78 Loneliness poems

i.  Let's look then at the Desert of Atacama ii. Let's look at our loneliness in the desert So that desolate before these forms the landscape becomes a cross extended over Chile and the loneliness of my form then sees the redemption of the other forms:   my own Redemption in the Desert iii.  Then who would speak of the redemption of my form iv.  Who would tell of the desert's loneliness So that my form begins to touch your form and your form that other form like that until all of Chile is nothing but one form with open arms:   a long form crowned with thorns v.   Then the Cross will be nothing but the opening arms of my form vi.  We will then be the Crown of Thorns in the Desert vii.  Then   nailed form to form   like a Cross extended over Chile   we will have seen forever the Final Solitary Breath of the Desert of Atacama

I went up the hill At moonrise. She swore that she would come By the south way. A dusky hawk Caught up the path In his talons.

In the half-light, I am most at home, my shadow as company. When I feel hot, I push a button to make it stop. I mean this stain on my mind I can’t get out. How human I seem. Like modern man, I traffic in extinction. I have a gift. Like an animal, I sustain. A flock of birds when touched, I scatter. I won’t approach until the back is turned. My heart betrays. I confess: I am afraid. How selfish of me. When there’s no one here, I halve the distance between our bodies infinitesimally. In this long passageway, I pose against the wallpaper, dig my heels in, catch the light. In my vision, the back door opens on a garden that is always in bloom. The dogs are chained so they can’t attack like I know they want to. In the next yard over, honeybees swarm and their sound is huge.

I’ve carved a cave in the mountainside. I’ve drilled for water, stocked provisions to last a lifetime. The walls are smooth. We can live here, love, safe from elements. We’ll invent another love that can’t destroy. We’ll make exquisite reproductions of our selves, immortal on these walls. And when this sea that can’t support us is burned clean, when the first new creatures crawl from it, gasping for water, air, more wondrous and more wild than earth’s first couple, they shall see there were two before them: you and me.

You see them on porches and on lawns down by the lakeside, usually arranged in pairs implying a couple who might sit there and look out at the water or the big shade trees. The trouble is you never see anyone sitting in these forlorn chairs though at one time it must have seemed a good place to stop and do nothing for a while. Sometimes there is a little table between the chairs where no one is resting a glass or placing a book facedown. It might be none of my business, but it might be a good idea one day for everyone who placed those vacant chairs on a veranda or a dock to sit down in them for the sake of remembering whatever it was they thought deserved to be viewed from two chairs side by side with a table in between. The clouds are high and massive that day. The woman looks up from her book. The man takes a sip of his drink. Then there is nothing but the sound of their looking, the lapping of lake water, and a call of one bird then another, cries of joy or warning— it passes the time to wonder which.

P. entered a third space from which he could watch time pass instead of walking to the monastery in the middle of the night. His opaque sexuality derived from the absence of a guarantee that his person would remain intact. He recognized this in himself and we stared at the pylons regressing into the lackluster northeastern woods. The monastery was a display before which he claimed sangfroid a picturesque ruin to which he was conveyed as though by boreal fluid. Everyone loved occasional works like this their allusions to complementary and absent events. Weaving around proliferating drywall I despaired over this desire. P. joined the migrant workforce and grew more disconsolate and distant and drunk in our presence. Our presence was only possible because of advances in technology in a dialectical relationship with their debasement: servers in cold rooms and a recursive void of woodblock chat sounds.

Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat. A turn of the key will expel the world. Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life. In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood. A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore. Modest against a hedge, a spade dreams its beautiful death. “Simple and calm,” nourished on weeds and wind, the image moves, distilling its own memory. Far off, we disappear into the ochre and the gold, the mud-brown and the primordial green. The slightest evidence of life. In the courtyard's silence, the barking of that dog. A shutter, merely, that's banging. Those books stacked in one corner of the room. Everything that, ordinarily, follows its automated course. And there, all at once: the happiness that spreads its billion pinpricks through the body. Evening's voice unreels its argument. Five floors below, the courtyard and its echoes. The barking still, and overhead the footsteps of regret in the maids' rooms. I'll try to have given each thing my word before giving in to sleep. The room breathes deeply the music of a quartet. It's that grave well-being, unexpectedly, you know? Nobody. You may speak. I'm not there. A gesture: the garden diffuses the pale green taste of currants. One remains quiet as long as possible. Another gesture: the sun rips open the scent of the lindens. Childhood leaps over the wall. The miracle would be having something to say. Maybe we could have inhabited that smile, over there, at the other end of the room; or else we could have met at the improbable dawn of memory. Maybe we could have fallen asleep in the twilight of this autumn when the brain is nothing more than oak and leather. But we have only this thin life to place beneath the axe. The crows in the plowed field, black against the field's ochre, gleaming and black amid the smell of moist earth, a smell mixed with the brush and bark and roots that the wind returns as someone somewhere burns them. And then that pile of words that rots with helplessness. In the forest, the sound, dry and brief, of a pebble in a streambed, fallen after patient millennia into the earth's darkness. Just a dry sound and its echo, quickly engulfed by birdcalls. And later, on the path, drops of blood from the trees. A farmer carriers his tools slowly toward the shed. In the atmospheric silence, a woodpecker registers the sound of its life's work. That's all. Some animals, a pile of wood, and the smell of rain, which always calls to mind something that can't quite be reconstructed. Acrid smoke; and then that crackling of the woods in the clearing. A few centimeters above the cut weeds, the tenuous vapor of memory. Between eyelashes, amid the colors of the woods, the colors of weeds, and earth, that sky, that patch of sky, that sky. The courtyard, the wood bench, the sputtering of the fishpond, the smell of humus, the smell of mushroom. Five notes in the rain sketch the presence of a bird. The village, the morning, belong to the birds. Images flow freely through the alleys. Silence full of events: the eyes prey on a shadow. A gull's passing reshapes all the shores of the world. Birdcalls cut through the fog, wet grass: morning. The rectangle of a wall says: “blank,” nothing else. On the horizon, very nearby, a woman dressed in black glides silently across her wide open destiny. Between branches, near the sun, the moon, which opens the night to the night. I sink, gently, and disappear. On the surface, alone, the cry of an owl keeps watch. The stairs, the brass doorknob, the smell of dark corners. The iron bed, the red bedspread. Slow breathing. That song that waits for nothing but our melody. We are of the morning, of the gently sloping hour that comes slowly down from the sun. The old clothes in the corner are tinged with the morning's color, which will have to be worn. The lark's song widens the silence. Deep in the forest, the cuckoo, the woodpecker, the chiaroscuro of ancient musics. Heavy wagons clench their signal-lights toward the heights of the opaque sky. I moved with closed words across the homeland that sleeps me. From this far country, where you respond to me without my hearing a word of yours, without perhaps my words ever reaching you, from this country where perhaps we understand each other, I overhear the most contradictory noises, which veil and deny your voice, and which would like to make me believe that I'm speaking alone.

A single bed. A single room. I sing Of man alone on the skew surface of life. No kith, no kin, no cat, no kid, no wife, No Frigidaire, no furniture, no ring. Yes, but the perfect state of weightlessness Is a vacuum the natural mind abhors: The strait bed straightway magnetizes whores; The bare room, aching, itches to possess. Thus I no sooner shut the tan tin door Behind me than I am at once at home. Will I, nill I, a budget pleasure dome Will rear itself in Suite R-34. A pleasure dome of Klees and Watteaus made, Of chairs and couches from the Fair Exchange, Of leavings from the previous rich and strange Tenant, of fabrics guaranteed to fade. Here I will entertain the young idea Of Cambridge, wounded, winsome, and sardonic; Here I will walk the uttermost euphonic Marches of English, where no lines are clear. Here I will take the interchangeable Parts of ephemerid girls to fit my bed; Here death will first enter my freshman head On a visitor’s passport, putting one tangible Word in my mouth, a capsule for the day When I will be evicted from my home Suite home so full of life and damned to roam Bodiless and without a thing to say. Footnote: Mrs. Circassian An orphan home. But into this eclectic Mass of disasters sails Mrs. Circassian, Maid without parallel, queen beyond question Of household gods, gas and electric. She puts the room right with a basilisk Look, pats it into shape like a pillow; Under her hard hand, the Chinese willow Learns how to live with an abstraction. Risk All and win all is her maiden motto, Which makes mere matter fall into its place, Dress right and form platoons to save its face, And suffers Pollock to lie down with Watteau.

