872 Life poems

From the dull confines of the drooping west To see the day spring from the pregnant east, Ravish'd in spirit, I come, nay more, I fly To thee, blest place of my nativity! Thus, thus with hallow'd foot I touch the ground, With thousand blessings by thy fortune crown'd. O fruitful genius! that bestowest here An everlasting plenty, year by year. O place! O people! Manners! fram'd to please All nations, customs, kindreds, languages! I am a free-born Roman; suffer then That I amongst you live a citizen. London my home is, though by hard fate sent Into a long and irksome banishment; Yet since call'd back, henceforward let me be, O native country, repossess'd by thee! For, rather than I'll to the west return, I'll beg of thee first here to have mine urn. Weak I am grown, and must in short time fall; Give thou my sacred relics burial.

She could be a Norman Rockwell painting, the small girl on my front porch with her eager face, her wind-burned cheeks red as cherries. Her father waits by the curb, ready to rescue his child should danger threaten, his shadow reaching halfway across the yard. I take the booklet from the girl's outstretched hand, peruse the color photos of candy bars and caramel-coated popcorn, pretend to read it. I have no use for what she's selling, but I can count the freckles on her nose, the scars like fat worms on knobby knees that ought to be covered on a cold day like this, when the wind is blowing and the trees are losing their grip on the last of their leaves.I'll take two of these and one of those, I say, pointing, thinking I won't eat them, but I probably will. It's worth the coming calories to see her joy, how hard she works to spell my name right, taking down my information. Then she turns and gives a thumbs-up sign to her father, who grins like an outfielder to whom the ball has finally come—his heart like a glove, opening.

We are tender and our lives are sweet and they are already over and we are visiting them in some kind of endless reprieve from oblivion, we are walking around in them and after we shatter with love for everything we settle in. Thou tiger on television chowing, thou very fact of dreams, thou majestical roof fretted with golden fire. Thou wisdom of the inner parts. Thou tintinnabulation. Is it not sweet to hand over the ocean's harvest in a single wave of fish? To bounce a vineyard of grapes from one's apron and into the mouth of the crowd? To scoop up bread and offer up one's armful to the throng? Let us live as if we were still among the living, let our days be patterned after theirs. Is it not marvelous to be forgetful?

I was stretched out on the couch, about to doze off, when I imagined a small figure asleep on a couch identical to mine. “Wake up, little man, wake up,” I cried. “The one you’re waiting for is rising from the sea, wrapped in spume, and soon will come ashore. Beneath her feet the melancholy garden will turn bright green and the breezes will be light as babies’ breath. Wake up, before this creature of the deep is gone and everything goes blank as sleep.” How hard I try to wake the little man, how hard he sleeps. And the one who rose from the sea, her moment gone, how hard she has become—how hard those burning eyes, that burning hair.

A wanderer is man from his birth. He was born in a ship On the breast of the river of Time; Brimming with wonder and joy He spreads out his arms to the light, Rivets his gaze on the banks of the stream. As what he sees is, so have his thoughts been. Whether he wakes, Where the snowy mountainous pass, Echoing the screams of the eagles, Hems in its gorges the bed Of the new-born clear-flowing stream; Whether he first sees light Where the river in gleaming rings Sluggishly winds through the plain; Whether in sound of the swallowing sea— As is the world on the banks, So is the mind of the man. Vainly does each, as he glides, Fable and dream Of the lands which the river of Time Had left ere he woke on its breast, Or shall reach when his eyes have been closed. Only the tract where he sails He wots of; only the thoughts, Raised by the objects he passes, are his. Who can see the green earth any more As she was by the sources of Time? Who imagines her fields as they lay In the sunshine, unworn by the plough? Who thinks as they thought, The tribes who then roam'd on her breast, Her vigorous, primitive sons? What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure? What bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of God, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flashing as Moses felt When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste? Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him? This tract which the river of Time Now flows through with us, is the plain. Gone is the calm of its earlier shore. Border'd by cities and hoarse With a thousand cries is its stream. And we on its breast, our minds Are confused as the cries which we hear, Changing and shot as the sights which we see. And we say that repose has fled For ever the course of the river of Time. That cities will crowd to its edge In a blacker, incessanter line; That the din will be more on its banks, Denser the trade on its stream, Flatter the plain where it flows, Fiercer the sun overhead. That never will those on its breast See an ennobling sight, Drink of the feeling of quiet again. But what was before us we know not, And we know not what shall succeed. Haply, the river of Time— As it grows, as the towns on its marge Fling their wavering lights On a wider, statelier stream— May acquire, if not the calm Of its early mountainous shore, Yet a solemn peace of its own. And the width of the waters, the hush Of the grey expanse where he floats, Freshening its current and spotted with foam As it draws to the Ocean, may strike Peace to the soul of the man on its breast— As the pale waste widens around him, As the banks fade dimmer away, As the stars come out, and the night-wind Brings up the stream Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.

