872 Life poems

Am I to become profligate as if I were a blonde? Or religious as if I were French? Each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous (and how the same names keep recurring on that interminable list!), but one of these days there’ll be nothing left with which to venture forth. Why should I share you? Why don’t you get rid of someone else for a change? I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love. Even trees understand me! Good heavens, I lie under them, too, don’t I? I’m just like a pile of leaves. However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh. My eyes are vague blue, like the sky, and change all the time; they are indiscriminate but fleeting, entirely specific and disloyal, so that no one trusts me. I am always looking away. Or again at something after it has given me up. It makes me restless and that makes me unhappy, but I cannot keep them still. If only I had grey, green, black, brown, yellow eyes; I would stay at home and do something. It’s not that I am curious. On the contrary, I am bored but it’s my duty to be attentive, I am needed by things as the sky must be above the earth. And lately, so great has their anxiety become, I can spare myself little sleep. Now there is only one man I love to kiss when he is unshaven. Heterosexuality! you are inexorably approaching. (How discourage her?) St. Serapion, I wrap myself in the robes of your whiteness which is like midnight in Dostoevsky. How am I to become a legend, my dear? I’ve tried love, but that hides you in the bosom of another and I am always springing forth from it like the lotus—the ecstasy of always bursting forth! (but one must not be distracted by it!) or like a hyacinth, “to keep the filth of life away,” yes, there, even in the heart, where the filth is pumped in and courses and slanders and pollutes and determines. I will my will, though I may become famous for a mysterious vacancy in that department, that greenhouse. Destroy yourself, if you don’t know! It is easy to be beautiful; it is difficult to appear so. I admire you, beloved, for the trap you’ve set. It's like a final chapter no one reads because the plot is over. “Fanny Brown is run away—scampered off with a Cornet of Horse; I do love that little Minx, & hope She may be happy, tho’ She has vexed me by this Exploit a little too. —Poor silly Cecchina! or F:B: as we used to call her. —I wish She had a good Whipping and 10,000 pounds.” —Mrs. Thrale. I’ve got to get out of here. I choose a piece of shawl and my dirtiest suntans. I’ll be back, I'll re-emerge, defeated, from the valley; you don’t want me to go where you go, so I go where you don’t want me to. It’s only afternoon, there’s a lot ahead. There won’t be any mail downstairs. Turning, I spit in the lock and the knob turns.

You asked me once, on our way back from the midmorning trip to the spring: “What do you hate, and who do you love?” And I answered, from behind the eyelashes of my surprise, my blood rushing like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure . . . I love the spring and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you laughed . . . and the almond tree blossomed and the thicket grew loud with nightingales. . . . A question now four decades old: I salute that question’s answer; and an answer as old as your departure; I salute that answer’s question . . . And today, it’s preposterous, here we are at a friendly airport by the slimmest of chances, and we meet. Ah, Lord! we meet. And here you are asking—again, it’s absolutely preposterous— I recognized you but you didn’t recognize me. “Is it you?!” But you wouldn’t believe it. And suddenly you burst out and asked: “If you’re really you, What do you hate and who do you love?!” And I answered— my blood fleeing the hall, rushing in me like the shadow cast by a cloud of starlings: “I hate departure, and I love the spring, and the path to the spring, and I worship the middle hours of morning.” And you wept, and flowers bowed their heads, and doves in the silk of their sorrow stumbled.

were the last words of Goethe on his deathbed as the darkness closed around him. But Mayor Licht was also the chief executive of Providence, Rhode Island in the early Eighties. I’m dreaming of the best political commercial of all time— Weimar in the

The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.

The fence was down. Out among humid smells and shrill cicadas we walked, the lichened trunks moon-blue, our faces blue and our hands. Led by their bellwether bellies, the sheep had toddled astray. The neighbor farmer's woods or coyotes might have got them, or the far road. I remember the night, the moon-colored grass we waded through to look for them, the oaks tangled and dark, like starting a story midway. We gazed over seed heads to the barn toppled in the homestead orchard. Then we saw the weather of white wool, a cloud in the blue moving without sound as if charmed by the moon beholding them out of bounds. Time has not tightened the wire or righted the barn. The unpruned orchard rots in its meadow and the story unravels, the sunlight creeping back like a song with nobody left to hear it.

The day ended badly with a broken ankle, a jinxed printer, and a dead car. The dry yellow grass against the sunset saved me. Roosters pranced across a lawn of shit, proudly plumed in black feathers, bobbing before the gray goats. It was the first day I saw god in the quiet, and found a mustard seed was very small. There I had been for years cursing “why?” and all the gold in the sun fell upon me. There was a white mare in the midst of brown smog, majestic in the refinery clouds. Even the radio wouldn’t work! My mother limps and her hair falls out. The faithful drive white Chevy trucks or yellow Camrys, and I’m here golden on the smoking shock-less bus. I lost language in this want, each poem dust, Spanish fluttered as music across the desert, even weeds tumbled unloved. The police sirens seared the coming night, dogs howled helplessly sad. Lo I walk the valley of death, love lingers in my hard eyes. Mañana never comes just right. I mend myself in the folds of paper songs, ring my paper bells for empty success.Quiero Nada, if I sing long enough, I’ll grow dreamlike and find a flock of pigeons, white under wings lifting awkward bodies like doves across the silky blue-white sky.

Today outside your prison I stand and rattle my walking stick: Prisoners, listen; you have relatives outside. And there are thousands of ways to escape. Years ago I bent my skill to keep my cell locked, had chains smuggled to me in pies, and shouted my plans to jailers; but always new plans occured to me, or the new heavy locks bent hinges off, or some stupid jailer would forget and leave the keys. Inside, I dreamed of constellations— those feeding creatures outlined by stars, their skeletons a darkness between jewels, heroes that exist only where they are not. Thus freedom always came nibbling my thought, just as—often, in light, on the open hills— you can pass an antelope and not know and look back, and then—even before you see— there is something wrong about the grass. And then you see. That’s the way everything in the world is waiting. Now—these few more words, and then I’m gone: Tell everyone just to remember their names, and remind others, later, when we find each other. Tell the little ones to cry and then go to sleep, curled up where they can. And if any of us get lost, if any of us cannot come all the way— remember: there will come a time when all we have said and all we have hoped will be all right. There will be that form in the grass.

“I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....” Back from the trenches, more dead than alive, Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee, He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly: “I cannot quite remember.... There were five Dropt dead beside me in the trench, and three Whispered their dying messages to me.... “Their friends are waiting, wondering how they thrive— Waiting a word in silence patiently.... But what they said, or who their friends may be “I cannot quite remember.... There where five Dropt dead beside me in the trench—and three Whispered their dying messages to me....”

We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. Two nights he came to me, mute, on fire, no dream. I woke to find the window embered and fog filling the willows. The third time he was milder and early, his gray form all ash. He said to me at bedside, kneeling, “You must say your life to save it.” Midnight, hoarfrost. I was not yet ten and didn’t know what to make of so brief a bedtime story. His features were simple and familiar—the smile, both eyes shut in bliss, I guessed, head and torso echoing an antique keyhole. From sleep’s icy edge I asked, “How?” But he was gone, the room all hazed. The air smelled of struck matches, scuppernong, a copperhead’s musk. What next? The moon was new in the budding bird cherry and Venus startling overhead. Dizzy for water, I followed my flashlight down the stairs where the black mantel clock was bonging. Beside it sat the twin of my herald, a stone bookend from Kildare and no more able to speak or take wing than a weathercock. His closed eyes told me, “Look inside,” but I ached to see him blaze again and say aloud how change could shake me to a shining. “But I must be the key,” I thought, and stepped over the sparkling threshold. My nightshirt floated ghostly across the scalded lawn, under the arbor, beside the barn, my soles not troubled by white grass crackling all the way to the well shed, the burning that must have been coming from me.

The messenger runs, not carrying the news of victory, or defeat; the messenger, unresting, has always been running, the wind before and behind him, across the turning back of earth, leaving his tracks across the plains, his ropes hanging from the ledges of mountains; for centuries, millennia, he has been running carrying whatever it is that cannot be put down: it is rolled in a tube made of hide, carefully, to keep it dry as he runs, through storms and monsoons, sometimes on foot, sometimes poling a boat through a flooded mangrove swamp, or setting stiff sails to cross from island to island running before the wind. In some ages, peasants have helped him—bringing him small cakes of rice wrapped in the weeds of the sea and new sandals woven of hemp for his torn bleeding feet; sometimes in the heat of noon they would offer a drink of rosewater, sometimes a coat of fur against the winter snows; and sometimes at night, he would rest by a fire where voices wove with the music of gut-strings, or with mountain pipes whose sound was like wind through the bones of creation—and he would be cheered by the company of others, the firelit glow of their faces like a bright raft afloat in the dark; at times, rumors spread of his death, scholars analyzed his obsession, dated his bones, his prayer bundle; but at dawn, he always arose, in the mists, in the blur of so many mornings, so many shoes worn into scraps and discarded, so many the cities that burned as he passed them, so many the skulls abandoned by armies, so many whose blood stained the threads of their prayer rugs, so many, so many, so many— oh, and that green, sunlit hill that kept rising from the dark waters of flood, outlined bright against the sky, the odds, the evidence— and he, the messenger, running through history, carries this small tube, its durable hide—carries it, not like a torch, no, nothing so blazing; not like the brass lamp that summons a genie, no magic wishes; not like the candles that hope sets aflame and a breath can extinguish ... no. He carried it like what has no likeness, what is curled up inside and he swore he could feel it, though perhaps he had dreamed it, still at times, stopping under some tree or other, when the night was warm, so close the stars seemed to breathe in the branches, he would lie quiet, then it would seem that whatever it was in there would pulse softly with light, a code only the heart could break (but of course he couldn’t say for he was only the messenger)— and at sunrise, wearily, he would rise to his feet and trudge on, sometimes running, sometimes stumbling, carrying whatever it was that could not be put down, would not be cast aside— and besides, he would chide himself, weren’t they all as tired as he, and hadn’t they helped him, time and again, on his way?