872 Life poems

As some fond virgin, whom her mother’s care Drags from the town to wholesome country air, Just when she learns to roll a melting eye, And hear a spark, yet think no danger nigh; From the dear man unwillingly she must sever, Yet takes one kiss before she parts for ever: Thus from the world fair Zephalinda flew, Saw others happy, and with sighs withdrew; Not that their pleasures caused her discontent, She sighed not that They stayed, but that She went. She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks, Old-fashioned halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks, She went from Opera, park, assembly, play, To morning walks, and prayers three hours a day; To pass her time ‘twixt reading and Bohea, To muse, and spill her solitary tea, Or o’er cold coffee trifle with the spoon, Count the slow clock, and dine exact at noon; Divert her eyes with pictures in the fire, Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire; Up to her godly garret after seven, There starve and pray, for that’s the way to heaven. Some Squire, perhaps, you take a delight to rack; Whose game is Whisk, whose treat a toast in sack, Who visits with a gun, presents you birds, Then gives a smacking buss, and cries – No words! Or with his hound comes hollowing from the stable, Makes love with nods, and knees beneath a table; Whose laughs are hearty, tho’ his jests are coarse, And loves you best of all things – but his horse. In some fair evening, on your elbow laid, Your dream of triumphs in the rural shade; In pensive thought recall the fancied scene, See Coronations rise on every green; Before you pass th’ imaginary sights Of Lords, and Earls, and Dukes, and gartered Knights; While the spread fan o’ershades your closing eyes; Then give one flirt, and all the vision flies. Thus vanish scepters, coronets, and balls, And leave you in lone woods, or empty walls. So when your slave, at some dear, idle time, (Not plagued with headaches, or the want of rhyme) Stands in the streets, abstracted from the crew, And while he seems to study, thinks of you: Just when his fancy points your sprightly eyes, Or sees the blush of soft Parthenia rise, Gay pats my shoulder, and you vanish quite; Streets, chairs, and coxcombs rush upon my sight; Vexed to be still in town, I knit my brow, Look sour, and hum a tune – as you may now.

Out-of-focus photographs in front of equestrian monuments. The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. With this we arrive at our 40s and we shouldn’t be ungrateful. It could be worse. • The year ending with the month of parakeets who didn’t let anyone sleep with their demented squawking. The day we lowered our arms believing we were raising them. • An arm, a fragment of an arm congealed on the left margin: the photograph in which we’re posing like tourists in the ugliest city in the world. An extremity outside the frame pointing toward a place without historical value. That photograph, the mechanics of a smile set in motion by a signal from the stranger who took it. • To keep from dwelling on the imminent let’s speculate about the fate of a friend from elementary school who always covered his notebooks in pink. Or let’s be practical and calculate our taxes. • May God keep you, she thinks. Blessings, she says. • Every four months, with technical precision, Mom asks if I’m gay. • Son (leaving the table): See you tomorrow. Mother (under her breath): God willing. • Vacation of ’91, before nightfall, downloading the catalogue of bootlegs. The Exorcist on repeat for weeks to commit the dialogue to memory: 15 years later, nothing remains. A vacation’s useless exercise. The crisis of our 40s at 22. • The weeds grow when we’re not watching them. Years accumulate while we worry about the weeds. Learning this took longer than we would have liked. • “See you tomorrow.” “If that’s God’s will,” she corrects me. • From the sun, surpassed again by rotation and refraction, a few minutes of orange light are left flattering the silhouettes of the park’s elderly, unmoving. This is how it is or this is how I see it through the extenuating filter of 10mg of Klonopin. • The fog of the drug, low-impact anecdotes and scenes from badly dubbed films. At that hour of the morning when the transvestites begin to grow a beard. • Vices explain the glassy stare of someone who saw someone else ironing the old bills first on the cleared section of a table cluttered with stolen appliances to later, meticulously, restore each one with Scotch tape. • Jorge (the gardener) is weeding. “See you tomorrow.” “God be with you.” • Parents’ house a gluttonous Sunday (pants unbuttoned), every idea is a capital sin on the sofa in front of the TV. They show the movie about someone with the heart of a baboon or that’s what he’d been tricked into believing since he was a child: the weak muscle substituted by a fantasy. • Succumbing to the interruption, he writes this: “Above the bar where joy had been they built a cathedral out of everything that doesn’t belong to me.” • Succumbing to the interruption, he recites this: “Kyrie, rex genitor ingenite, vera essentia, eleyson.” • Statistic: “I have photographs that used to be ours.” A weak heart. No fantasy. • Years and years, hours and hours dedicated to exercising the brain which responds solely to the superficial. An autonomous organ dictates the heart’s — not at all metaphorical — ache. • In my head there’s a homunculus who skips stones, also a cripple who drags his dead leg through the sand of the Pacific and the trail that he’s leaving behind looks like the handwriting of someone who’s hurt you, and the waves come and the waves erase it. • Conversations you can’t participate in. Piles of overdue books. Keychains without working flashlights. The line of ants looks like a crack in the wall. To write on one’s own forearm with the sharp edge of a bitten-off fingernail. Supermarket: rice, mustard, toothpaste, Scotch tape, Tylenol. Jorge (the gardener): 224-5678. Supermarket: salt. Conversations you can’t participate in. • Off-center photographs in front of equestrian monuments. León Cortés’s arm, the shadow of León Cortés’s arm, cast on our 30-year-old biology. Apart from the extras behind us, everything looks like a Photoshopped montage. • The children of the Second Republic reproduced without thinking, fed those who shave heads and chests and armpits. Secretly they know it’s Independence Day, August 2nd. • Every four months, like an auditor, his mother asks if he is an addict. • May God keep you, she thinks. Bless, she says. • Out-of-focus photographs, photographs of people who consume anxiolytics rolled-up in a candy wrapper while they watch badly dubbed films. A cinema in the suburbs, one afternoon, a screening for the unemployed. • I have these photographs that used to be ours. If we superimpose the faces, Linda Blair appears, that transvestite appears, the one we’ve known since elementary school. • In place of the heart, a stone in the shape of La Virgen Criolla who liberated us from the Spanish, from your mother, from your brothers, from obesity, from understanding the mystery of the Trinity. • On the coast of the Pacific we’d watch the fire attentively as if it were an intelligent TV. The glitter of gel in your hair was a host of mortal stars, diminutive, extinguishing themselves. • It could be worse. This is how we arrive at our 40s. By the grace of God, the fog will soon disperse, so that we can take a photograph of the group, of the country, so that we can begin again where the cripple left off. • Off-center photographs every four months, damaged bills in a pants pocket, the sun as seen from a flat planet, the parakeets that month when we lowered our arms believing we were raising them. Translated from the Spanish

