872 Life poems

Nothing will hurt you that much despite how you feel the stress on your back shapes your insight this splendid November rain Toussaint. I find you by your marks, he says an imprint But when I summon you, I talk to—I say— my memory of your face. It’s kind of crazy to others. They’re not very interesting he says. When I first came to this country, and now I know the language I say, but I had in a dream spoken it many years previously. That is, not the language of the dead the language of France. I took one year of French in 1964 and then nothing but once, in 1977 I spoke French in a dream all night: I was in the future I moved here in 1992. Country of the more logical than I? though the people of my quartier know and like me, even as I a foreigner remain strange You do everything alone a woman said to me. There are ways to care without interfering but the French speak of anguish frequently they are conscious of emotional extremity a terrible gift. It’s all a gift, he says . . . some haven’t been opened. I’m not sure he said that it’s nearly my sixty-seventh birthday today though it’s the day of the dead hello we love you they say.

There’s a mystery By the river, in one of the cabins Shuttered with planks, its lock Twisted; a bunch of magazines flipped open, A body. A blanket stuffed with leaves Or lengths of rope, an empty gin bottle. Put down your newspaper. Look out Beyond the bluffs, a coal barge is passing, Its deck nearly Level with the water, where it comes back riding High. You start talking about nothing, Or that famous party, where you went dressed As a river. They listen, The man beside you touching his odd face In the countertop, the woman stirring tonic In your glass. Down the bar the talk’s divorce, The docks, the nets Filling with branches and sour fish. Listen, I knew a woman who’d poke a hole in an egg, suck It clean and fill the shell with gin, Then walk around all day disgusting people Until she was so drunk The globe of gin broke in her hand. She’d stay Alone at night on the boat, come back Looking for another egg. That appeals to you, rocking For hours carving at a hollow stone. Or finding A trail by accident, walking the bluff’s Face. You know, your friends complain. They say You give up only the vaguest news, and give a bakery As your phone. Even your stories Have no point, just lots of detail: The room Was long and bright, small and close, angering Gaston; They turned away to embrace him; She wore The color out of season, She wore hardly anything at all; Nobody died; Saturday. These disguises of omission. Like forgetting To say obtuse when you talk about the sun, leaving Off the buttons as you’re sewing up the coat. So, People take the little They know to make a marvelous stew; Sometimes, it even resembles you. It’s not so much You cover your tracks, as that they bloom In such false directions. This way friends who awaken At night, beside you, awaken alone.

I'm talking with Mike over coffee. His wife recently left him. He's lonely. We're both carpenters, a couple of old guys in baseball caps plying the trade. We can frame a wall and hang a door, we can read a set of blueprints. But when it comes to women . . . I'm thinking about my mother, who is 91 and very frail. I'm thinking about my wife, my daughters, my granddaughter, my sister, old girlfriends, my ex-wife, and the girl from Panama in the reading room of the New Orleans public library forty-five years ago who slipped a note to me across the table, asking: "Are you a philosophy?" Rain splatters against the storefront of the coffee shop. Mike and I are silent for a long time before going back to work.

The girl on the Bullard overpass looks happy to be there, getting soaked in a light rain but waving her hands to the four o'clock freeway traffic in which I'm anything but happy. You might think she's too dumb to come in out of the rain, but rain or shine, it doesn't seem to matter. She's there most every afternoon, as if she does this for a living. Some living, I'd say. Doesn't she ever get bored, or wish someone would stop and say, "Where to?" and her life would change? That's how I'd be, hating the noise, the stink of exhaust, the press of people. I can't imagine what her life is; mine is confused and often fretful. But there's something brave about standing alone in the rain, waving wild semaphores of gladness to impatient passersby too tired or preoccupied to care. Seeing her at her familiar station I suddenly grin like a fool, wave back, and forgive the driver to my right, who is sullen and staring as I pass. I find her in my rear-view mirror, then head for a needed drink and supper. I don't know where she goes, but I hope it's to a place she loves. I hope the rain lets up. I hope she's there tomorrow.

when I’m braced for a mugging is stranger than the Eritrean boy asking the question outside Clifton Hill station. The skinnier for baggies he’s hop & a skip across three lanes following my hand. No way to countermand him. No way he’d stay for the whole story. The ghosts of spray-can gangs who tagged the length & breadth of the subway are benign I’d tell him. There’ll be the odd gutter-crawler in front of the House of Love. Keep walking. The garage’ll be closed but in summertime a gaggle of mechanics will punt a football in the road there. One missing his mark is bound to call an Eritrean to kick it back. Ignore them. Continue to a far flung franchise of the American dream. Once it was the dull red brick of the United Kingdom pub where the last of the blessed aged quicker than most on Victoria Bitter. Now it’s the McDonalds of this convergence of worlds in whose vicinity I’m more or less lost.

A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word.

You know, Some kid wrote me a letter. You and Murcer, I know, Every time Murcer says I make oh for four and two errors. Some guy wrote, Which I haven’t gotten yet, He wrote it to Yankee Stadium, But by the way, You’re doing the play-by-play, Seaver. So go ahead. I was gonna tell you something, But I forgot what it was. Go ahead.

I wake up with a toothache, think Ishouldwrite about a toothache, make it somehow worthwhile. It's got everything: intimacy, decay, how the body's busy, night and day, doing you in. One of the hundreds of jumpers' corpses pulled from the bay had a note in its pocket saying No reason at all except I have a toothache. Josey's grandfather shot himself after his fifth sinus operation failed. Josey says Empty Nose Syndrome and I get confused— how can hollows be hollowed? But then I go to emptynosesyndrome.org, cup my poor nose in horror, grateful for all I take for granted, can't see. Golden Gate Hank hates his nickname. If you wanted to be called Serenity Hank, Ken tells him,you shouldn't have jumped off the fucking bridge. The ones that live all say they changed their minds in the four seconds before they hit, tried to land feet first and managed it. Ken says don't tell people I think every day of how I wouldn't kill myself, they get the wrong idea. I think every day of how I'd save myself, save Josey: stab the bad guy, fall feet first, punch the Great White in his eyeball, play dead in the bullet-ridden mass grave. From the back seat of the Suburban, I heard my mother say to my father Driving across a high bridge always makes me want to jump. You might live: A seventeen year old boy hit feet first, swam to shore and walked for help, saying his back was killing him. Another guy realized he was alive and underwater, felt something brushing his broken legs.Great, now I get eaten by a shark, he thought. It happens. But this was a seal, circling, apparently the only thing that was keeping me alive, and you can not tell me that wasn't God, because that's what I believe, and that's what I'll believe until the day I die.

From the kindness of my parents I suppose it was that I held that belief about suffering imagining that if only it could come to the attention of any person with normal feelings certainly anyone literate who might have gone to college they would comprehend pain when it went on before them and would do something about it whenever they saw it happen in the time of pain the present they would try to stop the bleeding for example with their own hands but it escapes their attention or there may be reasons for it the victims under the blankets the meat counters the maimed children the animals the animals staring from the end of the world

lonely as four cherries on a tree at night, new moon, wet roads a moth or a snowflake whipping past glass lonely as the red noses of four clowns thrust up through snow their shine four whitened panes drawn from imagined memory lonely as no other lives touching to recorded water all objects stare their memories aware lonely as pain recoiling from itself imagining the cherries and roses reaching out