872 Life poems

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean. And the day I quit the job my father got me. And the day I stood outside a door, and listened to my girlfriend making love to someone obviously not me, inside, and I felt strange because I didn’t care. There was the morning I was born, and the year I was a loser, and the night I was the winner of the prize for which the audience applauded. Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can’t forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I’m trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance. Happiness, Joe says,is a wild red flower plucked from a river of lava and held aloft on a tightrope strung between two scrawny trees above a canyon in a manic-depressive windstorm.

how much of the map could be labeled terraincognita how much        unknown        invisible to others how much of myself    could I shake off abandon               those undiscovered places [I barely know]        exist though the map is not the territory how I am drawn        to leave behind the pattern for the path        for a minute an hour        for one whole day I'd be like a Wintu               describing the body using cardinal directions he touches me on the west arm the river is to the east when we return          his east arm circles around me        and the river stays to the west

Oh there once was a woman and she kept a shop selling trinkets to tourists not far from a dock who came to see what life could be far back on the island. And it was always a party there always different but very nice New friends to give you advice or fall in love with you which is nice and each grew so perfectly from the other it was a marvel of poetry and irony And in this unsafe quarter much was scary and dirty but no one seemed to mind very much the parties went on from house to house There were friends and lovers galore all around the store There was moonshine in winter and starshine in summer and everybody was happy to have discovered what they discovered And then one day the ship sailed away There were no more dreamers just sleepers in heavy attitudes on the dock moving as if they knew how among the trinkets and the souvenirs the random shops of modern furniture and a gale came and said it is time to take all of you away from the tops of the trees to the little houses on little paths so startled And when it became time to go they none of them would leave without the other for they said we are all one here and if one of us goes the other will not go and the wind whispered it to the stars the people all got up to go and looked back on love

PRECEPT I. In Things of moment, on thy self depend, Nor trust too far thy Servant or thy Friend: With private Views, thy Friend may promise fair, And Servants very seldom prove sincere. PRECEPT II. What can be done, with Care perform to Day, Dangers unthought-of will attend Delay; Your distant Prospects all precarious are, And Fortune is as fickle as she’s fair. PRECEPT III. Nor trivial Loss, nor trivial Gain despise; Molehills, if often heap’d, to Mountains rise: Weigh every small Expence, and nothing waste, Farthings long sav’d, amount to Pounds at last.

Turn left off Henry onto Middagh Street to see our famous firehouse, home of Engine 205 and Hook & Ladder 118 and home also to the mythic painting “Fire under the Bridge” decorating the corrugated sliding door. The painting depicts a giant American flag wrinkled by wind and dwarfing the famous Brooklyn Bridge as it stretches as best it can to get a purchase on Manhattan. In the distance a few dismal towers and beyond the towers still another river. A little deal table holds a tiny American flag—like the one Foreman held as he bowed to receive gold at the ’68 Olympics in Mexico City—; this actual flag is rooted in a can of hothouse roses going brown at the edges and beginning to shed. There’s a metal collection box bearing the names of those lost during the recent burnings. Should you stop to shake the box— which is none of your business—you’ll hear only a whisper. Perhaps the donations are all hush money, ones, fives, tens, twenties, or more likely there are IOUs and the heart of Brooklyn has gone cold from so much asking. Down the block and across the street, a man sleeps on the sidewalk, an ordinary man, somehow utterly spent, he sleeps through all the usual sounds of a Brooklyn noon. Beside him a dog, a terrier, its muzzle resting on crossed paws, its brown eyes wide and intelligent. Between man and dog sits a take-out coffee cup meant to receive, next to it a picture of Jesus— actually a digital, color photograph of the Lord in his prime, robed and though bearded impossibly young and athletic, and— as always—alone. “Give what you can,” says a hand-lettered cardboard sign to all who pass. If you stand there long enough without giving or receiving the shabby, little terrier will close his eyes. If you stand there long enough the air will thicken with dusk and dust and exhaust and finally with a starless dark. The day will become something it’s never been before, something for which I have no name.