I am the type to go to bed with my feet dirty A man calling from a balcony is not to be trusted In 1988, the nation sings a song I can’t understand but I sing it 
because everyone looks at me like a thief and no one likes a thief Algae gather in plastic cups along the Jersey Shore The dull prongs of a fork still count as a weapon I gather plastic cups along the shore and shake them out to use for tea, juice, a home for my toothbrush The pledge of allegiance is a building ledge, an alleged crime, a leg crossed over another leg, a plea gone askew, a glance shared in a room with someone else who looks like you Hundreds of toxic wild boars are roaming across northern Japan and it would be a mistake to identify with them In 1960, my grandmother holds no knife in no tall wheat When washing her feet, my grandmother tells me she spent decades without shoes, wonders if the mud misses her When we look at each other, we also look away, knowingly I am a good daughter and I can repeat this indefinitely without 
taking a breath Often, I call out to myself just to hear an echo, to hear something moving in the walls like a healthy family of rats My mother has been told, repeatedly: “You cannot walk here” Here is a white stone, a white fence, a white seagull, a white jug of milk, a white candle, a white duvet, a white patio, a white bar of soap to wash your mouth out Sometimes I dream in Cantonese and I have no idea what is being said You grow to love what you create, pouring out of your mouth In 1988, my father sees his reflection in the rearview mirror and identifies with the blood moon lighting his way to Atlantic City From a balcony, a man yells at me: “You need some white dick” and I turn into a boar 我 在 广 东 做 梦 My father disappears for weeks and my mother keeps weeding the garden, pulling cigarettes from the splintering tomatoes I will devour I study asymptotes for months and dream in curves — almost but never touching My mother writes in her English diary for night school: “I hate him I hate him I hate him I hate him I” and her ESL teacher only gives her a check, so I give her a check plus To be a good daughter means to carry everything with you at all times, the luggage of the past lifted to the mouth When we look at each other, my mother laughs like an overripe tomato on a windowsill In 1989, I spent months assembling a puzzle map of the United States of America and the teacher said, “Good job, Jane” and then louder and slower like a drowning sloth: “Gooooood jooooob, Jane” and I did not touch a single piece Bloody drunk and a blood moon, my father fights with another gambler and jabs at his arm with a dull fork and they both laugh celestially 你 是 一 只 美 丽 的 野 猪 During elementary school, I did not say a single word, not even when called on, and thus the teachers and administrators 
decided I could not speak English because they looked at me Mao Zedong explains math: “In geometry, I just drew a picture of an egg — that was enough geometry for me” My grandfather was jailed by the Red Army sometime between 1966 and 1976 and my mother says: “I saw him cry when I tried to visit. He wanted to eat the bao I made for him” Algae gather, gleaming like jewels, on the head of my 5th grade betta fish Counterrevolutionaries during the Cultural Revolution are likened to “finding a bone inside an egg” I was born, healthy, in the year of the rat The man on the balcony invests in a foldable set of two chairs and one table in eggshell white — mold resistant, perfect for outdoor use 你 不 敢 看 我 I was ten when I willed a rock to fall off a ledge, just by staring at it long enough

