872 Life poems

I have never arrived into a new life yet. Have you? Do you find the squeak of boots on snow excruciating? Have you heard people say,It wasn’t me, when they accomplished a great feat? I have, often. But rarely. • Possibility is one of the elements. It keeps things going. The ferry with its ratty engine and exactitude at chugging into blocks and chains. Returning as ever to mother’s house under a salty rain. Slave up, slave down.

When the lights come on at five o'clock on street corners That is Evolution by the bureau of power, That is a fine mechanic dealing in futures: For the sky is wide and warm upon that hour.

Of course there is a jackhammer. And a view, like Hopper, but happier. Of course there is the newspaper—the daily herald of our powerlessness. Easy go, easy come:thwash, the next day another, an example of everything that gets done in the dark. Like the initiative of the crocuses from a snow that was, as it works out, warming them. Or in this case, the strange October weather warming them. There were the conclusions we jumped to. To which we jumped. There was pain, and then there was suffering. Of course there was my ambition to offer you the world, but one that I have rearranged to make sense. Here are all the sensations of being alive at the turn of the twenty-first century, here’s how they ring out against each other, here’s how one brings out the sense of another, here is the yellow next to the fathomless blue.

I was conceived in the cruelest month in whatever spring California could muster. A little rain—with some more likely. And the buckeyes were they yet on the ground? Damn my father’s smooth stone eyes, other prevailing enticements and what Eliot called the

The neighbors will soon spread their confounding potluck before you. Dressed in period garb, they wear sandals with socks. They subscribe to Life magazine to experience the present as if it were already the past. Their flowering trees were engineered to never drop fruit. Overhead, constellations of stickers glow from bedroom ceilings as souvenirs from a time when life was lived outdoors. All conversations end in silence. The trick is to make it purposeful. It’s not going to get any easier, for these are the CliffsNotes.

for Paul Levitt Be perpendicular to the basket, toes avid for the line. Already this description is perilously abstract: the ball and basket are round, the nailhead centered in the centerplank of the foul-circle is round, and though the rumpled body isn’t round, it isn’t perpendicular. You have to draw “an imaginary line,” as the breezy coaches say, “through your shoulders.” Here’s how to cheat: remember your collarbone. Now the instructions grow spiritual—deep breathing, relax and concentrate both; aim for the front of the rim but miss it deliberately so the ball goes in. Ignore this part of the clinic and shoot 200 foul shots every day. Teach yourself not to be bored by any boring one of them. You have to love to do this, and chances are you don’t; you’d love to be good at it but not by a love that drives you to shoot 200 foul shots every day, and the lovingly unlaunched foul shots we’re talking about now— the clinic having served to bring us together—circle eccentrically in a sky of stolid orbits as unlike as you and I are from the arcs those foul shots leave behind when they go in.

What makes for a happier life, Josh, comes to this: Gifts freely given, that you never earned; Open affection with your wife and kids; Clear pipes in winter, in summer screens that fit; Few days in court, with little consequence; A quiet mind, a strong body, short hours In the office; close friends who speak the truth; Good food, cooked simply; a memory that’s rich Enough to build the future with; a bed In which to love, read, dream, and re-imagine love; A warm, dry field for laying down in sleep, And sleep to trim the long night coming; Knowledge of who you are, the wish to be None other; freedom to forget the time; To know the soul exceeds where it’s confined Yet does not seek the terms of its release, Like a child’s kite catching at the wind That flies because the hand holds tight the line.