The light here leaves you lonely, fading as does the dusk that takes too long to arrive. By morning the mountain moving a bit closer to the sun. This valley belongs to no one— except birds who name themselves by their songs in the dawn. What good are wishes, if they aren't used up The lamp of your arms. The brightest blue beneath the clouds— We guess at what's next unlike the mountain who knows it in the bones, a music too high to scale. *       *       * The burnt, blurred world where does it end— The wind kicks up the scent from the stables where horseshoes hold not just luck, but beyond. But weight. But a body that itself burns, begs to run. The gondola quits just past the clouds. The telephone poles tall crosses in the road. Let us go each, into the valley— turn ourselves & our hairshirts inside out, let the world itch—for once— *       *       * Black like an eye bruised night brightens by morning, yellow then grey— a memory. What the light was like. All day the heat a heavy, colored coat. I want to lie down like the lamb— down & down till gone— shorn of its wool. The cool of setting & rising in this valley, the canyon between us shoulders our echoes. Moan, & make way. *       *       * The sun's small fury feeds me. Wind dying down. We delay, & dither then are lifted into it, brightness all about— O setting. O the music as we soar is small, yet sating. What you want— Nobody, or nothing fills our short journeying. Above even the birds, winging heavenward, the world is hard to leave behind or land against— must end. I mean to make it. Turning slow beneath our feet, finding sun, seen from above, this world looks like us—mostly salt, dark water. *       *       * It's death there is no cure for life the long disease. If we're lucky. Otherwise, short trip beyond. And below. Noon, growing shadow. I chase the quiet round the house. Soon the sound— wind wills its way against the panes. Welcome the rain. Welcome the moon's squinting into space. The trees bow like priests. The storm lifts up the leaves. Why not sing.

It was a forlorn eve, my descent wintry. In that foreign midnight, I sounded the chanceries of doubt as day drove up in an ordinary yellow cab. To my astonishment, I seemed to be blindfolded but the clock —talk     talk— continuing called me, a voice ever stranger in complaint. With my staff I came to the first step, sanguine indeed, and dressed in a well-cut Western suit —quite the best I saw on anybody during my whole stay in that unstable regime. There were people in plots bowing to creation. Please I protested, I had not come to stay, You will go in said Nobody, all will be quiet. I looked down and could see thousands crowding into the grounds —my     my— and climbed into the burial site. Within the twisted rows of graves, the teeth of under, some spoke of hatred and some of hope. Blind, they wept on command, in wheelchairs, on crutches, waving stumps. It was rather haunting— the gates of shadows, the path unlit, and ahead, also dark, an abandoned fortress. Carried along by the crowd, our way lit by flashlights through dim corridors, I said Citizens, no     no. Ahead, a door opened. I recognized the old council sitting round a table, some in religious collars, the atmosphere a court. Chairing the proceeding, a tall, bearded figure uttered a few words in German, for my benefit. He had lived for a time and remarked that I needed to be dealt with. Listening quietly, I tried to avoid any show of emotion. This clearly displeased him. He seemed to expect me to present my own commentary. I said in reply the following, shaken and uneasy, the slim thread of truth but little help . . .