the sexual New Jerusalem that came prepared as a bride adorned for her husband . . . —That was how it was in those days, back when my friend hadn't yet met the coroner who wrote down his cause of death as "polysubstance abuse" that brought on his heart attack while fucking . . . And regardless if I believed, whenever we were together God shone clearer— those were the days when every morning God woke up in a blur of ecstasy and went to bed every night in divine rage. Whoever loved him, he loved. Whoever hated him, he hated back: for who can doubt the vitality of hate or the volatility of love.

We knew. Anne to come. Anne to come. Be new. Be new too. Anne to come Anne to come Be new Be new too. And anew. Anne to come. Anne anew. Anne do come. Anne do come too, to come and to come not to come and as to and new, and new too. Anne do come. Anne knew. Anne to come. Anne anew. Anne to come. And as new. Anne to come to come too. Half of it. Was she Windows Was she Or mine Was she Or as she For she or she or sure. Enable her to say. And enable her to say. Or half way. Sitting down. Half sitting down. And another way. Their ships And please. As the other side. And another side Incoming Favorable and be fought. Adds to it. In half. Take the place of take the place of take the place of taking place. Take the place of in places. Take the place of taken in place of places. Take the place of it, she takes it in the place of it. In the way of arches architecture. Who has seen shown You do. Hoodoo. If can in countenance to countenance a countenance as in as seen. Change it. Not nearly so much. He had. She had. Had she. He had nearly very nearly as much. She had very nearly as much as had had. Had she. She had. Loose loosen, Loose losten to losten, to lose. Many. If a little if as little if as little as that. If as little as that, if it is as little as that that is if it is very nearly all of it, her dear her dear does not mention a ball at all. Actually. As to this. Actually as to this. High or do you do it. Actually as to this high or do you do it. Not how do you do it. Actually as to this. Not having been or not having been nor having been or not having been. Interrupted. All of this makes it unanxiously. Feel so. Add to it. As add to it. He. He. As add to it. As add to it. As he As he as add to it. He. As he Add to it. Not so far. Constantly as seen. Not as far as to mean. I mean I mean. Constantly. As far. So far. Forbore. He forbore. To forbear. Their forbears. Plainly. In so far. Instance. For instance. In so far.

My death was arranged by special plans in Heaven And only occasioned comment by ten persons in Adams, Massachusetts. The best thing ever said about me Was that I was deft at specifying trump. I was killed by my father And married to my mother But born too early to know what happened to me, And as I was an only child I erected selfishness into a personal religion, Sat thinking forty years saying nothing. I observed all. I loved to drink gin, Would not have thought to go farther Into arcane episodes of the heavier drugs, And, being New England, always remained sober. However, I confess now, I was Always afraid of women, I don’t know why, it was just the way it was, I could never get very close to any woman. Knowledge and intelligence allowed me The grand rationalization of this; also, I respected Delicacy, but would not go too far in any direction. I thought I was a good man. I was. I did not obstruct the state, nor religion, But I saw through both and maintained my independence. I kept my counsels among the learned. My learning was more private and precious than worldly. The world had no sense of the devious, So my private vicissitudes were mine alone. I say all this with a special sort of grace For I avoided many of the pitfalls of fallen man And while I did not have heroic size, the Creative grandeur, or mastership of the mind I earned my bread by cynicism alone, And blow you all a kiss from the tomb.

Forget the corncrake’s elegy. Rusty Iambics that escaped your discipline Of shorn lawns, it is sustained by nature. It does not grieve for you, nor for itself. You remember the rolled gold of cornfields, Their rustling of tinsel in the wind, A whole field quivering like blown silk? A shiver now runs through the laurel hedge, And washing flutters like the swaying lines Of a new verse. The high fidelity Music of the newly-wed obscures your Dedication to a life of loving Money. What could they be for, those marble Toilet fixtures, the silence of water-beds, That book of poems you bought yesterday?

I was ready for a new experience. All the old ones had burned out. They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside And blew in drifts across the fairgrounds and fields. From a distance some appeared to be smoldering But when I approached with my hat in my hands They let out small puffs of smoke and expired. Through the windows of houses I saw lives lit up With the otherworldly glow of TV And these were smoking a little bit too. I flew to Rome. I flew to Greece. I sat on a rock in the shade of the Acropolis And conjured dusky columns in the clouds. I watched waves lap the crumbling coast. I heard wind strip the woods. I saw the last living snow leopard Pacing in the dirt. Experience taught me That nothing worth doing is worth doing For the sake of experience alone. I bit into an apple that tasted sweetly of time. The sun came out. It was the old sun With only a few billion years left to shine.