209 Nostalgia poems

You find it when you’re tearing up your life, trying to make some sense of the old messes, moving dressers, peering under beds. Almost lost in cat hair and in cobwebs, in dust you vaguely know was once your skin, it shows up, isolated, fragmentary. A tidy little solid. Tractable. Knobbed to be fitted in a lock-step pattern with others. Plastic: red or blue or yellow. Out of the dark, undamaged, there it is, as bright and primary colored and foursquare as the family with two parents and two children who moved in twenty years ago in a dream. It makes no allowances, concedes no failures, admits no knowledge of a little girl who glared through tears, rubbing her slapped cheek. Rigidity is its essential trait. Likely as not, you leave it where it was.

DEVEREUX FARM, NEAR MARBLEHEAD. We sat within the farm-house old, Whose windows, looking o'er the bay, Gave to the sea-breeze damp and cold, An easy entrance, night and day. Not far away we saw the port, The strange, old-fashioned, silent town, The lighthouse, the dismantled fort, The wooden houses, quaint and brown. We sat and talked until the night, Descending, filled the little room; Our faces faded from the sight, Our voices only broke the gloom. We spake of many a vanished scene, Of what we once had thought and said, Of what had been, and might have been, And who was changed, and who was dead; And all that fills the hearts of friends, When first they feel, with secret pain, Their lives thenceforth have separate ends, And never can be one again; The first slight swerving of the heart, That words are powerless to express, And leave it still unsaid in part, Or say it in too great excess. The very tones in which we spake Had something strange, I could but mark; The leaves of memory seemed to make A mournful rustling in the dark. Oft died the words upon our lips, As suddenly, from out the fire Built of the wreck of stranded ships, The flames would leap and then expire. And, as their splendor flashed and failed, We thought of wrecks upon the main, Of ships dismasted, that were hailed And sent no answer back again. The windows, rattling in their frames, The ocean, roaring up the beach, The gusty blast, the bickering flames, All mingled vaguely in our speech; Until they made themselves a part Of fancies floating through the brain, The long-lost ventures of the heart, That send no answers back again. O flames that glowed! O hearts that yearned! They were indeed too much akin, The drift-wood fire without that burned, The thoughts that burned and glowed within.

Maybe a sin, indecent for sure—dope, The storekeeper called it. Everyone agreed That Manuel Lawrence, who drank Through the side of his mouth, squinting And chortling with pleasure, was hooked; Furthermore, Aunt Brenda, Who was so religious that she made Her daughters bathe with their panties on, Had dubbed it “toy likker, fool thing,” And so might I be, holding the bottle Out to the light, watching it bristle. Watching the slow spume of bubbles Die, I asked myself, could it be alive? When they electrocuted Edwin Dockery, He sat there like a steaming, breathing Bolt, the green muscles in his arms Strained at the chair’s black straps, The little finger of his right hand leapt up, But the charge rose, the four minutes And twenty-five hundred volts of his death, Which in another month will be Thirty-five years old. So the drink fizzed With the promise of mixtures to come. There it was. If the hard-shell Baptists of Alabama are good and content That the monster has died, so am I. I swallowed. Sweet darkness, one thing Led to another, the usual life, waking Sometimes lost, dried blood in the ear, Police gabbling in a strange language. How else would I ever gauge How pleasure might end, walking Past midnight in the vague direction Of music. I am never satisfied.

Although I can see him still— The freckled man who goes To a gray place on a hill In gray Connemara clothes At dawn to cast his flies— It's long since I began To call up to the eyes This wise and simple man. All day I'd looked in the face What I had hoped it would be To write for my own race And the reality: The living men that I hate, The dead man that I loved, The craven man in his seat, The insolent unreproved— And no knave brought to book Who has won a drunken cheer— The witty man and his joke Aimed at the commonest ear, The clever man who cries The catch cries of the clown, The beating down of the wise And great Art beaten down. Maybe a twelve-month since Suddenly I began, In scorn of this audience, Imagining a man, And his sun-freckled face And gray Connemara cloth, Climbing up to a place Where stone is dark with froth, And the down turn of his wrist When the flies drop in the stream— A man who does not exist, A man who is but a dream; And cried, “Before I am old I shall have written him one Poem maybe as cold And passionate as the dawn.”

Red and blue plaid, pockets with buttons, my camping shirt is flannel, worn soft, pine smells, campfire, forest moss. I keep it hidden in my bottom drawer— where no one will find it and wash away my memories.

It was the sort of thing given to little girls: sturdy and small, round edged, wooden and light. I stalked the pasture’s rough and waist-high grass for worthy specimens: the belle amid the mass, the star shaming the clouds of slighter, ordinary blooms. The asters curled inside my sweat-damp palms, as if in sleep. Crushed in the parlor’s stifling heat, I pried each shrinking petal back, and turned the screws. But flowers bear no ugly bruise, and even now fall from the brittle page, dried prettily, plucked from memory’s hush.

I lay back on the carpeted bottom step Of the stairwell that like a well extended Darkly up to the window near the ceiling, Up where the Chinaman under the wide-brimmed hat That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held No flower across the sill no one could reach. There was a television on somewhere Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking, Someone was saying. Someone was saying something About a blockade and a quarantine, Who would blink first, lose face, or push the button. A fat man banged a shoe against a desk. The Chinaman however didn’t care. Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers, He was content to be a clot of darkness Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass— The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms, The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled. And everywhere within the light’s slow fall Infinities of particles were falling Into the flowerpot they’d never fill.

