872 Life poems

The eyes on a face have brought me sadness: the right eye searching for seams in ripped fishnets; the left eye lost and wandering the dark; the eye of the baby god crawling behind a couch in the moist suburb where we planned our escape from video games and grilled cheese; the eye of a whale we met in a dream who spit us out so we could make the 8 o’clock screening of On Golden Pond; the eye of the clock, blinking when the oboe wailed like a burning shofar; the eye inside the eye, curled up—a sprouting lima bean, remembering the nineteenth century, those rosy drapes; the eyes of missing finger tips, of sad afternoons in French cafés in Dayton, Ohio; the eyes on the very real parrot who sits on the shoulders of a wax actor dressed as a pirate; the eyes of an actress, pretending to be my mom; the eyes of my father, sleeping on a train, dreaming about miniature crashing planes; the eyes of a swimming pool, looking up or down everyone’s swimsuits and into their souls; the eyes in love songs written by mean men; the eyes in the painting lost in a fire where we tried to save the ancient cat; the eyes underneath tap shoes clicking like teeth; the eyes of Fred Astaire, never blinking, even to kiss in the dark; the eyes of the state of Texas secretly tattooed on everyone’s ass, and the eyes on the billboard, ripped and faded from rain like the eyes of the best waitress on the Upper West Side who knows everyone’s order, even those of customers she’s never met. Can you hear  the eyes under my eyes? They steal other people’s dreams to use them for ad copy. Here are the eyes of a man who’d be my husband if he hadn’t married my twin, and there are the eyes of the judge who divorced them, blue as his tie. I forget the eye color of the first man I loved—what color was my hat when we cried in the snow? The whites of everyone’s eyes swirl together in silent music. Nothing like the closed eyes of a flamenco dancer, eating a dripping hamburger by the highway. Instead it is the right eye of a teacher when she touches her student; the eyes inside my mouth and the eyes outside your mouth; the eyes of the writer and reader, a broken vase and a whole petal; the eyes on what you thought of as a cunt and the eyes on what I thought of as a cock; the small eyes on the open book and the bigger eyes of the closed book; the eyes I swallow when we talk, and the eyes that fly above us in sleep.

A new obsession. How to get out of cold, metallic waters alive. Every night for a week I dream of my car ending up in a body of water. If I’m not driving, someone else is. Bob, the neighbor. My new paranoia. I Google how to escape a car filling with water. I watch videos on YouTube. I memorize the steps of what to do if this happens. First, you take your seat belt off. Late at night, I read pages and pages on the internet. What if the car lands in the water flipped over? Remember to stay calm. If you panic, you will die. News story about a woman who drives her minivan into the ocean on purpose. Horrified beachgoers run toward the water. The two kids are strapped in the back seat. One of the kids is screaming “No, mommy” — What about the sunroof? What if you land in the water and your car has a sunroof? My new car has a sunroof. You have to let the car fill with water so that pressure is equalized on both sides. This is elementary physics. If you don’t do this, it’s impossible to open the doors. This is the scary part. You have to hold your breath. None of the YouTube videos say anything about what to do if you have kids strapped in car seats in the car. I look up what the dreams mean. Water in dreams signifies turbulent emotions. If you are in your car and there is a flash flood, you should get out immediately. Even six inches of water can sweep your car away. Sweep it to where? Maybe the forest? I get nervous driving by the Gulf of Mexico. My friend Dyan got into an accident there and she said that if the car had flipped on the other side of the road, her whole family would have ended up in the water. I don’t like water. I don’t want to touch it. It scares me. I know all life was born of water. Today the government proposed to sell off all public lands. That before anything existed there were rocks and then water. I know that water is beautiful and mysterious. But why does it sweep people away? I want to push down the rising seas. I look at a map of cities that will be underwater by 2100, 2200 — Jacksonville, New Orleans, Amsterdam. I want to push them down with my bare hands.