Even city planning. Yesterday, for example, with its unexpected view of posterity draped loosely between high-rises — unlike the composed street raised to stoop level like a stroller. No moon but clearly under some pressure to form one in quick stages, while being careful to avoid what intervenes with commas, speech tags, etc. Architraves pre-everything. So that time, or what’s left of it, prior to displaying its secret life (which wasn’t so secret to begin with) waves everyone and everything away, including the burnished sills and their plants lithographed with evening plus the host of secondary qualities that rush in on the least pretext, a new unit of space, some jazz below, mouths to feed ... wrinkles alchemy prints on studious foreheads. Or indeterminacy. What did Rimbaud know about ageing anyway? — More than you think. Leaving (you might say) a colorful flag without a flagpole, the parade route all but painted over like the history of unopposed takeovers and the real wrinkle is that nothing is there for the taking no matter how it appears. Shuffling off to Buffalo or wherever they go to fill the intemperate, intermediate needs, while the wisps of grass that inevitably push up between cracks look digital and the buses squeeze their passengers to left and right like shifts in basic economic priorities. Have I mentioned noodling, as opposed to “raptures of attention”? The effect without a cause — unless you’re one of those who find that notion empty of meaning — not only in connection to instrumental music (“I wasn’t playing anything I was just noodling”) but phenomena in general, potential as well as kinetic, from Y. Zowl singing “to a small guitar” to our near-absorption in textures, weathers, (invasive) ellipses, sublimation, etc.? To sum up: it’s not that the telegram to Elizabeth Bishop was 
undelivered but that the dead — if not busy licking their wounds — are absorbed with themselves, as we must appear to the perceptive hawks. Dark gray, dark green, beet red all over, but also (hence the notion of collateral damage when it applies) thickness tout court.

You will buy your life as a series of "experiences" to which you will belong. Have a good flight. •

The grocery had provided him with boxes of rotten lettuce He was loading them onto a yellow pick-up truck He was a frail white man and wore a plaid woolen shirt and frayed dungarees I was sitting in a gray chevrolet rent-a-dent “I have eight adult geese and twenty-six ducks,” he said and i said “I’ll bet you have a big management problem,” and he said “They’re no trouble at all. My wife raised two of them in the house. When she goes near their pen the geese waddle towards her and nibble the lettuce out of her hand” “I'd never think of killing them” he said “They keep me out of the bars”

All afternoon I walk behind the mower, Imagining, though paradoxically, That even though the grass is getting lower, What I have cut is like a rising sea; The parts I haven’t cut, with every pass, Resemble real geography, a map, A shrinking island continent of grass Where shoreline vanishes with every lap. At last, the noise and smell of gasoline Dispel my dream. What sea? Peninsulas? They were the lands my inner child had seen, Their little Yucatáns and Floridas. But when I’m finished, and Yard goes back to Lawn, I can’t help thinking that a world is gone.