In ’29 before the dust storms sandblasted Indianapolis, we believed in the milk company. Milk came in glass bottles. We spread dye-colored butter, now connected to cancer. We worked seven to seven with no overtime pay; pledged allegiance every day, pitied the starving Armenians. One morning in the midst of plenty, there were folks out of context, who were living on nothing. Some slept in shacks on the banks of the river. This phenomenon investors said would pass away. My father worked for the daily paper. He was a union printer; lead slugs and blue smoke. He worked with hot lead at a two-ton machine, in a low-slung seat; a green-billed cap pulled low on his forehead. He gave my mother a dollar a day. You could say we were rich. This was the Jazz Age. All over the country the dispossessed wandered with their hungry children, harassed by the law. When the market broke, bad losers jumped out of windows. It was time to lay an elegant table, as it is now; corporate paradise; the apple before the rot caved in. It was the same worm eating the same fruit. In fact, the same Eden.

London returns in damp, fragmented flurries when I should be doing something else. A scrap of song, a pink scarf, and I’m back to curries and pub food, long, wet walks without a map, bouts of bronchitis, a case of the flu, my halfhearted studies, and brooding thoughts and scanning faces in every bar for you. Those months come down to moments or small plots, like the bum on the Tube, enraged that no one spoke, who raved and spat, the whole car thick with dread, only to ask, won’t someone tell a joke? and this mouse of a woman offered,What’s big and red and sits in the corner? A naughty bus.

after Bernadette Mayer I guess it's too late to live on the farm I guess it's too late to enter the darkened room in which a single light illuminated the artist stripped from the waist down, smeared with blood, stretched and bound to the table I guess it's too late to inhabit a glass-fronted, white, box-like room, dressed in white, against which the menstrual blood was visible I guess it's too late to start farming I guess it's too late to start struggling to remain standing in a transparent plastic cubicle filled with wet clay, repeatedly slipping and falling I guess it's too late to buy 60,000 acres in Marfa I guess it's too late to begin appearing on the subway in stinking clothes during rush hour with balloons attached to her ears, nose, hair and teeth I guess we'll never have an orgiastic Happening I guess we're too old to carry out maintenance activities in public spaces, during public hours I guess we couldn't afford to simulate masturbation while President Josip Broz Tito's motorcade drove by below I guess we're not suited to "I am awake in the place where women die" I guess we'll never have a self-inflicted wound in front of an audience now I guess entering a sex cinema dressed in a black shirt, jeans with the crotch removed, and a machine gun slung over her shoulder is not in the cards now I guess Clive wouldn't make a good photographic montage in which their male and female faces became almost indistinguishable I guess I can't expect we'll ever have a selection of photographs derived from images produced by the beauty industry now I guess I'll have to give up all my dreams of being seen, clothed and unclothed, being systematically measured by two male 'researchers' who record her measurements on a chart and compare them with a set of 'normal' measurements I guess I'll never be waiting for my body to break down, to get ugly We couldn't get tied together by our hair anyways though Allen Ginsberg got one late in life Maybe someday I'll have the foreshortened barrel of a gun pointing toward the viewer I guess joining our hands around the base's perimeter fence into which they weave strands of wool is really out Feeding the pigs and the chickens, walking between miles of rows of crops I guess examining women's working conditions is just too difficult We'll never have a, never-really-a-collective, a group of women who came together to work on a public mural Too much work and still to be poets Who are the simultaneously-the-beneficiary-of-our-cultural-heritage- and-a-victim-of-it-poets Was there ever a poet who had a self-sufficient loss of certainty Flannery O'Connor raised peacocks And Wendell Berry has raised large-scale spirals of rusted industrial materials in incongruous natural and commercial spaces Faulkner may have spent three days in a gallery with a coyote, a little And Robert Frost asked a friend to shoot him at close range with a .22 caliber rifle And someone told me Samuel Beckett lay hidden under a gallery-wide ramp, masturbating while vocalizing into a loudspeaker his fantasies about the visitors walking above him Very few poets are really going to the library carrying a concealed tape recording of loud belches If William Carlos Williams could be a doctor and Charlie Vermont too, If Yves Klein could be an artist, and Jackson Pollock too, Why not a poet who was also dying of lymphoma and making a series of life size photographs, self-portrait watercolors, medical object-sculptures and collages made with the hair she lost during chemotherapy Of course there was Brook Farm And Virgil raised bees Perhaps some poets of the past were overseers of the meticulous chronicle of the feeding and excretory cycles of her son during the first six months of his life I guess poets tend to live more momentarily Than life in her body as the object of her own sculpting activity would allow You could never leave the structures made of wood, rope and concrete blocks assembled to form stocks and racks, to give a reading Or to go to a lecture by Emerson in Concord I don't want to be continuously scrubbing the flesh off of cow bones with a cleaning brush but my mother was right I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing Or on as little as one needs to survive Steadfast as any person's glottis, photographed with a laryngoscope, speaking the following words: "The power of language continues to show its trace for a long time after silence" and fixed as the stars Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly