209 Nostalgia poems

If I had known Two years ago how drear this life should be, And crowd upon itself allstrangely sad, Mayhap another song would burst from out my lips, Overflowing with the happiness of future hopes; Mayhap another throb than that of joy. Have stirred my soul into its inmost depths, If I had known. If I had known, Two years ago the impotence of love, The vainness of a kiss, how barren a caress, Mayhap my soul to higher things have soarn, Nor clung to earthly loves and tender dreams, But ever up aloft into the blue empyrean, And there to master all the world of mind, If I had known.

The sniper at work over the street corner acts. Two girls, breathless after the dash across, radiate heat and bouquets, as when ironing silken delicates. With one, in place of a chignon, goosefleshed Christmas wheat. She explodes, rages, curses the sniper; at the window, seemingly, I'm watching a beautiful storm. From the other, words like a sun-umbrella's flutterings, in the morning, on an Adriatic beach. Now and again, she flicks her head back: just for us. As she well knows: flicked hair sweetens the air. Beauty, always forthcoming, never misses a half-smile. As they well know: making us happy costs them nothing. Those half-smiles saying you aren't just one fact among others—not at all, not for them—even banishing the hex of that fact if any other woman's glacial look had magicked it up. The air smelt strongly of my distant youth when every boulevard led to the end of the world, when life was not yet "threadbare as a proverb." Now they're going, leaving such tenderness in me as engulfs you when looking too long at the heavens into which snowflakes are swarming. So they disappeared chattering, not girls but breezes, blown lightly, surprisingly, through the St. John's heat of siege. The St. John's heat of being.

You were whiny and socially unacceptable even to loud young men whose first criterion for rock and roll was that it strike someone else as awful and repulsive and you told grim stories about such obscure affairs as a man-killing Zamboni and a grudge- laden marathon runner from Zanzibar who knifed a man after finishing sixteenth Each tale sped from you at such anxious rate sarcastic showtunes abject similes feel like a piece of burnt black toast for example threaded on a rusty wire followed up by spitting too much time to think by fusillades from rivetguns by cold and awkward bronze reverberant church bells percussive monotones 4/4 all for the five or six consumers who enjoyed both the impatience of youth and the pissiness of middle age as if you knew you had to get across your warnings against all our lives as fast as practicable before roommate or friend could get up from a couch to turn them off We barely remember you in Minnesota we love our affable Replacements who modeled a more acceptable form of rage who thought of girls and cities boys and beds and homes and cars as flawed but fixable with the right drink right mates and right guitar strings whereas you did not and nothing in your songs resolved except in a certain technical sense as a drill resolves contests between drywall and screw Your second bassist took the stage name Flour your second drummer copied a machine Somebody else in your hometown took credit for every sound you taught them how to use I write about you now since nobody else is likely to and since even appalled too-serious flat compliments like these are better than nothing and because to annoy perseverate and get under everyone's skin beats the hell out of the real worst thing in the world which is to fade into silence entirely which will never happen to The Ice Machine to "Driving the Dynamite Truck" to The Very Long Fuse to Smoker's Paradise such hard sticks thrown in the eyes of any audience that is I should say not until it happens to me

Things weren’t very specific when I was in labor, yet everything was there, suddenly: all that my body had known, even things I’d only been reminded of occasionally, as when a stranger’s scent had reminded me of someone I’d known in the distant past. The few men I’d loved but didn’t marry. The time, living alone in Albuquerque, when I fainted in the kitchen one morning before work and woke up on the floor, covered in coffee. Finally. it was coming. It was all moving forward. Finally, it was all going to pass through me. It was beginning to happen and it was all going to happen in one single night. No more lingering in the adolescent pools of memory, no more giving it a little more time to see if things would get better or worse. No more moving from one place to the next. Finally, my body was all that had ever been given to me, it was all I had, and I sweated through it in layers, so that when, in the end, I was finally standing outside myself and watching, I could see that what brought me into the world was pulling you into the world, and I could see that my body was giving you up and giving you to me, and where in my body there were talents, there were talents, and where there were no talents, there would be scars.

There lies a somnolent lake Under a noiseless sky, Where never the mornings break Nor the evenings die. Mad flakes of colour Whirl on its even face Iridescent and streaked with pallour; And, warding the silent place, The rocks rise sheer and gray From the sedgeless brink to the sky Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day Thro’ a void space and dry. And the hours lag dead in the air With a sense of coming eternity To the heart of the lonely boatman there: That boatman am I, I, in my lonely boat, A waif on the somnolent lake, Watching the colours creep and float With the sinuous track of a snake. Now I lean o’er the side And lazy shades in the water see, Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide Crawled in from the living sea; And next I fix mine eyes, So long that the heart declines, On the changeless face of the open skies Where no star shines; And now to the rocks I turn, To the rocks, around That lie like walls of a circling sun Wherein lie bound The waters that feel my powerless strength And meet my homeless oar Labouring over their ashen length Never to find a shore. But the gleam still skims At times on the somnolent lake, And a light there is that swims With the whirl of a snake; And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air, And dayless the sky, The heart is alive of the boatman there: That boatman am I.

