48 Morning poems

The morning coffee. I'm not sure why I drink it. Maybe it's the ritual of the cup, the spoon, the hot water, the milk, and the little heap of brown grit, the way they come together to form a nail I can hang the day on. It's something to do between being asleep and being awake. Surely there's something better to do, though, than to drink a cup of instant coffee. Such as meditate? About what? About having a cup of coffee. A cup of coffee whose first drink is too hot and whose last drink is too cool, but whose many in-between drinks are, like Baby Bear's por- ridge, just right. Papa Bear looks disgruntled. He removes his spectacles and swivels his eyes onto the cup that sits before Baby Bear, and then, after a discrete cough, reaches over and picks it up. Baby Bear doesn't understand this disruption of the morning routine. Papa Bear brings the cup close to his face and peers at it intently. The cup shatters in his paw, explodes actually, sending fragments and brown liquid all over the room. In a way it's good that Mama Bear isn't there. Better that she rest in her grave beyond the garden, unaware of what has happened to the world.

Dawn marks the wall a thin flange of off-blue An imagined silence Always an imagined silence The speed at which sleep’s fogged dialogue withers into the present noun-scape This rift valley A volley of seasonal beacons Window where mind finds orbit + All a world can do is appear The window intones A room whose walls warp with sun What’s seen is dreamed We think ourselves here

—for Travis and Vaughan and all the St. Catherine’s Indian School kids dust, leaves twirling whirlpool up off road under wheels undercarriage automotive    winds turning,    lifting giving force to such delicate    particles ends attached in former position to branch soft paper thin petal- like reds and golds much as the mane swings blows back    from higher plane winds    Percheron    gold mane    that red Percheron on the right the north side you’ve seen her in the early morning when it’s snowing she raises her dignity laughing at motorists distressed by ice and Pueblo patrol cars we catch in peripheral focus    signal    turn the halogens off and on on and off    until they code the signal distress signal approaching tribal police traffic trap commuting    the 35 mph racket through Nambe Pojoaque turn    50 Tesuque Bingo/Pull-Tabs long before the lodge turned stone    near Camel Rock before the Congested Area in approach to the “City of the Oldest Catholic Church in North America” we convey these danger signs    to local yokels    perhaps even tourists    if we’re in the mood consideration strange nation neither of us belong though    we do stay in close    proximity to these other    Native peoples very different than where we come from    still the same only sometimes though they know the patrol man he’s their cousin all of theirs they know this whirl these leaves    rising now before our heated grill Chevy 4x    ’91 they know the Percheron she steals the scenery easily with her laughter and turn pitching hoof and tail in mockery    indispensable humor she takes this morning under gray the shade of nickel to cloud the stress enabling me to speak to you of beauty

Apprentice morning come easily now, silver with fog and the breakdowns of neighbors: shouts from up hill where the land curls under vines and under the porches of oaks, where even now wintergreen and inkberry shiver forth streamers of new growth, and the green frogs suck at the dew and sing their bent songs. It is easy to hear my own voice in the liquid contraltos of rage, the vents and accusations that feed fires up the hill. It is all human enough, the yelling, capacious and frank, the doors slamming, cries of betrayal. I too have betrayed, lost my place among the condensations of commitment, dallied. I go among friends who say with neither fear nor fury in their voices that they too don’t know what’s next, that from the studied impactment of their lives they have sallied small lines of proposition, made a few calls. Slight affairs shiver and fail; we go for a walk by the rotunda, where, on the perishable lawn, a band plays Dixieland—speaking, not earnestly, but with steady intent, of the play of choices, the simple chance of another future somewhere else, perhaps a house in the hills above L.A., part-time work for the screen, a few avocado trees. For a while it is as if the hazy play of evening light, the splashes of music, the unbundled oaks surrounding the Square, are enough in themselves to sustain, as if mood is itself sustenance, that our struggle to conceive a continuance is of no more moment than the fuchsia and soft yellow clothes of the tourists. Perhaps it is possible to be gentle no matter what, to seek not restraint but surrender entirely, to turn from the snarling reproach not into the keening dismissal of hope but to whatever bright fluttering is next, the bright fluttering of wisteria petals, a felicitous phrase, fingers touching a face. How else to avoid redemption, or its opposite, which we stopped believing in one day in high school, suddenly startled over a steaming lunch tray by the way the fizzed flowers of a stunted mimosa seemed to beg for release? We realized then we could say whatever we wanted, that the world was no more particular than anything else, it too could be out-argued, confused by refusal or lies, that it was no wonder people were stunned by the eloquent permanence of death. So there is permission, not granted but given, as a forsythia at the edge of the walk, having stolen more light than it can contain, trembles, and the echoes of argument fade into a fluttering over the price of butterscotch floats, and we are dazzled by the gouge of perception, as if there was in fact a word we were waiting to hear, not as completion but as synoptic and inevitable entitlement—the drift of some stranger’s conversation, the memory of a thin mist moored temporarily over the garden, that face we saw from the window on the way to St. Albans: beautiful, indifferent, unequivocably doomed.