It's best to wake early, four, five a.m., while the neighbors sleep and the moon floats like a pearl in a pool of ink. In half-light the empty house is less familiar, less sad—the walls with their nail holes, the carpet—its patterns of wear, curtains with no job to do. I sit on my suitcase, eat powdered donuts; a napkin for a plate, juice out of a paper cup. Make one last check of the cupboards, the drawers. Run my hand along the countertops, the stair rail, trace the walls with my fingertips, each scar proof of my childhood, my initials carved into the tree of this, our sixth house. My family could write a Handbook for Leaving— the way we pack up during summer solstice, disconnect from people and places like an abrupt shutting off of electricity. My father's convinced himself that the unknown is always better, the way the retina sees images upside down and the brain corrects. Here I smoked candy cigarettes, my breath in winter passing for smoke, pale green of my bedroom. I counted the number of intersections on the way to school (four). I bundle memories together, weight them with stones like unwanted kittens drowned in a creek. What kind of animal constantly moves? The point of migration is the return. We're nomads without the base knowledge of where to find water. These moves are like arranged marriages; economics now, love later. Maybe it's not against nature to move. Most of the body is no more than ten years old and blood renews itself every 90 days. But leaving disturbs the fabric of a place. I'd rather stay and witness change. My mother always wanting to plant perennials that we never stay to see. I pour some water on the marigolds clattering around the mailbox, Aztec flowers of death, their strong scent a beacon to lost souls. Then we drive away, the blank windows like the blank eyes of the dead, waiting for someone to seal the past with a penny.

The word, the stone, the ringing phone, the part of me that wants to be alone, the vow of silence in the reeds; God descends in ravenese. The vinegar tasters dip their fingers, make their faces: stoic, bitter, strangely sweet. The seeker leaves for Bangladesh, the prophets check for signs of theft, the singers sing for what is left. The children breathe. Come of age. Search the faces for a taste of what's to come: the widening road, the row your boat, he choked with weeds, the rabbit hole. This holding on. The word, the stone, the ringing phone. The part of we that answers when alone.

About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation. Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made, I took heart in the pointlessness of stars and lay there until my teeth chattered. I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge building a birdhouse out of license plates manufactured by felons in the big house. No more paramilitary organizations for me, I said, ten years before I was drafted. I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend, his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid through the church service among the pipes of the organ and still did not have faith, although my ears rang until Monday. I began to know that little worth knowing was knowable and faith was delusion. I began to believe I believed in believing nothing I was supposed to believe in, except the stars, which, like me, were not significant, except for their light, meaning I loved them for their pointlessness. I believed I owned them somehow. A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare. The horse I loved foundered and had to be put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right. In cold air a nipple horripilates and rises, the sun comes up and up and up, a star that bakes the eggs in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse. God was in music and music was God. A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag chain and threatened to beat me to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags, the one he said they’d leave in my mouth before they zipped the body bag closed. Yet one more thing I’d come to know. He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass, no more true than my ownership of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord in five or six places on the neck of a guitar. A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s becomes a callus, smooth as leather. Stars are invisible in rainy weather, something any fool knows, of course.

Always behind my back I hear The spastic clicking of jerked knees And other automatic reactions Tracking me through the years to where Time’s winged chariot is double Parked near the eternity frontier And in such moments I want to participate In human life less and less But when I do the obligatory double take And glance behind me into the dark green future All I see stretching out are vast Arizona republics of more

I’m amazed we haven’t crawled off by now. Later we could go back and cross things out, that way we wouldn’t know where we came from, the shapes we asked to be bent into. Sinatra’d be okay again, mother the same distal approximation, the sea still trying to spit it out. Sometimes your sleep is different than mine. I can’t catch up. I don’t know—there are voices tangled outside. Wind wants to make me correct something, the refrigerator says something needs to be pushed further from the sun. Out where the sunset ends, they’ve installed a graveyard and where it rises, some automatons bash together mellifluous metal tubing imparting a festive contusion to the usual calm disaster of getting out of bed. To find out why life has this glass sparkle at the end of a dark hall. To find out why the paper skeleton holds its hands demurely over its crotch. Did it fall that way? To find out how we fell. There is a name to wake into and music to sleep through. To find out where the blood comes from on the towels. Old friends, I believe your betrayals were inadvertent. To find out if my heart is unruined. Father, are you out there or was your corpse accurate?