One afternoon of summer rain my hand skimmed a shelf and I found an old florin. Ireland, 1950. We say like or as and the world is a fish minted in silver and alloy, an outing for all the children, an evening in the Sandford cinema, a paper cone of lemonade crystals and say it again so we can see androgyny of angels, edges to a circle, the way the body works against the possible— and no one to tell us, now or ever, why it ends, why it always ends. I am holding two whole shillings of nothing, observing its heaviness, its uselessness. And how in the cool shadow of nowhere a salmon leaps up to find a weir it could not even know was never there.

It's the ragged source of memory, a tarpaper-shingled bungalow whose floors tilt toward the porch, whose back yard ends abruptly in a weedy ravine. Nothing special: a chain of three bedrooms and a long side porch turned parlor where my great-grandfather, Pomp, smoked every evening over the news, a long sunny kitchen where Annie, his wife, measured cornmeal dreaming through the window across the ravine and up to Shelby Hill where she had borne their spirited, high-yellow brood. In the middle bedroom's hard, high antique double bed the ghost of Aunt Jane, the laundress who bought the house in 1872, though I call with all my voices, does not appear. Nor does Pomp's ghost, with whom one of my cousins believes she once had a long and intimate unspoken midnight talk. He told her, though they'd never met, that he loved her; promised her raw widowhood would heal without leaving a scar. The conveniences in an enclosed corner of the slant-floored back side porch were the first indoor plumbing in town. Aunt Jane put them in, incurring the wrath of the woman who lived in the big house next door. Aunt Jane left the house to Annie, whose mother she had known as a slave on the plantation, so Annie and Pomp could move their children into town, down off Shelby Hill. My grandmother, her brother, and five sisters watched their faces change slowly in the oval mirror on the wall outside the door into teachers' faces, golden with respect. Here Geneva, the randy sister, damned their colleges, daubing her quicksilver breasts with gifts of perfume. As much as love, as much as a visit to the grave of a known ancestor, the homeplace moves me not to silence but to righteous, praise Jesus song: Oh, catfish and turnip greens, hot-water cornbread and grits. Oh, musty, much-underlined Bibles; generations lost to be found, to be found.

They are all gone away, The House is shut and still, There is nothing more to say. Through broken walls and gray The winds blow bleak and shrill: They are all gone away. Nor is there one to-day To speak them good or ill: There is nothing more to say. Why is it then we stray Around the sunken sill? They are all gone away, And our poor fancy-play For them is wasted skill: There is nothing more to say. There is ruin and decay In the House on the Hill: They are all gone away, There is nothing more to say.

Even if I still had the clothes I wore, those first twelve years, even if I had the clothes I would take off before my mother climbed the stairs toward me: the glassy Orlon sweater; the cotton dress, under its smocking my breasts-to-be accordion-folded under the skin of my chest; even if I had all the sashes, even if I had all the cotton underwear, like a secret friend, I think I could not get back to how it felt. I study the stability of the spirit — was it almost I who came back out of each punishment, back to a self which had been waiting, for me, in the cooled-off pile of my clothes? As for the condition of being beaten, what was it like: going into a barn, the animals not in stalls, but biting, and shitting, and parts of them on fire? And when my body came out the other side, and I checked myself, 10 fingers, 10 toes, and I checked whatever I had where we were supposed to have a soul, I hardly dared to know what I knew, that though I had been taken down, again, hammer and tongs, valley and range, down to the ground of my being and under that ground, it was possible that in my essence, at the center of my essence, in some tiny chamber my mother could not enter — or did not enter — I had not been changed.

from Sonnets, Second Series XXIX How oft in schoolboy-days, from the school’s sway Have I run forth to Nature as to a friend,— With some pretext of o’erwrought sight, to spend My school-time in green meadows far away! Careless of summoning bell, or clocks that strike, I marked with flowers the minutes of my day: For still the eye that shrank from hated hours, Dazzled with decimal and dividend, Knew each bleached alder-root that plashed across The bubbling brook, and every mass of moss; Could tell the month, too, by the vervain-spike,— How far the ring of purple tiny flowers Had climbed; just starting, may-be, with the May, Half-light, or tapering off at Summer’s end.