Somebody left this white T-shirt like a hangman’s hood on the new parking meter— the magic marks upon its back say:I QUIT METH 4-EVER. A declaration to the sky, whose angels all wear seagull wings swooping over this street with its torn scratch tickets and Big Gulp cups dropped by the curb. Extra large, it has been customized with a pocketknife or a canine tooth to rough the armholes where my boobs wobble out as I roam these rooms lit by twilight’s bulb, feeling half like Bette Davis in a wheelchair and half like that Hell’s Angels kingpin with the tracheotomy. Dear reader, do you know that guy? I didn’t think so. If only we could all watch the same TV. But no doubt you have seen the gulls flying, and also the sinister bulked-up crows carrying white clouds of hotdog buns in their beaks: you can promise them you’ll straighten up, but they are such big cynics. I should have told you My lotto #’s 2-11-19-23-36 is what’s written in front, beside the silk screen for Listerine Cool Mint PocketPaks™— which means you can’t hijack my name; no, you have to go find your own, like a Hopi brave. You might have to sit in a sweat lodge until you pass out or eat a weird vine and it will not be pleasant. Your pulse goes staccato like a Teletype machine— then blam you’ll be transformed into your post-larval being. Maybe swallowtail, maybe moth: trust me, I know because once I was a baby blue convertible but now I’m this black hot rod painted with flames.

In the east, the day breaks; do not say we have started too early; For we shall cross many hills yet Before we grow old; here the land is surpassing in beauty. Mao Tse Tung 1934 I look out the bars upon the Castle the crust caked row of age in a corner my friendly spider crouches for the unwary gnats of my days. So much there is we must atone. There are spires of faith in the invisible claws of spiders in the flight and curve of gulls. These know, I swear, the contours of the rolling Saharas and the destitute oceans of our history. We sit, debating the charity of our captors. At night lights come on the shoreline bends into a broad bay near the Castle the sea is gray Yesterday it rained on the eve of my forty-first year and left all my defeats intact Let me lead you into the country It is only as half clansman of the ritual goat that I bring my song to the place of sacrifice here in the pain fields asphalt and smoke of a large hearth I lead my rope is short. I shall soon arrive under the tree. I will stage a hundred fights in honor of our Gods and our beloved leader Here, I could care less for the toiling masses I retreated here before Lent to my own stretch of sea front (I cannot see the damned sea because of old caked walls built by Dutchmen) But the shore falls into a deep gulf there are no cliffs. They found a week-old baby buried in a shallow grave on the front lawn of the fort. I want my grave to be deeper. They are sawing through our firewood Today is cassava day The flutist is silent Perhaps his troops have arrived in Georgia Not to arrive upsets me And for the path that I have trod I have no regrets

This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else. And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair. The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild as horses in their oat sacks. The women wear spurs. In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air. My room is the same as last year. They always give me end of the corridor, left, the top floor. Privacy. Why not. I’ve been through here before. I’m the town’s best customer. A minor attraction. I buy from their stores. Remember this bureau— battered wood, the fake drawer and split mirror? And even the glass marks, ring within ring of spilled drinks. When I sit here the widest warped links have a center. Strung out they’re a year’s worth of slack, a tether that swings around the spine’s dark pole and swings back. Each time I return something’s different, although there’s a few I can always expect. The cracks in the mirror: always more, never less. The stains in the bedspread have spread. And the rip in the window shade lets through more light, strange light, since I come here to be in the dark. Should be taped. A few things can be saved anyhow. But I don’t want to get into that. I set up my pictures. Mother and Father, stiffer, more blurred every year. I turn them to the walls when there’s customers, that is the least I can do. What mending there is occurs in small acts, and after the fact of the damage, when nothing is ever enough. There is always the scar to remind me that things were once perfect, at least they were new. I first came here when I was a girl. It surprised me, the things that two people could do left alone in a room. Not long and I learned. I learned what the selves are a man can disown till he lets them to life in a room. It’s the region’s hard winters, snowed in with the snow half the year. I’d expect them to think up a few. But nothing surprises me, not anymore. The plumbing can only get worse with the cold. It’s true, even summers the water is foul and flows slowly, a thin brown trickle by noon. Heat pours in the west, freak waves of dry lightning soak the whole town in a feverish light. Beneath me, the tables of water have dropped to unheard-of levels. It’s been a long drought. I bend my whole arm to the handle, the valve yawns open but nothing comes out. What else should I expect. Wrung cloth. The body washing in dust.