Here comes dawn and nothing rosy about her fingers — stove-flame blue and some hand must’ve turned the burner on: the little tongues licking, gradually, the teapot of  us aboil, cooking off a giardia of  stars, the dregs of our night- mares. Who will place his fingers in the nailmarks, come near enough to smell death in its hair? Already we’ve some of us slid back into our bodies, restirring the air our breaths stirred all night — whoever we are while we sleep — and gone about believing we are here. Ambulance sirens assure us, a plum’s sour skin, what’s become of  the poppies, dried all but greenless, etcetera. But the yearling child reaching into the lineaments of  sun lancing between his crib bars — how might this shame us, that they seem to seem graspable to him?

Up early, trying to muffle the sounds of small tasks, grinding, pouring, riffling through yesterday’s attacks or market slump, then changing my mind—what matter the rush to the waiting room or the ring of some later dubious excuse?— having decided to return to bed and finding you curled in the sheet, a dream fluttering your eyelids, still unfallen, still asleep, I thought of the old pilgrim when, among the fixed stars in paradise, he sees Adam suddenly, the first man, there in a flame that hides his body, and when it moves to speak, what is inside seems not free, not happy, but huge and weak, like an animal in a sack. Who had captured him? What did he want to say? I lay down beside you again, not knowing if I’d stay, not knowing where I’d been.

At dawn, down in the streets, from pavement grills, Steam rises like the spent breath of the night. At open windows, curtains stir on sills; There’s caging drawn across a market’s face; An empty crane, at its construction site, Suspends a cable into chasmed space. The roof shows other rooftops, their plateaus Marked with antennas from which lines are tied And strung with water beads or hung with clothes. And here and there a pigeon comes to peck At opaque puddles, its stiff walk supplied By herky-jerky motions of its neck. Downtown, tall buildings surmount a thinning haze. The newest, the world center of a bank, Has sides swept upward from a block-broad base, Obsidian glass, fifty stories tall; Against it hangs a window-washer’s plank, An aerie on a frozen waterfall. Nearer and eastward, past still-sleeping blocks, Crews on the waterfront are changing shifts. Trucks load at warehouses at the foot of docks; A tug out in the bay, gathering speed, With a short hollow blast of puffed smoke, lifts Gulls to a cawing and air-borne stampede. It is as if dawn pliantly compels The city to relax to sounds and shapes, To its diagonals and parallels: Long streets with traffic signals blinking red, Small squares of parks, alleys with fire escapes, Rooftops above which cloudless day is spread. And it’s as if the roofs’ breeze-freshened shelves, Their level surfaces of gravelled tar Where glassy fragments glitter, are themselves A measure of the intermediate worth Of all the stories to the morning star And all the stories to the morning earth.

The t(rain) again this morning, sky always gray, grain cars f(lying) like blackbirds with fieldseed in their bellies. The eight o five carrying g(rain) sings like tribes when they migrated north in summer across the plains following tracks of herds. High water into trees. The lake full of rain. We say it is someone else pushing down on the lake to make it spill over its edge. While we wait the woman earth sings with the tribes, transforms herself into all things. After the train b(rush) burning, the delay of smoke in the car comes after we have passed like sound. Rain hangs fringe from earth woman’s dress. She holds the delay of truth until it comes from our mouths. Coyotes sleep on her lap, birds fly into the b(ranches) of her hair while farther down the road the black snake train wiggles behind her ear.

6:48 a.m., and leaden little jokes about what heroes we are for getting up at this hour. Quiet. The surf and sandpipers running. T minus ten and counting, the sun mounting over Canaveral a swollen coral, a color bright as camera lights. We’re blind- sided by a flash: shot from the unseen launching pad, and so from nowhere, a flame-tipped arrow—no, an airborne pen on fire, its ink a plume of smoke which, even while zooming upward, stays as oddly solid as the braided tail of a tornado, and lingers there as lightning would if it could steal its own thunder. —Which, when it rumbles in, leaves under or within it a million firecrackers going off, a thrill of distant pops and rips in delayed reaction, hitting the beach in fading waves as the last glint of shuttle receives our hands’ eye-shade salute: the giant point of all the fuss soon smaller than a star. Only now does a steady, low sputter above us, a lawn mower cutting a corner of the sky, grow audible. Look, it’s a biplane!— some pilot’s long-planned, funny tribute to wonder’s always-dated orbit and the itch of afterthought. I swat my ankle, bitten by a sand gnat: what the locals call no-see-’ums.

This morning the world’s white face reminds us that life intends to become serious again. And the same loud birds that all summer long annoyed us with their high attitudes and chatter silently line the gibbet of the fence a little stunned, chastened enough. They look as if they’re waiting for things to grow worse, but are watching the house, as if somewhere in their dim memories they recall something about this abandoned garden that could save them. The neighbor’s dog has also learned to wake without exaggeration. And the neighbor himself has made it to his car with less noise, starting the small engine with a kind of reverence. At the window his wife witnesses this bleak tableau, blinking her eyes, silent. I fill the feeders to the top and cart them to the tree, hurrying back inside to leave the morning to these ridiculous birds, who, reminded, find the rough shelters, bow, and then feed.