The recital of the new optimism was oft interrupted, rudeness in the ramparts, an injured raven that needed attendance, pre-op nudity. The young who knew everything was new made babies who unforeseeably would one day present their complaint. Enough blame to go around but the new optimism didn’t stop, helped one pick up a brush, another a spatula even as the last polar bear sat on his shrinking berg thinking, I have been vicious but my soul is pure. And the new optimism loves the bear’s soul and makes images of it to sell at fair-trade craft fairs with laboriously knotted hunks of rope, photos of cheese, soaps with odd ingredients, whiskey, sand, hamburger drippings, lint, any and everything partaking of the glowing exfoliating cleanup. And the seal is sponged of oil spill. And the broken man is wheeled in a meal. War finally seems stupid enough. You look an animal in the eye before eating it and the gloomy weather makes the lilacs grow. Hello, oceans of air. Your dead cat loves you forever and will welcome you forever home.

to Michael Lally You had your own reasons for getting In your own way. You didn’t want to be Clear to yourself. You knew a hell Of a lot more than you were willing to let yourself know. I felt Natural love for you on the spot. R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Right. Beautiful. I don’t use the word lightly. I Protested with whatever love (honesty) (& frontal nudity) A yes basically reserved Irish Catholic American Providence Rhode Island New Englander is able to manage. You Are sophisticated, not uncomplicated, not Naïve, and Not simple. An Entertainer, & I am, too. Frank O’Hara respected love, so do you, & so do we. He was himself & I was me. And when we came together Each ourselves in Iowa, all the way That was love, & it still is, love, today. Can you see me In what I say? Because as well I see you know In what you have to say, I did love Frank, as I do You, “in the right way”. That’s just talk, not Logos, a getting down to cases: I take it as simple particulars that we wear our feelings on our faces.

Last night I invented a new pleasure, and as I was giving it the first trial an angel and a devil came rushing toward my house.  They met at my door and fought with each other over my newly created pleasure; the one crying, “It is a sin!”—the other, “It is a virtue!”

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes and it would be most convenient to impose its old rooms—just tack them up like an interior tent. Oh but the new holes aren’t where the windows went.

After William IX, Duke of Aquitaine As sweetness flows through these new days, the woods leaf out, and songbirds phrase in neumes of roosted melody incipits to a new song. Then love should find lubricity and quicken, having slept so long. The bloodroot blossoms, well and good, but I receive no word that would set my troubled heart at ease, nor could we turn our faces toward the sun, and open by degrees, unless we reach a clear accord. And so our love goes, night and day: it’s like the thorny hawthorn spray that whips about in a bitter wind from dusk to dawn, shellacked with sleet, until the sun’s first rays ascend through leaves and branches, spreading heat. I have in mind one April morning when she relented without warning, relenting from her cold rebuff in laughter, peals of happiness. Sweet Christ, let me live long enough to get my hands beneath her dress! I hate the elevated talk that disregards both root and stalk and sets insipid pride above vicissitudes of lust and strife. Let others claim a higher love: we’ve got the bread, we’ve got the knife.

a child carrying flowers walks toward the new year a conductor tattooing darkness listens to the shortest pause hurry a lion into the cage of music hurry stone to masquerade as a recluse moving in parallel nights who's the visitor? when the days all tip from nests and fly down roads the book of failure grows boundless and deep each and every moment's a shortcut I follow it through the meaning of the East returning home, closing death's door

Last night something tunneled through the elms. But at sunrise, I found just white light biting my eyelids, salt rubbed on a wound. Batons of ice fell from power lines, soundless but still emphatic. Then the rain churned the snow to soap scum, waxing cars with winter’s lichen, patchy in the strange uneven fur of newborns. And still, I was childless. One cardinal lodged on a branch: a blood-drop striking water before the slow dispersion.

The rain this morning falls on the last of the snow and will wash it away. I can smell the grass again, and the torn leaves being eased down into the mud. The few loves I’ve been allowed to keep are still sleeping on the West Coast. Here in Virginia I walk across the fields with only a few young cows for company. Big-boned and shy, they are like girls I remember from junior high, who never spoke, who kept their heads lowered and their arms crossed against their new breasts. Those girls are nearly forty now. Like me, they must sometimes stand at a window late at night, looking out on a silent backyard, at one rusting lawn chair and the sheer walls of other people’s houses. They must lie down some afternoons and cry hard for whoever used to make them happiest, and wonder how their lives have carried them this far without ever once explaining anything. I don’t know why I’m walking out here with my coat darkening and my boots sinking in, coming up with a mild sucking sound I like to hear. I don’t care where those girls are now. Whatever they’ve made of it they can have. Today I want to resolve nothing. I only want to walk a little longer in the cold blessing of the rain, and lift my face to it.