872 Life poems

The yolk went down my leg Like a beautiful snail without a shell, Went down the hill To the skillet of water, to the nymphflies, Into the lips of pond minnows, Down the long belly of the gar – the hellbenders Having dived and lost, then into The paw of the lame panther Who loped back to her lair with it. As for the white, it stayed with me, Mark of the beast, birth, and trade.

The Friend wriggled out and stood, a smiling tree, his shimmering head turning left and right. A person came along and looked up and said, “Who are you?” The Friend said, “Come on, get a buzz. It’s awesome!” The person said, “I don’t need that,” and walked off. “Wait!” The Friend caught up and tickled him, his fingers hooking him and reeling him in. The Friend promised he would be popular. The person said, “Really?” He wasn’t convinced. The Friend poured it on, slathering him until he reeled. The Friend slathered and slathered until his head bubbled. Reeling in circles, he fell down. “Hey!” The Friend tried to wake him up. “Oh no! He’s dead!” He scooped up dirt, dropped the person in, and patted it down. He acted as if nothing had happened. Then came along another person. The Friend perked up and waved. Translated from the American Sign Language

For Nate Pritts The friend lives half in the grass and half in the chocolate cake, walks over to your house in the bashful light of November, or the forceful light of summer. You put your hand on her shoulder, or you put your hand on his shoulder. The friend is indefinite. You are both so tired, no one ever notices the sleeping bags inside you and under your eyes when you’re talking together about the glue of this life, the sticky saturation of bodies into darkness. The friend’s crisis of faith about faith is unnerving in its power to influence belief, not in or toward some other higher power, but away from all power in the grass or the lake with your hand on her shoulder, your hand on his shoulder. You tell the friend the best things you can imagine, and every single one of them has already happened, so you recount them of great necessity with nostalgic, atomic ferocity, and one by one by one until many. The eggbirds whistle the gargantuan trees. The noiserocks fall twisted into each other’s dreams, their colorful paratrooping, their skinny dark jeans, little black walnuts to the surface of this earth. You and the friend remain twisted together, thinking your simultaneous and inarticulate thoughts in physical lawlessness, in chemical awkwardness. It is too much to be so many different things at once. The friend brings black hole candy to your lips, and jumping off the rooftops of your city, the experience. So much confusion — the several layers of exhaustion, and being a friend with your hands in your pockets, and the friend’s hands in your pockets. O bitter black walnuts of this parachuted earth! O gongbirds and appleflocks! The friend puts her hand on your shoulder. The friend puts his hand on your shoulder. You find a higher power when you look.

In our arteries and eyes, a hundred lightbulbs throb like drugs. The furnace: a permanent mishap. And up in the dusk, there is lucid debris— a conduit, a wire mask, a swastika of corn. Boy- and/or girl-small, we'll find some horizon, an intricate faking in which to lose way. Here we are, not speaking or dead. Here we are or dead. To what do we owe this forgetting not to kiss? Not that any given face is not afraid.

Wherever we go, needs feed and I find it harder and harder to believe benevolence is the thing Thousands of Yazidi girls missing and plastic fills the ocean’s mouth and the cursive of yr name still occupies the canopy of my throat Fuel, the under- pinning What fires your gd engine Rigor, mortis Cold as unmoving or unmoved The opposite of music Warm in the cold universe Molten, forming A rock becoming magma becoming lava becoming land Land, the trauma of lava Lava the lamp of the ancestors and later a cheeky find in the Junk shop and rising in our living room Livin groom Just bc nothing cares doesn’t mean it lacks meaning What’s the point of curiosity but a train rolling past the spot where the Donner Party feasted n then go on a four hour Wikipedia downward spiral I’m the closest thing to a mime parade I whisper, home late tiptoeing down the creaky hallway tryin not to wake my roommates Nice chicken parm, sluts, I say to my fingers at lunch Dissociation is evacuating from the inside I just know we’ll have a good time

Dropouts Mace had the kind of courage you could easily mistake for brawn. I don’t know why I call it courage. Sure, he stood up to greasers. And didn’t visibly fret on the days when his report card made hard fact of what was already apparent from his absences. Yet Mace was gifted with an uninflected quickness, a fine intelligence of his own despair, a knowledge— as he gunned the engine of his once white ’58 Chevy, with a four-on-the-floor he’d installed himself, to climb higher into the hills above the city— of where nowhere was… Light shadow cutting brusquely across the canyons— * Like everyone else in our class, Mace was a year older than me. He had stubble on his chin. I dragged a razor up and down my cheeks to inspire fast, early growth. “Don’t shave your jowls,” friends warned, knowing I overdid everything, “or you’ll grow hair there later.” Later was a word I disdained, its insistence on the future tense, postponement— life on the back burner. * Mace seemed incapable of worry. His coolness and insouciance made girls stare. He was always brushing back the shock of raven- black hair that fell over his right eyebrow. The same teacher who sent me lickety split to the principal’s office would lean over Mace’s desk and whisper warmly, compassionately in his ear. They would nod together. I could fill in every blank. “What’s the matter Richard?” “Nothing.” “If you’re having trouble,” this is where the whispering grew most intense, “I want you to feel you can talk to me as a friend. Your work in class is so good, you have so much ability, Richard…” Mace would never protest, never defend himself. Indignation was a country where he’d never been. “You may hate me,” I thought, praying she would not double the insult of the absence of her concern for me with a glance in my direction, “but deep down Mace and I are the same.” * Mace and I were running into the same problem at the same time. Mathematical wizards that we were we couldn’t solve advanced algebraic equations in our head; we were vexed by an added integer. We had gotten this far without lifting a pencil. History was being sold to us as a dead language of fixed events and we wouldn’t buy. What is a fact, I wondered, and I could see the same question wrinkling Mace’s brow. * Mace’s problems weren’t academic. His disgust thrummed like telephone wires in the wind, even his saturnine presence was deceptive, like his beat-up Chevy with its secret store of power concealed under the hood. Mace too began the year in the front row, placed there on the strength of pure ability. He sank slowly, buoyed as I was, by the one assigned book we read,Great Expectations. Mace attended to his tasks in the classroom. I dreamt of escape via the window’s easy access. There were unknown roads to be driven, gulleys to be plumbed; girls: a world of lovely distractions. * For all the years I lived in Salt Lake City I can’t remember seeing a single bird. I felt watched in Salt Lake City ever since that first day when the old geezer stepped out of the shadows, on a street vast and empty and without verticals, to reprimand my Double- mint gum wrapper for lighting in the gutter. But only around the time of Hitchcock’s The Birds did I start to withdraw from sight. I was keen to see The Birds the Wednesday afternoon it opened and I wanted the other—“good”—“Mark R.,” the irreproachable blond Mormon angel everyone loved, to join us. Our growling engine brought his mother to the porch. The sun glared on her helmet of curlers. Mark had “homework and chores,” she said, he “can’t come down.” But he had already descended. And stood framed in the doorway. I couldn’t get accustomed to the light in the trampled meadows around his house, the glow of dandelions, thistles, weeds. Mark’s red cheeks reeked of aspiration and I could read his thoughts:why couldn’t I wait until night? Why was I dragging myself down? Why skip history and rifle assembly? The movie would wait. But I would not. I was keen, and, seeking a purging terror to cleanse me of my dread, I sat alone with Mace in the vast empty theater alive to each click and flicker in the projection room, and the radiant impalpable dust caught in the unstinting beam; released from the limits of our world until the screeching stopped and, looked at askance by strangers, we stepped into an iron dark which held no trace of the light we’d left. * I forked over whatever change I had to fuel each day’s free-wheeling splendor. One morning, knowing Mace was down to smoking butts, I brought a pack of my mother’s Kents as an offering. Mace scorned them. He only smoked Marlboros. Yet later, desperate and broke in the maze of roads through the hills overlooking the city, he broke off the filters and smoked in silence. I was used to doing the talking for the two of us but this was different. He pulled up besides a long driveway. A vaulted roof jutted above columns of tall firs. This was where he lived. He’d be “a sec”—he had “some smokes” stashed in a drawer. I followed him past the plaster jockey and the massy trees toward an opulent, utterly contemporary house, fronted by oak door and gold bell-knocker, angular, white, high-ceilinged, skylit… Our apartment could have fit into the living room… Now I understood: Mace lived in the clouds. Though I couldn’t see beyond the back yard through the landscaping I knew what the view must be like: that was the reason to live there; for the nights, when the city, innocent as it was, still blazed through its grid of interlocking lights. * On May Day, Mace and I, long ago tossed out of R.O.T.C. for “insubordination,” but required to attend the final show-of-arms sat together in the bleachers, in splendid isolation, and watched as the rule-followers—led by the many-striped, other Mark R.— in their woolen khaki uniforms, shouldering their M 1 rifles, dropped like flies in the insuperable heat.

And yesterday something shattering happened. Not yesterday, but several (that’s becoming a favorite word) weeks ago I came across Kitaj’s The Jewish Rider and wept: there he was in the very image of my stepfather; the pate where a few strands of hair still frolic, the same skinny legs, the same misguided attempt to dress in a sporty way (who’s watching?), the same abstractedness, the same shlumpy—boneless—posture, gazing not at the landscape flashing past with wires lashed to the treetops as if with one tug the countryside would vanish, or listening to the tick of the rails, but fixed—distractedly—on his lower extremities, white loafers and the crease in his pants and nylon socks to see whether or not he should roll them up … ; no: looking both beyond and through physical space into an inner dark. Why else draw the eyes as shadows? It’s his glimpse into another world. * My mother’s father hunted and rode. My father rode and fished. My stepfather never budged from his Barca Lounger once the amber liquid began to pour. He had a spiritual life and a social life and no physical life. But he liked it that I was always outside: maybe that’s why he never got on my back about grades; he might have thought that this boy has to be outside at this time in his life. Maybe it’s more important that he roam the canyons and the hills that he know the streets that he come home covered with leaves and bark and mud, than that he sit there like a good young scholar like I was, a Rabbi at twenty giving money home to my parents in their cabbagy tenement in the Bronx. This is a boy who needs space. One time— I think I had my learner's permit— he rented a Mustang convertible in L.A. and for several days I drove around past the long rows of used car lots and the bruised facades of restaurants digging up relatives, my hoarse-voiced arthritic aunt in the shadows of her goldenrod colored ranch house, limping like Ruffian after her last run in the wet dirt at Belmont Stakes. * But I’ve said nothing about what made me weep. It's in the contrast between Kitaj's alter cocker seeking comfort on a train, and Rembrandt’s taut youth setting off into the rampant amber on horseback; it’s in the image of active life juxtaposed with the image of sedentary contemplation— though no one travels on horseback now and heroism has become attending AIDS patients or sheltering the homeless. The raw youth’s feet are planted lightly yet firmly in his stirrups. His coat glows with many colors. Not so The Jewish Rider. And yet—there's something more. * Michael Hoffman writes that New York is not what it was when I was too young to have marked the existence of The Blue Note, but I can pick up this trail by walking across the park to the Frick. And Barbara Hershey wouldn’t have been at the Frick in 1959 (they don’t allow children under sixteen) in black skin tight pants, black sweater, (the female uniform of our generation whose male version substitutes black jeans, baseball hat, and bomber jacket— though who knows what decorous garments she’d checked in the cloakroom), and white boots with plenty of Elizabethan ruff at the edges, pausing to look at The Polish Rider while I scribbled notes. Her white boots stood out against the dominant dark like the Jewish Rider’s white loafers. And that was good because the light in the painting is brief whatever the time of day, sunrise or sunset, and the rider’s gaze, looking out over unknown space, is inward. I followed his eyes through the archway toward canvases where clouds roll over harbors against the whiteness of sails or toward gilded robes and velvet-hung rooms, then back to meet wisdom’s bared breast in Veronese’s Wisdom and Strength… (Why didn’t Veronese have the nerve to call his painting Woman With Bare Breasts, like Tintoretto? Why an allegorical title when the bare flesh and bones and sinew would have done?) He spends his life looking not at far off hills or citadels or the lights in the village below: he has no choice but to fix on her one bared breast, her swelling nipple. I can’t figure out what landscape he might be facing in the painted world. The clatter of rocks and hooves echoes over the stony plain. * I was no rider, but a pretend horse and rider always rode beside my train window—at a canter no matter how fast the rails clicked by— and though he wore a bandana and leaned slightly forward in the saddle to pull himself aboard, his gaze, wide-ranging yet intent, was like the Polish Rider’s. Even as an only child I was never lonely. My mother's father rode until he was old and on a narrow pass his horse jammed him up against rockface. In his narrative of his life this collision marked the ruin of his hip the rise of his cataracts. My father rode “every morning before work.” I never witnessed that, but at a ranch in upper New York State while I bloodied my hands tugging the reins of a frothing giant who would not budge from a weedpatch, I watched him disappear in his black polo shirt and khaki jodhpurs as he galloped over a far off hill: more at ease in the saddle—in the air— than I’d ever seen him in civilian life. My woman friend in El Paso lives to ride. Only the Jewish Rider and I do not ride! * That’s the stuff of events. What about the signature inscribed by the sun, the dark clouds sinister in just being there; thresholds, exchanges going on in the village below, candles lit in the deep interiors, bread, wine, the plate making its way around the table; what about— leaping centuries ahead— the energy from generators blazing like auras through the clouds the scattered lights, the rotating tops of ambulances; the tuna casseroles and macaroni and cheese making the rounds, apple sauce passing from high chair to bib, the Wonder Bread on a calcified plate, children eating, heads down, in silence, communicating through eye movements, the mother wiping her lips, the father grinning stupidly and drooling; the television quacking in the background, the perfect suburban night unfolding in bedroom and drive-in and den, the sprinkler system ticking. The snipers in the tower—. This is what the riders, guests everywhere and nowhere, say goodbye to as their horses break into a canter as night comes down. And last night, driving to Connecticut, I understood that the Polish Rider gleans the permutations of light after dusk, that its olive-gray smudges reflect the absence of pitch-darkness. I was wrong about the Polish Rider all along: he doesn’t depart at nightfall, he stops for a moment crossing difficult terrain (anticipating rockslide?) in the night, because, as the faint light rimming the edges of the sky makes clear, night is not absolute black, but rough-hewn and curious. The rider lives in order to depart. The Woman Who Rode She hitched her horse to the gateposts of my house. Bare trees, frost, the whole bit. I wanted our lives to be like that: as rife with silences as a Quaker meeting. She came to me in her stride. Dropped her crop on the chair. Peeled off her britches and boots; crawled under the covers. Her hour in the saddle had “made her ready.” I felt like an accessory. The wound was open. Drowsily I rolled onto her, no longer caring if she was using me. As the new year wore on and black ice made riding a fast track to certain death or paralysis, she grew tense. Came to me now with clinical terms, “schi” words I worked hard to break down. The good news was she was not a true “split personality”—the glitch that “she was divorced from herself, and could not love or care.” * The light in her house was like the light before dawn. On the last of my rare visits her mother jarred preserves while we watched instant replays of Robert Kennedy die and die. Her father skulked upstairs, perhaps testing gadgets; or wishing me off his daughter; or taking precautions I would not overhear what words were ricocheting on his “hot line” to the patent office. * Any objective observer standing back from the distraction of the impinging present could see that her torment overleapt any visible signs and that she was— as a WASP “rider”—the wrong person for the place she was in. Her resilience could not be in question. She lived to stray from known paths to leap stone fences and break into open fields. When her horse went down in an Irish bog and she was trampled—hooves branding her cheek— the next day she up and mounted him again. * When she came to me in the dream last night her smile had loosened. How lovely she looked in her blue silk blouse. How well it lit up the colors of her hair.

to be reminded of the failing mainspring not sudden silence after the extreme figure but the relative a grimace told him to push the articulation farther the yet green used marks a tongues -width to tally a different sound preceded every word then took to term to feel hips as if new tangents were bolting

at the third floor window of the tenement, the street looks shiny. It has been washed and rinsed by rain. Beyond the silver streaks of the streetcar tracks a single streetlight stands in a pool of wet light. It is night. St. Louis. Nineteen forty-seven. I have just come home from the orphanage to stay. Years later, I will be another person. I will almost not remember this summerónot at all. But for nowówith the streetlight reflecting an aura on the wet sidewalk, with dark behind me in the dirty two rooms we call home, for now, I see it all. Tomorrow I will begin to try to forget. But in this moment everything is clear: who I am, where I am, and the clean place that I have left behind. As clear as the streetlight: how distinct its limits in the vast dark and the rain.

You humble in. It's just as you remember: The sallow walls, formica counter top, The circular argument of time beneath Fluorescent flickering—doubt, faith, and doubt. She knows you've been to see the gilded girl Who's always promising and walking out With someone else. She knew that you'd return, With nothing in your pockets but your fists. Why do you resist? When will you learn That this is what your weary dreams are of— Succumbing to Her unconditional love?