872 Life poems

Ain’t no use as I can see In sittin’ underneath a tree An’ growlin’ that your luck is bad, An’ that your life is extry sad; Your life ain’t sadder than your neighbor’s Nor any harder are your labors; It rains on him the same as you, An’ he has work he hates to do; An’ he gits tired an’ he gits cross, An’ he has trouble with the boss; You take his whole life, through an’ through, Why, he’s no better off than you. If whinin’ brushed the clouds away I wouldn’t have a word to say; If it made good friends out o’ foes I’d whine a bit, too, I suppose; But when I look around an’ see A lot o’ men resemblin’ me, An’ see ’em sad, an’ see ’em gay With work t’ do most every day, Some full o’ fun, some bent with care, Some havin’ troubles hard to bear, I reckon, as I count my woes, They’re ’bout what everybody knows. The day I find a man who’ll say He’s never known a rainy day, Who’ll raise his right hand up an’ swear In forty years he’s had no care, Has never had a single blow, An’ never known one touch o’ woe, Has never seen a loved one die, Has never wept or heaved a sigh, Has never had a plan go wrong, But allas laughed his way along; Then I’ll sit down an’ start to whine That all the hard luck here is mine.

The new root of the fern is the part you eat in famine. Harsh words are spoken, but they’re not the ones that make you turn. Where the muscle’s smooth. That’s where it doesn’t fray. The hard part is what comes easy. The hard part isn’t hard. It only seems. It only seems. It only seems that way. The snail inside the shell is tough. It holds the tooth, not tongue. The fingernail. The hair. What the old ropes come from. What’s left, dug up, and laid aside. Not the nick that never healed. There are lice that live inside the quill of every feather of every bird. You spoil it with a fingerprint. Artichokes have hearts. The alligator pear has an endosperm that, when squeezed, weeps only oil. You shed your skin as you grow cold. The hard part isn’t hard.

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself, ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat (a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada, a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great). And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?) in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers. Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down, stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver. Heard myself speak fluently in my own language, have heard myself too described as hard work (as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic. And I may as well admit that I have touched myself (who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.

I leaned against the mantel, sick, sick, Thinking of my failure, looking into the abysm, Weak from the noon-day heat. A church bell sounded mournfully far away, I heard the cry of a baby, And the coughing of John Yarnell, Bed-ridden, feverish, feverish, dying, Then the violent voice of my wife: "Watch out, the potatoes are burning!" I smelled them ... then there was irresistible disgust. I pulled the trigger ... blackness ... light ... Unspeakable regret ... fumbling for the world again. Too late! Thus I came here, With lungs for breathing ... one cannot breathe here with lungs, Though one must breathe Of what use is it To rid one's self of the world, When no soul may ever escape the eternal destiny of life?

I am a reaper whose muscles set at sun-down. All my oats are cradled. But I am too chilled, and too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain between my teeth. I do not taste it. I have been in the fields all day. My throat is dry. I hunger. My eyes are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time. I am a blind man who stares across the hills, seeking stack’d fields of other harvesters. It would be good to see them . . . crook’d, split, and iron-ring’d handles of the scythes . . . It would be good to see them, dust-caked and blind. I hunger. (Dusk is a strange fear’d sheath their blades are dull’d in.) My throat is dry. And should I call, a cracked grain like the oats . . . eoho— I fear to call. What should they hear me, and offer me their grain, oats, or wheat or corn? I have been in the fields all day. I fear I could not taste it. I fear knowledge of my hunger. My ears are caked with dust of oat-fields at harvest-time. I am a deaf man who strains to hear the calls of other harvesters whose throats are also dry. It would be good to hear their songs . . . reapers of the sweet-stalked cane, cutters of the corn . . . even though their throats cracked, and the strangeness of their voices deafened me. I hunger. My throat is dry. Now that the sun has set and I am chilled. I fear to call. (Eoho, my brothers!) I am a reaper. (Eoho!) All my oats are cradled. But I am too fatigued to bind them. And I hunger. I crack a grain. It has no taste to it. My throat is dry . . . O my brothers, I beat my palms, still soft, against the stubble of my harvesting. (You beat your soft palms, too.) My pain is sweet. Sweeter than the oats or wheat or corn. It will not bring me knowledge of my hunger.

Just wasted and taking it. In life I rally constantly. Effort is what we breach. And accountability. Honed limits do you require ruthlessness or subtlety? The # for that delivery service I could find. My instinct is to agree with the collective. I’ll flip over their indoor/outdoor reversible rug. But my feelings & their representatives the passing sacrosanct mob cuddle stirring expedience are mine. Gradations of default tenor. Anything but more instinct. A proxy of determination in a cosmic discharge salon speaking freely of cost’s elephantine deployable former charm. I’m micromanaging nausea. The dishes are twilighting. The dairy scythe elevatrix skins my shining teleprompted sporkdom. As poor specimens go, the trail left inhabitable trails. Arkanoid as meditative space, if we travel by dragonfly. I cling to thy moving perimeter. I want payment for all instances of being caught on camera. We all should. Mutually assured destruction overdosed on civility by comparison. Babywiping lead paint dust from my soles. I’ll read entrails for omens, action figure entrails.

Hobos wail a garbage can against the cyclone links. The monkey puzzle tree droops its scaly tails above our heads as she sets up near the zoo’s bonobos, humping happy in their cages close to chimps ripping off each other’s ears. And in the cloud reposing on the sky, cut by an

Thin gruel, shallow graves, whiskey watered down, the ne’er-do-well and good-for-nothing crowd of cornerboys and gobshites were among Argyle’s manifold perturbations. Worse still, the episcopal vexations: their excellencies, eminence and graces, red-cassocked dandies and mitered wankers, the croziered posers in their bishoprics with their Easter duties and Peter’s pence, their ledgers full of mortal, venial sins— keepers of the till and tally, bankers of indulgences and dispensations; their bulls and bans and excommunications, nothing but contumely and bamboozles. For all their vestiture, rings and unctions, preaching to bishops, like farting at skunks, was nothing but a mug’s game to the sin-eater, so in earshot of them mum is what he kept. Still, he thought there might be something to it: a life apart from this life where the souls long dead and gone were neither dead nor gone. Some days he felt so happily haunted, by loving ghosts and gods upholding him. Some days he felt entirely alone.

As one may be relieved by the myriad marigold faces held aloft beside the freeway — their articulation — and, too, by the rush of notes following their own likenesses in these headlong phrases Relieved of what? Relieved of what?

and hue to have unheld a scale— silver dishes little mirrors on their chains— they go that way, This and hoist It’s not like looking into a pool, to let your intelligence run away with you Come back quarter size, apricot moon A changeling is a child who appeared under cover of the ordinary, in exchange The morning came I have such pretty handwriting no one said but I myself thought it to myself so I matted it like the grasses or a canvas or some uncombed hair. It became a mess which was the research of where things go. A child could figure it out if there is such a thing as “out” in the sense of being figured in the thinking was like Origami, everyone folded out of birds, into specific kinds of birds I call you hickory category dot