10 New year poems

First Architect of the jungle & Author of pastel slums, Patron Saint of rust, You have become too famous to be read. I let the book fall behind me until it becomes A book again. Cloth, thread, & the infinite wood. Don’t worry. Don’t worry. In the future, everyone, simply everyone, Will be hung in effigy. The crepe paper in the high school gym will be Black & pink & feathery, Rainbow trout & a dog’s tongue. In effigy. This, For example, was written in memory of ... But of whom? Brecht gasping for air in the street? Truman dancing alone with his daughter? Goodbye, little century. Goodbye, riderless black horse that trots From one side of  the street to the other, Trying to find its way Out of  the parade. Forgive me for saluting you With a hand still cold, sweating, And resembling, as I hold it up & a heavy sleep Fills it, the body of someone Curled in sleep as the procession passes. Excuse me, but at the end of our complete belief, Which is what you required of us, don’t we deserve A good belly laugh? Don’t we deserve A shout in the street? And this confetti on which our history is being written, Smaller & smaller, less clear every moment, And subject to endless revision? Under the circumstances, & because It can imagine no other life, doesn’t the hand, Held up there for hours, Deserve it? No?No hunh? No.

With what stillness at last you appear in the valley your first sunlight reaching down to touch the tips of a few high leaves that do not stir as though they had not noticed and did not know you at all then the voice of a dove calls from far away in itself to the hush of the morning so this is the sound of you here and now whether or not anyone hears it this is where we have come with our age our knowledge such as it is and our hopes such as they are invisible before us untouched and still possible

I’ve tracked myself from day to day how many steps through a field of snow how many hours have I slept what have I eaten what did I burn calories or cigarettes what birds have poured through Bellefontaine where mausoleums bear the names of Busch and Brown Lemp and Spink on marble white as winter endive when I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies

The dragon is in the street dancing beneath windows pasted with colored squares, past the man who leans into the phone booth’s red pagoda, past crates of doves and roosters veiled until dawn. Fireworks complicate the streets with sulphur as people exchange gold and silver foil, money to appease ghosts who linger, needy even in death. I am almost invisible. Hands could pass through me effortlessly. This is how it is to be so alien that my name falls from me, grows untranslatable as the shop signs, the odors of ginseng and black fungus that idle in the stairwell, the corridor where the doors are blue months ajar. Hands gesture in the smoke, the partial moon of a face. For hours the soft numeric click of mah-jongg tiles drifts down the hallway where languid Mai trails her musk of sex and narcotics. There is no grief in this, only the old year consuming itself, the door knob blazing in my hand beneath the lightbulb’s electric jewel. Between voices and fireworks wind works bricks to dust—hush, hush— no language I want to learn. I can touch the sill worn by hands I’ll never know in this room with its low table where I brew chrysanthemum tea. The sign for Jade Palace sheds green corollas on the floor. It’s dangerous to stand here in the chastening glow, darkening my eyes in the mirror with the gulf of the rest of my life widening away from me, waiting for the man I married to pass beneath the sign of the building, to climb the five flights and say his Chinese name for me. He’ll rise up out of the puzzling streets where men pass bottles of rice liquor, where the new year is liquor, the black bottle the whole district is waiting for, like some benevolent arrest—the moment when men and women turn to each other and dissolve each bad bet, every sly mischance, the dalliance of hands. They turn in lamplight the way I turn now. Wai Min is in the doorway. He brings fish. He brings lotus root. He brings me ghost money.

I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves seated in front of a fireplace, our house made somehow more gracious, and you said “There are stars in your hair”— it was truth I brought down with me to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature, and it is truth, that we came here, I told you, from other planets where we were lords, we were sent here, for some purpose the golden mask I had seen before, that fitted so beautifully over your face, did not return nor did that face of a bull you had acquired amid northern peoples, nomads, the Gobi desert I did not see those tents again, nor the wagons infinitely slow on the infinitely windy plains, so cold, every star in the sky was a different color the sky itself a tangled tapestry, glowing but almost, I could see the planet from which we had come I could not remember (then) what our purpose was but remembered the name Mahakala, in the dawn in the dawn confronted Shiva, the cold light revealed the “mindborn” worlds, as simply that, I watched them propagated, flowing out, or, more simply, one mirror reflecting another. then broke the mirrors, you were no longer in sight nor any purpose, stared at this new blackness the mindborn worlds fled, and the mind turned off: a madness, or a beginning?

Letters swallow themselves in seconds. Notes friends tied to the doorknob, transparent scarlet paper, sizzle like moth wings, marry the air. So much of any year is flammable, lists of vegetables, partial poems. Orange swirling flame of days, so little is a stone. Where there was something and suddenly isn’t, an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space. I begin again with the smallest numbers. Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves, only the things I didn’t do crackle after the blazing dies.

In the shape of this night, in the still fall of snow, Father In all that is cold and tiny, these little birds and children In everything that moves tonight, the trolleys and the lovers, Father In the great hush of country, in the ugly noise of our cities In this deep throw of stars, in those trenches where the dead are, Father In all the wide land waiting, and in the liners out on the black water In all that has been said bravely, in all that is mean anywhere in the world, Father In all that is good and lovely, in every house where sham and hatred are In the name of those who wait, in the sound of angry voices, Father Before the bells ring, before this little point in time has rushed us on Before this clean moment has gone, before this night turns to face tomorrow, Father There is this high singing in the air Forever this sorrowful human face in eternity’s window And there are other bells that we would ring, Father Other bells that we would ring.

New Year’s morning— everything is in blossom! I feel about average. A huge frog and I staring at each other, neither of us moves. This moth saw brightness in a woman’s chamber— burned to a crisp. Asked how old he was the boy in the new kimono stretched out all five fingers. Blossoms at night, like people moved by music Napped half the day; no one punished me! Fiftieth birthday: From now on, It’s all clear profit, every sky. Don’t worry, spiders, I keep house casually. These sea slugs, they just don’t seem Japanese. Hell: Bright autumn moon; pond snails crying in the saucepan.

The Wise Men will unlearn your name. Above your head no star will flame. One weary sound will be the same— the hoarse roar of the gale. The shadows fall from your tired eyes as your lone bedside candle dies, for here the calendar breeds nights till stores of candles fail. What prompts this melancholy key? A long familiar melody. It sounds again. So let it be. Let it sound from this night. Let it sound in my hour of  death— as gratefulness of eyes and lips for that which sometimes makes us lift our gaze to the far sky. You glare in silence at the wall. Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all. It's clear that you are now too old to trust in good Saint Nick; that it's too late for miracles. —But suddenly, lifting your eyes to heaven's light, you realize: your life is a sheer gift.

Every new year i ask god what this one is for i don't always get an answer right away but i ask and i show up and the year unfolds usually with something worth showing up for