872 Life poems

(for Seamus Heaney) First time out I was a torc of gold And wept tears of the sun. That was fun But they buried me In the earth two thousand years Till a labourer Turned me up with a pick In eighteen fifty-four. Once I was an oar But stuck in the shore To mark the place of a grave When the lost ship Sailed away. I thought Of Ithaca, but soon decayed. The time that I liked Best was when I was a bump of clay In a Navaho rug, Put there to mitigate The too god-like Perfection of that Merely human artifact. I served my maker well — He lived long To be struck down in Denver by an electric shock The night the lights Went out in Europe Never to shine again. So many lives, So many things to remember! I was a stone in Tibet, A tongue of bark At the heart of Africa Growing darker and darker . . . It all seems A little unreal now, Now that I am An anthropologist With my own Credit card, dictaphone, Army-surplus boots And a whole boatload Of photographic equipment. I know too much To be anything any more; And if in the distant Future someone Thinks he has once been me As I am today, Let him revise His insolent ontology Or teach himself to pray.

I had my quiet time early in the morning Eating Almond Joys with Mother. We’d sit on the back porch and talk to God. We really had a good time. Later on, I’d sort baseball cards Or look for bottles. In the afternoon I’d shoot blackbirds. Jimmy would go by the house for ice water And make the truck backfire. Oh, I really liked that. That was the reason he did it. In the evening the cottontails ran across the groves. I shot one and put him in the backseat. He went to the bathroom. Jimmy said I knocked the shit out of him. At night we would listen to the ballgame. Then to the Hoss Man. Jimmy liked “Take Out Some Insurance On Me Baby” by Jimmy Reed.

If this is Wednesday, write Lazartigues, return library books, pick up passport form, cancel the paper. If this is Wednesday, mail B her flyers and K her shirts. Last thing I asked as I walked K to her car, “You sure you have everything?” “Oh yes,” she smiled, as she squalled off. Whole wardrobe in front closet. Go to Morrison’s for paint samples, that’s where housepainter has account (near Pier One), swing by Gano St. for another bunch of hydroponic lettuce. Stop at cleaners if there’s parking. Pap smear at 4. After last month with B’s ear infections, can’t bear sitting in damn doctor’s office. Never a magazine or picture on the wall worth looking at. Pack a book. Ever since B born, nothing comes clear. My mind like a mirror that’s been in a fire. Does this happen to the others. If this is Wednesday, meet Moss at the house at noon. Pick B up first, call sitter about Friday evening. If she prefers, can bring B to her (hope she keeps the apartment warmer this year). Need coat hooks and picture hangers for office. Should take car in for air filter, oil change. F said one of back tires low. Don’t forget car payment, late last two months in a row. If this is Wednesday, there’s a demo on the green at 11. Took B to his first down at Quonset Point in August. Blue skies. Boston collective provided good grub for all. Long column of denims and flannel shirts. Smell of patchouli made me so wistful, wanted to buy a woodstove, prop my feet up, share a J and a pot of Constant Comment with a friend. Maybe some zucchini bread. Meet with honors students from 1 to 4. At the community college I tried to incite them to poetry. Convince them this line of work, beat the bejesus out of a gig as gizzard splitter at the processing plant or cleaning up after a leak at the germ warfare center. Be all you can be, wrap rubber band around your trigger finger until it drops off. Swim at 10:00 before picking up B, before demo on the green, and before meeting moss, if it isn’t too crowded. Only three old women talking about their daughters-in-law last Wednesday at 10:00. Phone hardware to see if radon test arrived. Keep an eye out for a new yellow blanket. Left B’s on the plane, though he seems over it already. Left most recent issue of Z in the seat. That will make a few businessmen boil. I liked the man who sat next to me, he was sweet to B. Hated flying, said he never let all of his weight down. Need to get books in the mail today. Make time pass in line at the P.O. imagining man in front of me butt naked. Fellow in the good-preacher-blue-suit, probably has a cold, hard bottom. Call N for green tomato recipe. Have to get used to the Yankee growing season. If this is Wednesday, N goes in hospital today. Find out how long after marrow transplant before can visit. Mother said she read in paper that Pete was granted a divorce. His third. My highschool boyfriend. Meanest thing I could have done, I did to him, returning a long-saved-for engagement ring in a Band-Aid box, while he was stationed in Da Nang. Meant to tell F this morning about dream of eating grasshoppers, fried but happy. Our love a difficult instrument we are learning to play. Practice, practice. No matter where I call home anymore, feel like a boat under the trees. Living is strange. This week only; bargain on laid paper at East Side Copy Shop. Woman picking her nose at the stoplight. Shouldn’t look, only privacy we have anymore in the car. Isn’t that the woman from the colloquium last fall, who told me she was a stand-up environmentalist. What a wonderful trade, I said, because the evidence of planetary wrongdoing is overwhelming. Because because because of the horrible things we do. If this is Wednesday, meet F at Health Department at 10:45 for AIDS test. If this is Wednesday, it’s trash night.

