872 Life poems

The first few years she wore them I didn't even notice the leather's soft tan, and the buckskin laces roughly looped. By the time I paid attention, her feet had already curved the shoes inward, weather had toughened the soft leather, and one lace had broken short. Then I asked where she got those shoes and she said from the Indian store down in Mountain View. Some other time, another year, I asked the name of the Indian store that sold handmade shoes like hers, but she said it went out of business and no store sold mocs with vodka splatters and Yosemite dirt ground in with a little tamale pie, so I couldn't buy shoes like hers anyway. Last summer, laughing and crying together, in the campground at Lake Mendocino, on the night before her youngest son's wedding while the men drank beer and talked of politics and sports, I told her how much I really, really liked those old shoes of hers. So she took them off and gave them to me. Those beat-up, raggedy Kaibab moccasins I wear are stained and worn rough by hard years in my friend's life. I wear them when I need her courage.

The ampalaya, no matter how bitter, Is sweet to those who like it. The hardest person to awaken Is a lover feigning sleep. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. Easily split asunder is that Which never was united. The water is cold at first, for it Takes time to heat the pipe. The kids run away from home, only to Sit through endless classes. You take the battery out of a watch, You turn it into a liar. You strip the sheet off a drinking straw And stab it into the scalp. The basketball held underwater Wants violently to come up. The one who reads the sutra is not The one who knows what is said. My life is as unchanging As the surface of the moon. And I give you the same reason: I have no atmosphere. El hacha ya está puesta A la raíz de los árboles, Y todo árbol que no produzca buen fruto Is hewn down and cast into the fire. You take a rose by the throat. How much blood comes out your hand Is how recklessly you took hold, Is how shamelessly. Who wants to be great or holy Has no lust for peace. For peace is a thread only spools on a thing That’s good for nothing else.

Has it coming, the pest. Gets irritated, the stuck up. Gets approval, the dimpled. Gets cold, the talk. The sidewalk separates from the curb. Frogs peek out there. There are passages there, channels. Gardens, orderly, get respect; no one hurts them. Only animals, insects, beings without comprehension. A house on a corner lot, good to look up at from the corner, compels. Branches of live oak reach across the way. There must be acorns, black, green, green with earth yellow. The wind cools the walker. There is nothing to stop the wind up. It finds every walker in its path, cools him, cools her. Director must direct and make decisions. Buildings on the edges of developments look out over edges. The other world never nearer. Between towns, roads are lonely. Lonely, too, who cannot bear being lied to. The angry become less intelligent. Do and undo, the day is long enough. Liars do not think they are lying; that’s how they do it. The nut gives way to the teeth; the teeth crush it. Smashed frog in the parking lot turns colors, becomes flat, extends its fingers, does not come back to life when it rains, yet disappears. Wonderfully, beliefs antedate evidence. Wonderfully, people seldom believe a thing unless they already wanted it. Many cry when signaled, not pursuant to cognition. What is offered as proof is suspect. Summer makes strategic. Strategy is a pleasure. Whatever people say, to obey, of itself, does not hurt. Stray feline must lie in shade, under tree, distrust her well-wisher first. Grackle must shelter under car, direct its thirsty attention to the water there. Cut of meat must lose its color on the fire, exchange it, be seasoned. To be accused, rightly or wrongly, feels the same. Old man must speak against his own best interests, for he cannot swallow his complaints, not all of them. Glassware touching glassware gets chipped, broken into triangles, in the move. Vital sheet of paper must sometimes be lost. Papers are many. The thing learned at length, the memorized rigmarole, must fade from memory, in time. The kind word given unexpectedly is good. The hearer must be relieved. The thought that nothing can ever go right again must depart for a time. The light must change. The waiting person wait longer. The walker must step out of the summer heat wet to the hair roots, the shirt wet. The sky is the same but seems grander where no buildings are. Colored clouds are remarked; white ones less. One’s looks, one’s skin color matter less if money has its feet in it. The hated one, the cheated many, are the poor. Lean grackle must stalk a branch, mouth open like scissors. Striped raptors, wings in fixed positions, must kite, must circle. Beautiful Soul wants a world in which he or she has no place. Godspeed, sweet intent. Love will creep where it cannot go. Stick-figure reptiles, black, must cross the sidewalk by the pool, dartingly. They weigh one paperclip. Beauty enslaves on contact. Better have it than hear of it. Sweet and cunningly seldom meet. In dragging a bamboo tree, one must snatch it by the eyebrows. The rusty sword and the empty purse plead performance of covenants. Even Graceful must sometimes, in putting on her coat, sweep everything off the table and into the floor. If many strike on an anvil, they must in meter. He, only, pursues honesty honestly, who has destroyed any possibility of good repute. Whether you boil snow or pound it, you can only have water out of it. Cities must have boulevards, vast channels not possible or dangerous to cross. There must be holes in the decomposing concrete, paint invisible at sunrise and sunset, guardrails, median strips, shrines. The student must wait to do the assignment, wait beyond the advisable point, stay up against a deadline. Must turn in a paper never read, not by the writer, not by the friend. Must muster, thunder, one or two times in a life, a sound to frighten the unfrightenable. Must pour, from the sky, rarely, chips and balls and coins and smooth clusters of partly white, partly clear ice. Some believe, helplessly. Others, less. Some count, tabulate, helplessly. They check calendars. They can’t shake it. Winter travels, hides, shelters. It pursues the lightly dressed into buildings during summer. It lies in wait in restaurants, miscalculates. The pill and its coating, obnoxious to the child, are welcome enough to the grown swallower. First deserve and then desire. Blow first and sip afterwards. The wise let it go a great deal. Sorrow is wondrously clinging; clouds glide. The friend who comes apologizing and promising must be received. He is sorry and not sorry and sorry. Courage comes up. Sacrifice, oftener. The disintegrating parking lot is witness to the exchange. Drugs are traded, caresses. The dog in its heavy coat must lie, half dead, on the porch. Eyes like a bear, tongue like a lion, lethargy. One must consciously retire. Comes off a train none but was on it. The heirloom ring, wrong-gendered, trash, gets rescued. When the spirit of praising is upon him, a man will judge linen by candlelight. Burr oaks yield fewer fruit, but bigger, shag-capped. One must consciously retire. A helve must fit its ax head. Most laugh before understanding. Fame is best.

