872 Life poems

Kitty Goes Kommando and the Goldman Rats — Phooey! That blue scaffolding holds up the sky. Who did we think we were padlocking in, or out? Give me that huge looping black script no one can read, a secret glyph, and just where someone has smashed the window, Jesus the Way the Truth the Life and a dented aluminum frame. He bent down, we know, and wrote something illegible on the ground. A toothy black-and-white dinosaur gapes. I like the crack in this wall of monsters where skylines topple and ogres twiddle train tracks in their claws like pipe cleaners. Down the long, semi-abandoned street in Queens calligraphy gallops toward the shop displaying, like guitar strings, seven different iron rods for gates. Hole in the wall, rose sound-hole, ribbed sounding board — always from fissures and gaps melody strains as trains thunderclank across the girdered overpass, a siren keens, and a solitary man ambles past amputated acacias fisting out with leaves.

This is not a waiting room for souls. It is modern, totally unwindowed. The sun threw a ray away, lost two rays it’s raining here in the room. On the beach it looks very evening already, money removed from the world: if one travels somewhere and back again, one is always different—we are not separated on the journey. My mouth keeps spr- inging open. Everything does not have to have a limit : varnish out, dooryear—winter ice is caught in winter, I plunged myself but not under. (I can’t pull it out of my head, can I.) Godthrough: a word with a star tied around it, it has to hit someone. Was such a storm the trees fell over, there was a storm against. I have got a lot more songs in my mouth: Shudderhorror. Souldoll. Shiverbeard, is there much enough snow? is that supposed to be lakes for the chessmen have reached the bank? Mother shakes the little tree. Otherwise the darkness will read it and will remain dark forever. A dream falls off, a little shirt— the sky is red. And blue. How do the bones get into my foot? Ung-Ung-train, Puff-Puff train afraided me away. No everything does not have a limit: I saw that I lived here. That there is a spider in the window here. That there is a mirror here. Twinslight, the tongue, the garden flowers painted —almostyou: to walk where it is very dark and the small bell is already hanging in the air—

The overweight, overnight parts that came to me in a dream. Their clothes no longer fit, it was this that brought them to me crying, their faces twitching. That had to end. No, they said, it didn’t. So I rolled over to ghosts that couldn’t dent a pillow. The clock shed. Night pulled its burdens into harbor and I woke, glad for the day, its telltale light, its flying minute, that genie work, and the everlasting perturbations of my people, their glories, their heavy last words, and for these, I rose.

Be like a bear in the forest of yourself. Even sleeping you are powerful in your breath. Every hair has life and standing, as you do, swaying from one foot to the other all the forest stands with you. Each minute sound, one after another, is distinct in your ear. Here in the blur of mixed sensations, you can feel the crisp outline of being, particulate. Great as you are, huge as you are and growling like the deepest drum, the continual vibration that makes music what it is, not some light stone skipped on the surface of things, you travel below sounding the depths where only the dauntless go. Be like the bear and do not forget how you rounded your massive shape over the just ripened berry which burst in your mouth that moment how you rolled in the wet grass, cool and silvery, mingling with your sensate skin, how you shut your eyes and swam far and farther still, starlight shaping itself to your body, starship rocking the grand, slow waves under the white trees, in the snowy night.

To be a disco ball dangling in a storefront window, in the sun, with a cage on
 it. To be two and three disco balls, downtown McAllen, spangles of sun and
 water that grew tangerine skins late February, pink bottlebrush nostrils, buff-bellied hummingbirds. To be mirrors and hexagonal combs, mexican honey
 wasps, larvae, paper, wax. To make geometry without vocabulary, to be live 
music—take off your jacket, girl, wear your tank top . . . it's ninety degrees! To be a green light go, downtown Corpus, after cars and trucks zooming on beach
 sand, before hot tubs. To be an orange sun driving from Anzaldúa's grave, to
 be a cactus bloom fuchsia, opuntia, Laguna Atascosa, Laguna Madre, to be a
 watering hole, a mud chimney air vent for crawdad water tunnels. To be a silver lizard run over by tires, a swatch of river on asphalt, to be a bolt loosened from 
the border wall, to be a peso falling out of the border crossing's revolving slot, 
to be a coke-bottle dove, a mexican coca-cola, a cooing quorum of lotería cards
 signing a resolution. To be a goose perched on top of an abandoned sink in a yard, in a town that fords the river, to be the woman stretched on her beloved's grave, returned after decades. To be a kid in juvie, to be her guardian, the judge, 
the p.o., to be the letters she writes, the words that matter more than food, almost as much as music and more than makeup, nearly suns seen through the mandatory skylight, imagined by the control room monitor. To be el chalán, the last hand-drawn ferry on the river, its ropes pulled by pilots, to be a passenger
 almost on the other side.