There is so much sweetness in children’s voices, And so much discontent at the end of day, And so much satisfaction when a train goes by. I don’t know why the rooster keeps crying, Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks, Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night. A handsome child is a gift from God, And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand, And a wound is an inheritance from the wind. Some say we are living at the end of time, But I believe a thousand pagan ministers Will arrive tomorrow to baptize the wind. There’s nothing we need to do about John. The Baptist Has been laying his hands on earth for so long That the well water is sweet for a hundred miles. It’s all right if we don’t know what the rooster Is saying in the middle of the night, nor why we feel So much satisfaction when a train goes by.

My father’s dying resembles nothing so much as a small village building itself in the mind of a traveler who reads about it and thinks to go there. The journey is imagined in a way not even felt as when years ago I knew my father would die someday. The idea came up as fast as a curve in a road which opens out to an unexpected vista, and now in this journey the road gravel crunches under my tires. I miss some of the streets, get lost, get lost. I find I’m no tourist anymore and settle into the oldest human assignment. Bury your father and live forever as a stranger in that town.

Body is something you need in order to stay on this planet and you only get one. And no matter which one you get, it will not be satisfactory. It will not be beautiful enough, it will not be fast enough, it will not keep on for days at a time, but will pull you down into a sleepy swamp and demand apples and coffee and chocolate cake. Body is a thing you have to carry from one day into the next. Always the same eyebrows over the same eyes in the same skin when you look in the mirror, and the same creaky knee when you get up from the floor and the same wrist under the watchband. The changes you can make are small and costly—better to leave it as it is. Body is a thing that you have to leave eventually. You know that because you have seen others do it, others who were once like you, living inside their pile of bones and flesh, smiling at you, loving you, leaning in the doorway, talking to you for hours and then one day they are gone. No forwarding address.

The coarse croker-sack cloth she’d grown to clutch mesh-merged with her woof and pang rose to serve more like organ than protection

I’ll know the time to leave the room where I’ve been growing hair from my face, drinking dark beers when the light in the lake bums out. That’s when fish turn on their music. They lie in a blue current waiting for the moon to pass over, and the fishermen with their lanterns know this as they spill a can of sweet corn and wonder if they spoke what they were just thinking. I clear my way through the fog as music will break through static. The frogs strike up, a window goes out in the Home for Elders. Don’t you wonder why it is built far from anywhere, as though memory needs a terrain for forgetting; blind driveways to lost roads. As for my own parents, they did not grow old. What I know: dinners without conversation, stars that shine for anyone. I know my time is brief. I know love of the cut sleeve. I want to say don’t feel sorry for men, those who leave women smouldering like cigarettes, those who are fond of burials. War is a habit of mind, I swear by my mother’s gender. Tonight sticks in the leaves are slick as pilot snakes. Wherever I part branches no one is in a boat, no one has stirred a wake. Not jackknifing off the dock, it’s hauling myself back up that gooses my titties and makes my peter shrink. Don’t wake the cottonmouths. Summertime. If you were here and you remembered to stash your smokes in a Glad bag so they didn’t soak like mine we’d fall quiet now as pollen on water, I would tell you the true story of Urashima and the turtle.

Nothing by or for itself, the sound of eggs hard-boiling in the hot water echoed by the heavy rain that pours down the broken spout, the cowardly lion’s roar answered by the moos of the buffalo the bloody mouth of the one by the sharp and polished horns of the other, even Nelson Eddy could hear someone else singing in his bathtub the songs from his dumb movies though when I once drove up the vertical highway in Colorado to visit Elaine the Gnostic and take her to the stone mountain where her husband fell we drove back without talking though she touched my knee in gratitude and when we reached the very top there were no trees only flowers grew there accompanied by nothing the name of which was loneliness which Shelley the poet himself suffered from among his beleaguered women you’ll die remembering.

The girl hunting with her father approaches the strange man who has stopped at the end of his day to rest and look at the lake. Do you like geese? she asks. The man smiles. The girl draws a webbed foot from her pocket and places it in his hand. It's late fall and still the geese keep coming, two fingers spread against a caution-yellow sky. Before he can thank her, the girl has run off, down to the edge of the water. The man studies her father, about to bring down his third goose today—then ponders the foot: soft, pink, and covered with dirt like the little girl's hand. He slips it into his coat pocket, and holds it there.