209 Nostalgia poems

Nobody knows exactly when it fell off the map or what the pressures were on its flooding river. The hedge, the tottering mailbox, were gone. That dimple of light from the bicycle that raised itself to creak at noon across a clattering bridge names my father. His blood silent as a surging wish drags this town lost through my body, a place I can get back to only by hunch and a train whistle that was right on time. But time and trains were never right in Green Springs, West Virginia. What color could map the coal’s grime, shacks shored against the river every March, mail left to rot because no one answered to occupant? Farmers low on sugar cursed the heat and left bad cigars boys would puff back to clouds where they dreamed of girls naked as their hands under outfield flies. Scores were low. There were no springs for the sick. Women lined their walls with the Sears catalog, but the only fur they ever had was a warbled rabbit. To get here think of dirt, think of night leaking, the tick of waterbugs, a train held in Pittsburgh.

On an island the soft hue of memory, moss green, kerosene yellow, drifting, mingling in the Caribbean Sea, a six-year-old named Alfred learns all the words to all the songs on his grandparents’ jukebox, and sings them. To learn the words is not so hard. Many barmaids and teenagers have done as well. But to sing as Alfred sings— how can a giant whale live in the small pool of his chest? How can there be breakers this high, notes crashing at the beach of the throat, and a reef of coral so enormous only the fishes know its size? The grandparents watch. They can’t sing. They don’t know who this voice is, trapped in their grandson’s body. The boy whose parents sent him back to the island to chatter mango-talk and scrap with chickens— three years ago he didn’t know the word “sad”! Now he strings a hundred passionate sentences on a single line. He bangs his fist so they will raise the volume. What will they do together in their old age? It is hard enough keeping yourself alive. And this wild boy, loving nothing but music— he’ll sing all night, hugging the jukebox. When a record pauses, that live second before dropping down, Alfred hugs tighter, arms stretched wide, head pressed on the luminous belly. “Now!” he yells. A half-smile when the needle breathes again. They’ve tried putting him to bed, but he sings in bed. Even in Spanish—and he doesn’t speak Spanish! Sings and screams, wants to go back to the jukebox. O mama I was born with a trumpet in my throat spent all these years tryin’ to cough it up …

No feeding on wisteria. No pitch-burner traipsing In the nettled woods. No milk in metal cylinders, no Buttering. No making small contusions on the page But saying nothing no one has not said before. No milkweed blown across your pony-coat, no burrs. No scent of juniper on your Jacobean mouth. No crush Of ink or injury, no lacerating wish. Extinguish me from this. I was sixteen for twenty years. By September I will be a ghost And flickering in unison with all the other fireflies in Appalachia, Blinking in the swarm of it, and all at once, above And on a bare branch in a shepherd's sky.    No Dove. There is no thou to speak of.

I.“Before the War” “Before the war” means Fresno, a hedged-in house, two dogs in the family. Blackie, the small one, mine, lapped at his insides on the floorboard, on the way to the doctor. Jimmy, my father's shepherd, wouldn't eat after the evacuation. He wouldn't live with another master and pined away, skin and bone. With feelings more than pride, we call him our one-man dog. II. Mud Mud in the barracks— a muddy room, a chamber pot. Mud in the moats around each barracks group. Mud on the shoes trudging to the mess hall. Mud in the swamp where the men chopped wood. Mud on the guts under a loaded wagon— crushed in the mud by the wheel. III.  Desert Songs 1. all that we gathered Because there was little else to do, they led us to the artillery range for shells, all that we gathered, and let us dig among dunes for slugs, when they were through. Because there was little else to do, one of them chased a stray with his tail between his legs and shot him through the head. 2. shells A desert tortoise— something mute and hard— something to decorate a desert Japanese garden: gnarled wood, smooth artillery shells for a border. When a guard smashes one, the shell cracks open and the muscles ooze. 3. it is only natural The pheasant is an Oriental creature, so it is only natural that one should fly into camp and, famished by rations and cans, break out in secret, native dance over a fire, on a black coal stove. 4. song of the 442nd Caged creatures have curious moods. Some of them choose to be turned loose in a group, to take their chances in the open. 5. steers Because a dentist logically drives a butcher truck, I rode with my father to the slaughterhouse on an afternoon. Not hammers, not bullets, could make him close his eyes. 6. he teaches He jerks the eyes from birds, feet from lizards, and punishes ants with the gaze of a glass. And with his sly gaze, his child's face, he teaches what has its place, and must be passed on to others. IV. Song of Chicago When the threat lessened, when we became tame, my father and friends took a train to Chicago for factory work, for packaging bolts. One grew a mustache and called himself Carlos. And they all made a home with those of their own— rats, bedbugs, blacks.