After it lifts the army-green, stuffed dumpster over its head and the trash falls to the receptacle, it hulks backward with a cadenced beep as if to say, get out the fucking way, please.

The present tense is the body’s past tense here; hence the ghost sludge of hands on the now gray strip of towel hanging limp from the jammed dispenser; hence the mirror squinting through grime at grime, and the worn- to-a-sliver of soiled soap on the soiled sink. The streaked bowl, the sticky toilet seat, air claustral with stink— all residues and traces of the ancestral spirit of body free of spirit—hence, behind the station, at the back end of the store, hidden away and dimly lit this cramped and solitary carnival inversion—Paul becoming Saul becoming scents anonymous and animal; hence, over the insides of the lockless stall the cave-like scribblings and glyphs declaring unto all who come to it in time: “heaven is here at hand and dark, and hell is odorless; hell is bright and clean.”

Very sad, Having to Come out of nowhere, The rain We’ve been waiting for Is waiting too. Trees, By now, Have had enough daylight. They’d like, Please, To sleep it off. If nothing Else, nothing Else. Behind our backs Things mean themselves. Violins crack From wanting to exist. It’s hard, getting a word in. I’m waiting To arrive inside my clothes, If nothing else, Willing To be (having to Come out of nowhere) Very sad.

She brightens at the evidence. Like a strong appliance. You can make it hot. Grown ass people having tantrums. I’m unbought, unheated. Like a perfectly square morsel of lasagna. A wrathful rubics cube. To realize, I wish to ridicule people interested in martial arts. That I’m not getting better. My uncle would prank call my father, “Immigration!” He’d crow. And my father would fall to silence. No matter the heavy accent. No matter the voice he’d known unto boredom. One wing swigging out to its brother on the other bird. I measured this silence when I was a girl. The quality of the joke and how it rested on the bad stomach of a tensile citizenry. The joke was that, in an instant, We Lost Everything. It is important to remember who would laugh first— the perpetrator/uncle/jokester or the assailed/father/feather. Or maybe, it isn’t. Maybe what you should know is that they told this joke over and over and ever. My uncle crowed. My father disbelieved. We lost everything. And then, the svelte, sweet brier laughter.

The giant takes us down. A man with no arms. Unbreakable. What made today is concordant, transforms the brief decisive phase we call fear. I look to that whited-over part and see a face. Then I look to the black and see the same face. There were tunnels…chambers beneath some of the sidewalks…page after page of places… The last thing you think of. Won’t be my fluffy blonde hair. We have his ear. He was the first boy I knew. The liberation. Which I remember from sand. The pail shape. The whole world’s washed out. These words: take refuge. What I mean by dream in this case is his last dream. And you see no land, you’re that far away. Someone coughs in my first life. Someone must have noticed how like you he is… First you can’t be heard Then you can’t hear Then you can’t dial Then you can’t turn it off You pose a question, I repeat it. And as always with speech, one is blind. As a reflector, as of cloth or thick flecked glass, as slats— You asked though about the self. There were fireflies, and the corn cut to the nubs. The windows shook, we saw a flash of light… then the tiniest feckles of rain after we waited all day.