872 Life poems

Adolescent white pelicans squawk, rustle, flap their wings, lift off in a ragged spiral at imaginary danger. What danger on this island in the middle of Marble Lake? They’re off to feel the lift of wind under their iridescent wings, because they were born to fly, because they have nothing else to do, because wind and water are their elements, their Bach, their Homer, Shakespeare, and Spielberg. They wheel over the lake, the little farms, the tourist village with their camera eyes. In autumn something urges them toward Texas marshes. They follow their appetites and instincts, unlike the small beetles creeping along geometric roads, going toward small boxes, toward lives as narrow or as wide as the pond, as glistening or as gray as the sky. They do not know why. They fly, they fly.

my god all the days we have lived thru saying not this one, not this, not now, not yet, this week doesn’t count, was lost, this month was shit, what a year, it sucked, it flew, that decade was for what? i raised my kids, they grew i lost two pasts–i am not made of them and they are through. we forget what we remember: each of the five the fevered few days we used to fall in love.

Without even knowing it, I have believed in you for a long time. When I looked at my blood under a microscope I could see truth multiplying over and over. —Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma persuaded me but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass thrust up above the January snow. Your postcards of Picasso and Matisse, from the museum series on European masters. When my friend died on the way to the hospital it was not his death that so amazed me but that the driver of the cab did not insist upon the fare. Quotation marks: what should we put inside them? Shall I say “I”  “have been hurt” “by”  “you,”  you neglectful monster? I speak now because experience has shown me that my mind will never be clear for long. I am more thick-skinned and male, more selfish, jealous, and afraid than ever in my life. “For my heart is tangled in thy nets; my soul enmeshed in cataracts of time...” The breeze so cool today, the sky smeared with bluish grays and whites. The parade for the slain police officer goes past the bakery and the smell of fresh bread makes the mourners salivate against their will.

With statements by President Donald Trump I write my body, as border between We have some bad hombres here this rock & the absence of water. & we’re going to get them out. I cut myself with a scimitar, When Mexico sends its people, as political documentation. they’re not sending their best. How do you write about the violence They’re not sending you. of every man you’ve ever loved? They’re sending people Macho, you that have lots of problems breathe bright in the neocolony, & they’re bringing those problems to us a problem of Empire pulling They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing the capitalist threads of my border. crime. They’re rapists. Empire: you were so sterile Mexico’s court system [is]corrupt. & shiny with your dead man’s coins I want nothing to do with Mexico & castration, your white roses other than to build an impenetrable & that trash bag full of a Mexican WALL & stop them from ripping woman’s dark hair. Empire: you off U.S. I love the Mexican people, made us hungry for the glint but Mexico is not our friend. of machismo, the dim glare They’re killing us at the border of marianismo. Tonight on TV, & they’re killing us on jobs & trade. muted montages of the largest FIGHT! Happy #CincodeMayo! ICE raid in Texas. I drink The best taco bowls are made pink champagne in a hotel bar, in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics! & correct the pronunciation of   my name.

(for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach) He was born to wonder about numbers. He balanced fives against tens and made them sleep together and love each other. He took sixes and sevens and set them wrangling and fighting over raw bones. He woke up twos and fours out of baby sleep and touched them back to sleep. He managed eights and nines, gave them prophet beards, marched them into mists and mountains. He added all the numbers he knew, multiplied them by new-found numbers and called it a prayer of Numbers. For each of a million cipher silences he dug up a mate number for a candle light in the dark. He knew love numbers, luck numbers, how the sea and the stars are made and held by numbers. He died from the wonder of numbering. He said good-by as if good-by is a number.

It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them. And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more than laughter in the warm dark strangled at dawn. Happiness. I try to hoist it on my narrow shoulders again— a knapsack heavy with gold coins. I stumble around the house, bump into things. Only Midas himself would understand.

It could be a clip, it could be a comb; it could be your mother, coming home. It could be a rooster; perhaps it’s a comb; it could be your father, coming home. It could be a paper; it could be a pin. It could be your childhood, sinking in. The toys give off the nervousness of age. It’s useless pretending they aren’t finished: faces faded, unable to stand, buttons lost down the drain during baths. Those were the days we loved down there, the soap disappearing as the water spoke, saying, it could be a wheel, maybe a pipe; it could be your father, taking his nap. Legs propped straight, the head tilted back; the end was near when he could keep track. It could be the first one; it could be the second; the father of a friend just sickened and sickened.

After Alfred Stieglitz Not so much the missing of things but the nostalgia of colors, their music, the ordinary revelation of a family’s life caught in the flop and dance, a jig, if you will, of their layers, outer and inner skins, the secret things so close to the body, the taste, the salt and sweet of blood, and shit, and piss, and then, rinsed and scrubbed, leaving beneath the astringent scent of soap a musky marker of self for strays to smell or imagine as they walk past the parade of the living on taut lines, propped by poles with nails for a hook, above the startling green of grass and hedge, the barefaced concrete steps, the sky, inscrutable as a wall; this is what one carries as a kind of sweetness — the labor of brown hands, elbow-deep in suds, the rituals of cleansing, the humility of a darning or a frayed crotch, the dignity of cleanliness, the democracy of truth, the way we lived our lives in the open.

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor, A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song. You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine. The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

For some time now, I have lived anonymously. No one appears to think it odd. They think the old are, well, what they seem. Yet see that great egret at the marsh's edge, solitary, still? Mere pretense that stillness. His silence is a lie. In his own pond he is of some renown, a stalker, a catcher of fish. Watch him.