Three mini ciabattini for breakfast where demand for persnickety bread is small, hence its expense, hence my steadfast recalculation of my overhead, which soars, and as you might expect the ciabattini stand in for my fantasy of myself in a sea-limned prospect, on a terrace, with a lemon tree... Not: Assessed a fee for rent sent a day late. Not: Fines accrued for a lost library book. Better never lose track of the date. Oversleep, and you’re on the hook. It’s the margin for error: shrinking. It’s life ground down to recurrence. It’s fewer books read for the thinking the hospital didn’t rebill the insurance; the school misplaced the kids’ paperwork. Here’s our sweet pup, a rescue which we nonetheless paid for, and look: he gets more grooming than I do. When I turn my hand mill, I think of the dowager who ground gems on ham for her guests; the queen who ground out two cups of flour on the pregnant abdomen of her husband’s mistress; I think of a “great rock-eating bird” grinding out a sandy beach, the foam said to be particulate matter of minute crustaceans, each brilliantly spooning up Aphrodite to Greek porticoes, and our potatoes, and plain living which might be shaken by infinitesimal tattoos.

All this was written on the next day’s list. On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots, pale but effective, and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events, built-up its tiniest cathedral ... (Or is it the sum of what takes place?) If I lean down, to whisper, to them, down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path, hoping to be on the air, hoping to please the children— (and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if I stir the wintered ground-leaves up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun, into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though mostly crisp, fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by— just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought, no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves, oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one, the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one, the hurried mind hovering over its rankings, the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the zero of the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart, formulating its alleyways of discovery, fussing about the integrity of the whole, the heart trying to make time and place seem small, sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event on the list then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss, an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged obligation, checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing what might have been, peeling away what should ... There are flowerpots at their feet. There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe. It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air, down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth. Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you. My distance from you makes them louder. Are we all waiting for the phone to ring? Who should it be? What fountain is expected to thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees, what parapets petalling-forth the invisible into the world of things, turning the list into its spatial form at last, into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony.... Oh look at you. What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list won’t cover?   You down there, in the theater of operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical— (are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)— (what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)— oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused —as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some original fleet, the captains gone but some of us who saw the plan drawn out still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men, who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings, while the solitary ones, heads in their hands, so still, the idea barely forming at the base of that stillness, the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot itself out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought, before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by— the men of x, the outcomes of y—before— the mind still gripped hard by the hands that would hold the skull even stiller if they could, that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let to filter through— the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree, without the distractions of wonder— oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea, which taking-form begins to twist, coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit, now finally about to rise, about to go into the other room—and yet not having done so yet, not yet—the intake—before the credo, before the plan— right at the homesickness—before this list you hold in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.

The long road south, the pavement flat and black as a dash without end, no signs, no houses, the heat like an unseen fog and the sun a swollen crimson clot above fields where frazzle-haired palm trees rose sporadic and unwieldy, the miles of pasture where cattle of every conceivable color, rust and tobacco and ashen, fed and nursed their stumbling young, heavy heads bent to the ground. And insects that crashed against windshield so tiny, no body was left behind. Then a wooden shack where we stopped to pee and the shock of iron-red flecks against bowl, the water placid, unmoved. There was hardly any pain. What could we do but continue on as scattered street-lamps gradually revealed a landscape inhabited once again: the still shuttered windows of bungalows pink as scrubbed flesh, the small dark yards of abandoned Bigwheels and plots of petunias or cukes, the closed, expectant mailboxes and the living already dead inside me.

For Frank O'Hara I The lights are out The cats are hungry The room is full of gangsters II The dishes are dirty The icebox is empty I dream of celery and a compass III The roof is upstairs The window next door A guitar in the shower IV The hours disappear in my room Where is my blue pistol The door-god is knocking.

I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back... I've got protection. I've got a receiver open downfield... What the hell is this? This isn't a football, it's a shoe, a man's brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air. I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they weren't very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities, one has to make choices. This isn't right and I'm not going to throw it.