This unfinished business of my childhood this emerald lake from my journey’s other side haunts hierarchies of heavens a palm forest fell overnight to make room for an unwanted garden ever since fevers and swellings turn me into a river the streets were steep winds were running ahead of ships . . . There was indeed the death of birds the moon had passed away. * The morning after his death pursuing him beyond his bitter end his mother came to his grave: she removed his bones out of their pattern and ditched them into mud: women came at night and claimed Rimbaud their own that night there was much thunder      it was awesome * Laurels and lilacs bloom around my head because I stood up to the sun You see     the Colorado River runs between flowered banks I repeat my journeys to seek the happiness that overcame your absence I was happy not to love you anymore until the sunset reached the East and broke my raft apart there were other rivers underground covered with dead flowers it was cold it was cold yes it was cold. * Under a combination of pain and machine-gun fire flowers disappeared they are in the same state of non-being as Emily Dickinson We the dead have conversation in our gardens about our lack of existence. * The gardener is planting blue and white flowers some angel moved in with me to flee the cold temperature on earth are rising but we wear upon us some immovable frost everyone carries his dying as a growing shadow. * I left the morning paper by the coffee cup the heat was 85 like the year and I went to the window to find that flowers had bloomed overnight to replace the bodies felled in the war the enemy had come with fire and ruse to stamp the names of the dead in the gardens of Yohmor It is not because spring is too beautiful that we’ll not write what happens in the dark. * A butterfly came to die between two stones at the foot of the Mountain the mountain shed shadows over it to cover the secret of death. *

I had seven summer jobs between fifteen and twenty-two each one taught me something none of it what the job was supposed to teach what i learned: how to show up how to leave how to get paid

For the Briarcliff High School class of 1986 Just what I needed, Just when the dreams had almost totally receded, The dreams of roles for which I learned no lines and knew no cues, Dreams of pop quizzes with no pants on and no shoes, Just when I understood I was no longer among Those ephemeral immortals, the gauche and pitiable young, Suddenly come phone calls, messages sift out of the air To ask who will be there: Names I haven't given a thought to in a score (A score!) of years, and names I used to think about but don't much anymore, And those I think of all the time and yet Have lost somehow like keys to doors I've closed, and some I have tried to forget— And some who will never arrive at this date Here in the distant future where we wait Still surprised at how We carry with us the omnipresent and ever-changing now. We wince at what we used to wear, Fashion has made ridiculous the high hubris of our hair. Heartbreak, looked at through the wrong end of distance's glasses, Is trivial, and quickly passes, Its purity embarrasses us, its lust, The way we wept because it was unjust. Why should we travel back, who've come so far— We know who we are. How can we be the same As those quaint ancestors we have left behind, who share our name— Why have we inherited their shame?

Yes, your childhood now a legend of fountains — jorge gullén Yes, your childhood, now a legend gone to weeds, still remembers the gray road that set out to cross the desert of the future. And how, always just ahead, gray water glittered, happy to be just a mirage. Who steps off the gray bus at the depot? Sidewalks shudder all the way home. Blinds close their scratchy eyes. Who settles in your old room? Sniffy air sprawls as if it owns the place, and now your teenage secrets have no one to tell. For the spider laying claim to the corner, there is a stickiness to spin, that the living may beg to be wrapped in silk and devoured, leaving not even the flinch from memory.

Todd’s Hardware was dust and a monkey— a real one, on the second floor— and Mrs. Todd there behind the glass cases. We stepped over buckets of nails and lawnmowers to get to the candy counter in the back, and pointed at the red wax lips, and Mary Janes, and straws full of purple sugar. Said goodbye to Mrs. Todd, she white-faced and silent, and walked the streets of Beaver, our teeth sunk hard in the wax, and big red lips worth kissing.

My grandmother said when she was young The grass was so wild and high You couldn’t see a man on horseback. In the fields she made out Three barns, Dark and blown down from the weather Like her husbands. She remembers them in the dark, Cursing the beasts, And how they would leave the bed In the morning, The dead grass of their eyes Stacked against her.