On village green whose smooth and well-worn sod, Cross pathed, with many a gossip’s foot is trod; By cottage door where playful children run, And cats and curs sit basking in the sun; Where o’er an earthen seat the thorn is bent, Cross-armed and back to wall poor William leant His bonnet all awry, his gathered brow, His hanging lip and lengthened visage show A mind but ill at ease. With motions strange His listless limbs their wayward postures change; While many a crooked line and curious maze With clouted shoon he on the sand portrays. At length the half-chewed straw fell from his mouth, And to himself low spoke the moody youth. ‘How simple is the lad and reft of skill, Who thinks with love to fix a woman’s will: Who every Sunday morn, to please her sight, Knots up his neckcloth gay and hosen white; Who for her pleasure keeps his pockets bare, And half his wages spends on pedlar’s ware; When every niggard clown or dotard old, Who hides in secret nooks his oft-told gold, Whose field or orchard tempts, with all her pride, At little cost may win her for his bride! While all the meed her silly lover gains, Is but the neighbours’ jeering for his pains. On Sunday last, when Susan’s banns were read, And I astonished sat with hanging head, Cold grew my shrinking frame, and loose my knee, While every neighbour’s eye was fixed on me. Ah Sue! when last we worked at Hodge’s hay, And still at me you mocked in wanton play — When last at fair, well pleased by chapman’s stand, You took the new-bought fairing from my hand — When at old Hobb’s you sung that song so gay, ‘Sweet William,’ still the burthen of the lay, — I little thought, alas! the lots were cast, That thou shouldst be another’s bride at last; And had, when last we tripped it on the green, And laughed at stiff-backed Rob, small thought I ween, Ere yet another scanty month was flown To see thee wedded to the hateful clown. Ay, lucky churl! more gold thy pockets line, But did these shapely limbs resemble thine, I’d stay at home and tend the household gear, Nor on the green with other lads appear. Ay, lucky churl! no store thy cottage lacks, And round thy barn thick stand the sheltered stacks. But did such features coarse my visage grace, I’d never budge the bonnet from my face. Yet let it be; it shall not break my ease, He best deserves who doth the maiden please. Such silly cause no more shall give me pain, Nor ever maiden cross my rest again. Such grizzled suitors with their taste agree, And the black fiend may take them all for me!’ Now through the village rose confused sounds, Hoarse lads, and children shrill, and yelping hounds. Straight every housewife at her door is seen, And pausing hedgers on their mattocks lean. At every narrow lane and alley’s mouth Loud-laughing lasses stand, and joking youth. A bridal band tricked out in colours gay, With minstrels blithe before to cheer the way, From clouds of curling dust that onward fly, In rural splendour break upon the eye. As in their way they hold so gaily on, Caps, beads, and buttons, glancing in the sun, Each village wag with eye of roguish cast, Some maiden jogs and vents the ready jest; While village toasts the passing belles deride, And sober matrons marvel at their pride. But William, head erect, with settled brow, In sullen silence viewed the passing show; And oft he scratched his pate with careless grace, And scorned to pull the bonnet o’er his face; But did with steady look unaltered wait, Till hindmost man had passed the churchyard gate, Then turned him to his cot with visage flat, Where honest Lightfoot on the threshold sat. Up leaped the kindly beast his hand to lick, And for his pains received an angry kick. Loud shuts the door with harsh and thundering din; The echoes round their circling course begin, From cot to cot, church tower, and rocky dell, It grows amain with wide progressive swell, And Lightfoot joins the coil with long and piteous yell.

Sprawling like some small group of picnickers, They're propped among the shadows of the trees, Though one seems drunk, spread-eagled. Nothing stirs Except the flies that clog their cavities. A red cleft rules the parting of that head. You stretch a little and slide out of bed. Acres of debris are in sodden flood About the ruined village, which concedes In blackened matchwood to the tide of mud Its smoking households. Rising from the weeds, Arms reach up stiffly, as for an embrace. Out of the mirror you observe your face While sunlight offers all that you desire. The Aztecs, to appease your counterparts, Would hook still-living bodies from the fire, Hack out and hold aloft the pulsing hearts, Drenching the steps with blood, so they might give Those idle brutes each day a day to live. You have today. Stark-eyed and hollow-faced, Her rigid ribcage almost bursting through The skin, a girl sits in a land laid waste And stares out blankly. So then, it is you— The thought had not occurred to you before— It's you, Huitzilopochtli, God of War.

No other man, unless it was Doc Hill, Did more for people in this town than l. And all the weak, the halt, the improvident And those who could not pay flocked to me. I was good-hearted, easy Doctor Meyers. I was healthy, happy, in comfortable fortune, Blest with a congenial mate, my children raised, All wedded, doing well in the world. And then one night, Minerva, the poetess, Came to me in her trouble, crying. I tried to help her out—she died— They indicted me, the newspapers disgraced me, My wife perished of a broken heart. And pneumonia finished me.