872 Life poems

A Chant for Boys with Manly Voices (Every line sung one step deeper than the line preceding) Any sky-bird sings, Ring, ring! Any church-chime rings, Dong ding! Any cannon says, Boom bang! Any whirlwind says, Whing whang! The bell-buoy hums and roars, Ding dong! And way down deep, Where fishes throng, By Davy Jones' big deep?sea door, Shaking the ocean's flowery floor, His door-bell booms Dong dong, Dong dong, Deep, deep down, Clang boom, Boom dong.

Still half drunk, after a night at cards, with the grey dawn taking us unaware among our guilty kings and queens, we drove far North in the morning, winners, losers, to a stream in the high hills, to climb up to a place one of us knew, with some vague view of cutting losses or consolidating gains by the old standard appeal to the wilderness, the desert, the empty places of our exile, bringing only the biblical bread and cheese and cigarettes got from a grocer’s on the way, expecting to drink only the clear cold water among the stones, and remember, or forget. Though no one said anything about atonement, there was still some purgatorial idea in all those aching heads and ageing hearts as we climbed the giant stair of the stream, reaching the place around noon. It was as promised, a wonder, with granite walls enclosing ledges, long and flat, of limestone, or, rolling, of lava; within the ledges the water, fast and still, pouring its yellow light, and green, over the tilted slabs of the floor, blackened at shady corners, falling in a foam of crystal to a calm where the waterlight dappled the ledges as they leaned against the sun; big blue dragonflies hovered and darted and dipped a wing, hovered again against the low wind moving over the stream, and shook the flakes of light from their clear wings. This surely was it, was what we had come for, was nature, though it looked like art with its grey fortress walls and laminated benches as in the waiting room of some petrified station. But we believed; and what it was we believed made of the place a paradise for ruined poker players, win or lose, who stripped naked and bathed and dried out on the rocks like gasping trout (the water they drank making them drunk again), lit cigarettes and lay back waiting for nature to say the last word —as though the stones were Memnon stones, which, caught in a certain light, would sing. The silence (and even the noise of the waters was silence) grew pregnant; that is the phrase, grew pregnant; but nothing else did. The mountains brought forth not a mouse, and the rocks, unlike the ones you would expect to find on the slopes of Purgatory or near Helicon, mollified by muses and with a little give to ’em, were modern American rocks, and hard as rocks. Our easy bones groaned, our flesh baked on one side and shuddered on the other; and each man thought bitterly about primitive simplicity and decadence, and how he had been ruined by civilization and forced by circumstances to drink and smoke and sit up all night inspecting those perfectly arbitrary cards until he was broken-winded as a trout on a rock and had no use for the doctrines of Jean Jacques Rousseau, and could no longer afford a savagery whether noble or not; some would never batter that battered copy of Walden again. But all the same, the water, the sunlight, and the wind did something; even the dragonflies did something to the minds full of telephone numbers and flushes, to the flesh sweating bourbon on one side and freezing on the other. And the rocks, the old and tumbling boulders which formed the giant stair of the stream, induced (again) some purgatorial ideas concerning humility, concerning patience and enduring what had to be endured, winning and losing and breaking even; ideas of weathering in whatever weather, being eroded, or broken, or ground down into pebbles by the stream’s necessitous and grave currents. But to these ideas did any purgatory respond? Only this one: that in a world where even the Memnon stones were carved in soap one might at any rate wash with the soap. After a time we talked about the War, about what we had done in the War, and how near some of us had been to being drowned, and burned, and shot, and how many people we knew who had been drowned, or burned, or shot; and would it have been better to have died in the War, the peaceful old War, where we were young? But the mineral peace, or paralysis, of those great stones, the moving stillness of the waters, entered our speech; the ribs and blood of the earth, from which all fables grow, established poetry and truth in us, so that at last one said, “I shall play cards until the day I die,” and another said, “in bourbon whisky are all the vitamins and minerals needed to sustain man’s life,” and still another, “I shall live on smoke until my spirit has been cured of flesh.” Climbing downstream again, on the way home to the lives we had left empty for a day, we noticed, as not before, how of three bridges not one had held the stream, which in its floods had twisted the girders, splintered the boards, hurled boulder on boulder, and had broken into rubble, smashed practically back to nature, the massive masonry of span after span with its indifferent rage; this was a sight that sobered us considerably, and kept us quiet both during the long drive home and after, till it was time to deal the cards.