I made a posy, while the day ran by: “Here will I smell my remnant out, and tie My life within this band.” But Time did beckon to the flowers, and they By noon most cunningly did steal away, And withered in my hand. My hand was next to them, and then my heart; I took, without more thinking, in good part Time’s gentle admonition; Who did so sweetly death’s sad taste convey, Making my mind to smell my fatal day, Yet, sug’ring the suspicion. Farewell dear flowers, sweetly your time ye spent, Fit, while ye lived, for smell or ornament, And after death for cures. I follow straight without complaints or grief, Since, if my scent be good, I care not if It be as short as yours.

Animula, vagula, blandula. Life! I know not what thou art, But know that thou and I must part; And when, or how, or where we met, I own to me’s a secret yet. But this I know, when thou art fled, Where’er they lay these limbs, this head, No clod so valueless shall be, As all that then remains of me. O whither, whither dost thou fly, Where bend unseen thy trackless course, And in this strange divorce, Ah tell where I must seek this compound I? To the vast ocean of empyreal flame, From whence thy essence came, Dost thou thy flight pursue, when freed From matter’s base encumbering weed? Or dost thou, hid from sight, Wait, like some spell-bound knight, Through blank oblivious years th’ appointed hour, To break thy trance and reassume thy power? Yet canst thou without thought or feeling be? O say what art thou, when no more thou ’rt thee? Life! we’ve been long together, Through pleasant and through cloudy weather; ’Tis hard to part when friends are dear; Perhaps ’t will cost a sigh, a tear; Then steal away, give little warning, Choose thine own time; Say not Good night, but in some brighter clime Bid me Good morning.

Life, like a marble block, is given to all, A blank, inchoate mass of years and days, Whence one with ardent chisel swift essays Some shape of strength or symmetry to call; One shatters it in bits to mend a wall; One in a craftier hand the chisel lays, And one, to wake the mirth in Lesbia’s gaze, Carves it apace in toys fantastical. But least is he who, with enchanted eyes Filled with high visions of fair shapes to be, Muses which god he shall immortalize In the proud Parian’s perpetuity, Till twilight warns him from the punctual skies That the night cometh wherein none shall see.

That the stars are adamant everyone understands— but I won’t give up seeking joy on each blue wave or peace below every gray stone. If happiness never comes, what is a life? A lily withers in the sand and if its nature has failed? The tide washes the beach at night. What is the fly looking for on the spider’s web? What does a dayfly make of its hours? (Two wings creased over a hollow body.) Black will never turn to white— yet the perfume of our struggle lingers as each morning fresh flowers spring up from hell. The day will come when the earth is emptied, the skies collapse and all goes still— when nothing remains but the dayfly folded in a leaf. But no one knows it.

Roughly figured, this man of moderate habits, This average consumer of the middle class, Consumed in the course of his average life span Just under half a million cigarettes, Four thousand fifths of gin and about A quarter as much vermouth; he drank Maybe a hundred thousand cups of coffee, And counting his parents’ share it cost Something like half a million dollars To put him through life. How many beasts Died to provide him with meat, belt and shoes Cannot be certainly said. But anyhow, It is in this way that a man travels through time, Leaving behind him a lengthening trail Of empty bottles and bones, of broken shoes, Frayed collars and worn out or outgrown Diapers and dinnerjackets, silk ties and slickers. Given the energy and security thus achieved, He did . . . ? What? The usual things, of course, The eating, dreaming, drinking and begetting, And he worked for the money which was to pay For the eating, et cetera, which were necessary If he were to go on working for the money, et cetera, But chiefly he talked. As the bottles and bones Accumulated behind him, the words proceeded Steadily from the front of his face as he Advanced into the silence and made it verbal. Who can tally the tale of his words? A lifetime Would barely suffice for their repetition; If you merely printed all his commas the result Would be a very large volume, and the number of times He said “thank you” or “very little sugar, please,” Would stagger the imagination. There were also Witticisms, platitudes, and statements beginning “It seems to me” or “As I always say.” Consider the courage in all that, and behold the man Walking into deep silence, with the ectoplastic Cartoon’s balloon of speech proceeding Steadily out of the front of his face, the words Borne along on the breath which is his spirit Telling the numberless tale of his untold Word Which makes the world his apple, and forces him to eat.

and remote, and useful, if only to itself. Take the fly, angel of the ordinary house, laying its bright eggs on the trash, pressing each jewel out delicately along a crust of buttered toast. Bagged, the whole mess travels to the nearest dump where other flies have gathered, singing over stained newsprint and reeking fruit. Rapt on air they execute an intricate ballet above the clashing pirouettes of heavy machinery. They hum with life. While inside rumpled sacks pure white maggots writhe and spiral from a rip, a tear-shaped hole that drools and drips a living froth onto the buried earth. The warm days pass, gulls scree and pitch, rats manage the crevices, feral cats abandon their litters for a morsel of torn fur, stranded dogs roam open fields, sniff the fragrant edges, a tossed lacework of bones and shredded flesh. And the maggots tumble at the center, ripening, husks membrane-thin, embryos darkening and shifting within, wings curled and wet, the open air pungent and ready to receive them in their fecund iridescence. And so, of our homely hosts, a bag of jewels is born again into the world. Come, lost children of the sun-drenched kitchen, your parents soundly sleep along the windowsill, content, wings at rest, nestled in against the warm glass. Everywhere the good life oozes from the useless waste we make when we create—our streets teem with human young, rafts of pigeons streaming over the squirrel-burdened trees. If there is a purpose, maybe there are too many of us to see it, though we can, from a distance, hear the dull thrum of generation's industry, feel its fleshly wheel churn the fire inside us, pushing the world forward toward its ragged edge, rushing like a swollen river into multitude and rank disorder. Such abundance. We are gorged, engorging, and gorgeous.

Down the street, someone must be praying, and though I don’t Go there anymore, I want to at times, to hear the diction And the tone, though the English pronoun for God is obsolete— What goes on is devotion, which wouldn’t change if I heard: The polished sermon, the upright’s arpeggios of vacant notes. What else could unite widows, bankers, children, and ghosts? And those faces are so good as they tilt their smiles upward To the rostrum that represents law, and the minister who Represents God beams like the white palm of the good hand Of Christ raised behind the baptistry to signal the multitude, Which I am not among, though I feel the abundance of calm And know the beatitude so well I do not have to imagine it, Or the polite old ones who gather after the service to chat, Or the ritual linen of Sunday tables that are already set. More than any other days, Sundays stand in unvarying rows That beg attention: there is that studied verisimilitude Of sanctuary, so even mud and bitten weeds look dressed up For some eye in the distant past, some remote kingdom Where the pastures are crossed by thoroughly symbolic rivers. That is why the syntax of prayers is so often reversed, Aimed toward the dead who clearly have not gone ahead But returned to prior things, a vista of angels and sheep, A desert where men in robes and sandals gather by a tree. Hushed stores, all day that sense a bell is about to ring— I recognized it, waking up, before I weighed the bulk of news Or saw Saturday night’s cars parked randomly along the curb, And though I had no prayer, I wanted to offer something Or ask for something, perhaps out of habit, but as the past Must always be honored unconsciously, formally, and persists On this first and singular day, though I think of it as last.