What are days for? Days are where we live. They come, they wake us Time and time over. They are to be happy in: Where can we live but days? Ah, solving that question Brings the priest and the doctor In their long coats Running over the fields.

It’s brief and bright, dear children; bright and brief. Delight’s the lightning; the long thunder’s grief.

Dear Ra, There are no more cigarettes in this letter. It's all about spray-paint and traffic jams from here on out. Honk if you're epileptic, honk if it's 2:40 p.m., if you love shells. Honk in the name of freedom and fear of the human body. When I say "human body" I mean the kind that tears like lettuce. And when I say "fear" I mean the kind you feel seconds before crashing into a wall. That's the kind of poem this is. The kind raised on excess television violence. All that's left are ads for brotherhood and blowjobs. An ad for 2:42 p.m. A wad of hair. This isn't Marx. I'm not trying to bite the hand that feeds me sour candy. Run down the deer. Rain. Wear a red jacket and pumps. Pave the road back from my bed. I don't own a bed, it must've been the trap I've crept in and out of since I learned how to sleep alone. The Count of Monte Cristo's funeral. God's earlobe. An army of lamb can stop a film but not the violence of handbags. Not 2:43 p.m. Two forty-four pee em. Speak from a babble and a switch. Piss in a telephone booth. Grow a tree. Kidnap a car thief. Talk to him as though you want to be slammed in his trunk like a bag full of rocks. Talk to me in the woods. To my chest. With your fingers. Even if you kick in the gates, nyc is still nyc . My concussion is still a hotel. The guests are staying lukewarm and I'm picking up the tab. Ask me if I have ever wanted to tear out cables, burn up cradles. Interview my architects about hands. Ask an illegal immigrant how to escape from a political cliche. Does one use hammers? What about the moist area? The brutal caress? The spindle? Where does one learn to speak such a broken language? Are you jealous of films about Vietnam? This poem is dedicated to Jean-Luc Godard. This poem is dedicated to the man who put a gun in my gullet. This poem is a pay-phone. Someone has slashed its chords and ripped out its face. This drink is mixed with a plastic fork. This is an invitation to my Halloween party. Come as a key. Come as a metatextuai tear in the metatextual fabric. Listen to my concert through walls that were built to keep the vermin out of my armpits. Shovel. That's all I ask in return for my sonata on gravel. I mean gravel in a dialectic sense. As in, tomorrow dirt will be glamorous. Asphalt will be categorized as a sound. You will be categorized as an outdated method of psychotherapy. Like confession. Or the couch. Or the chair. I will be classified as a sore loser. Last year's winner must have thrown something hard at my head. Something that shattered like a waltz in a bomb raid. It's almost three o'clock. That makes it exactly several thousand miles since I left your town. I left your mice. I left a confusing note for the exterminators. I've been confused when I should have been reborn as a crusade or a hospital of innocents. I've been bored when I should've been screwed. I've been a hungry year.

A car’s backfire rifles the ear with skeleton clatter, the crowd’s walla walla draws near, caterwaul evaporating in thin air. Silence is dead. (Long live silence.) Let’s observe a moment of it, call it what it’s not: splatter of rain that can’t soothe the window’s pane, dog barking up the wrong tree. Which tree, which air apparent is there to hear a word at its worth? Hammer that drums its water-logged warning against the side of the submarine: I’m buried to the hilt like the knife, after it’s thrown, continues to bow to the apple it’s split.

Let it finally be Friday, let me drive downtown before five, park in the one space left open in front and feed the meter the exact change it needs. Let me go into the office, sit and nod, unfold my check on the table and sign. Let the line not be dotted, let it be solid. Let it be my name. Let it be final. Let me pull into the driveway while it is still light. It’s well past five and well into October and they are just about to change the time. Saturday night on the local news they’ll remind us all to Fall Back, but I make it in under the wire. There is still light. There is still time. I am up the back porch steps, under the awning, my hand on the back door lock the realtor left on. Let me remember rightly the numbers he gave me. Let this not be the dream of the high school locker with the Master Lock whose combination you forgot or fumbled, turning too fast, going too far, everything you’d locked up irretrievable, lost. Let the lock fall open, let me leave it on the steps for the realtor to pick up. Let him pull up the flimsy stakes of the sign in the yard that says I can be bought, let him drive away. Let no Master enter through my door. Let the house be a disaster, I don’t care. Let the smoke-framed blanks where another woman’s pictures marked the wall be the story of how my edges caught fire and the ash at last let me see where I stood. Let the cracked kitchen floor make a map to teach me where not to step, how not to fall through and break my very own back. Let the broken window be a way out, the broken door a way in. Let me go to the hardware store and buy the tools to take the chain off the bedroom door, let me paint the bathroom pink without asking, walk naked and unafraid through all my rooms. Let me pick up a broom and sweep nothing under the rug. Let me sweep it all into the light. Let me do it. Let there be time. Let there be light.

Everything stops. A fat man on his way to Baltimore smokes for three hours in the club car. The porter slips out and calls his wife, he has one dime left and he’s almost yelling. Somewhere south of York, she thinks he said. The funeral procession leaves its lights on and out of this pure stubbornness its batteries go dead. The bank robber leans on his horn in desperation while his partner snaps the rubber bands around the money. A band, you can hear it up the river, first like the new heart of the child on your lap, then like an old moon pulsing below your nails, or something softly moving through your arms and throat. Here, press here, not just drums. A clown is throwing caramels at the porch rails, balloons are exploding or sailing up the river. The lucky trees, to be able to stand that close. If we talk too much, we’ll surely miss it. And at the still center of summer it starts; cowboys ride out out of another life, old cars get up from the dead and dance like cripples hired out for a tent meeting. Up and down the sidewalk, the town sucks in its breath like a girl taking short gasps just above her trumpet, or a fire engine’s horn, heaving like a drowned man or a heat wave slapping against the water tower, this afternoon just like a parade. The sore-footed ponies are loaded down with flags and the library float says “Immortal Shakespeare,” says it with carnations and the hides of roses, says it with a jester and a princess wearing wings. And she stutters, but no one cares or can hear her. Except for the man on the unicycle who tips his top hat to the crowd, who swears he will follow her anywhere, who follows the mayor and the city council, who follows the tap dancing class and the Future Farmers, the Lions Club and the Veterans of Foreign Wars; who clasps a carnation between his teeth and sways back and forth like a broken clock. And then things begin again, a car follows the man on the unicycle and suddenly it’s just another car, a pair of dice dangling from the rearview mirror, a woman giving her breast to a child and another child carefully peeling a crayon, then slowly giving the peels to his grandmother, who opens the big brass clasps of her pocketbook and lets the bright curls drop slowly to the bottom like confetti or a boy’s first haircut. Like a first yellow leaf that fell when we weren’t looking. Because it’s summer. Like a smooth yellow pebble that is rubbing and rubbing in the new left boot of the drummer, that someone skimmed on the river exactly at three o’clock. Not out of anger or of boredom this time, but as if it could almost wear wings.

Here in life, they would understand. How could it be otherwise? We had groped too, unwise, till the margin began to give way, at which point all was sullen, or lost, or both. Now it was time, and there was nothing for it. We had a good meal, I and my friend, slurping from the milk pail, grabbing at newer vegetables. Yet life was a desert. Come home, in good faith. You can still decide to. But it wanted warmth. Otherwise ruse and subtlety would become impossible in the few years or hours left to us. “Yes, but . . .” The iconic beggars shuffled off   too. I told you, once a breach emerges it will become a chasm before anyone’s had a chance to waver. A dispute on the far side of town erupts into a war in no time at all, and ends as abruptly. The tendency to heal sweeps all before it, into the arroyo, the mine shaft, into whatever pocket you were contemplating. And the truly lost make up for it. It’s always us that has to pay. I have a suggestion to make: draw the sting out as probingly as you please. Plaster the windows over with wood pulp against the noon gloom proposing its enigmas, its elixirs. Banish truth-telling. That’s the whole point, as I understand it. Each new investigation rebuilds the urgency, like a sand rampart. And further reflection undermines it, causing its eventual collapse. We could see all that from a distance, as on a curving abacus, in urgency mode from day one, but by then dispatches hardly mattered. It was camaraderie, or something like it, that did, poring over us like we were papyri, hoping to find one correct attitude sketched on the gaslit air, night’s friendly takeover.

we had to read the instructions as we sank. In a hand like carded lace.Not nuclear warheads on the sea's floor nor the violet flow over the reactor will outlive this sorrowful rhyme.