536 Philosophy poems

1. Even the pole bean tendrils sought out and gripped their frames within six hours of my setting them. One of the things that is breaking my heart is that I can’t trust language to express any thanks. My pole beans, my honeybees, my coyotes, my dog, all my good horses. 2. The black mare I shouldn’t have bought and bought, and once I had, should have shipped, bucked me, too, the first time I got up. But God she was a beauty. I thought if I just rode her I could ride her down. Her name was Sara and we kept it at that. All she wanted to do was run. Ears back, flat out, nose pushed into the next life. I wanted her to learn to walk. 3. After about a year of chop I turned her uphill on a good gravel road and said, “OK, you bitch, you want to run?” I let go her head and gave her the steel. I’d never been on a horse so fast. I’ve never been on one since. So fast you couldn’t count the beats in the rhythm of her gait. Suicidal. But when, after some miles, she started to flag, I said, “I thought you wanted to run,” and dug her out again. 4. The pole bean tendrils sought their frames within six hours of my setting them. They broke my heart. They gripped. 5. A patch of sunlight mottled the shade. Whether she never saw the root that snaked through the shadow or was just too far in front of herself, I’ll never know. She stumbled and fell. First on her knees then over. We rasped together down the gravel road, black mare on top of me. We rasped to a halt. She jumped to her feet. She stared at me. I could see the bone in both her knees. Ribbons of hide hanging. Blood like volunteer firemen beginning to rise to the occasion. 6. Ten years later, today, I’m riding her. I keep her reined in most of the time. She tosses her head, snaps tie-downs. She dances and whirls, doubles under and rears incessantly. She makes me the butt of ridicule: “So, uh, Jim, how old is that mare?” “She must be twenty now.” “Don’t you think it’s time she was broke?” Every once in a while I let her run and break my heart. Anyone watching stops breathing. 7. If I ever get to heaven and know who I am, I’d like to over- hear my daughter tell a story to her children. “Sometimes my dad used to ride this black mare...”

To keep from ending The story does everything it can, Careful not to overvalue Perfection or undervalue Perfect chance, As I am careful not to do in telling. By now a lot has happened: Bridges under the water, No time outs, Sinewy voices from under the earth Braiding and going straight up In a faint line. I modify to simplify, Complicate to clarify. If you want to know your faults, marry. If you want to know your virtues, die. Then the heroine, Who resembles you in certain particulars, Precipitates the suicide Of the author, wretchedly obscure, Of that slim but turgid volume, By letting slip: Real events don't have endings, Only the stories about them do.

A straight rain is rare and doors have suspicions and I hold that names begin histories and that the last century was a cruel one. I am pretending to be a truck in Mexico. I am a woman with a long neck and a good burden and I waddle efficiently. Activity never sleeps and no tale of crumbling cliffs can be a short one. I have to shift weight favorably. Happiness can’t be settled. I brush my left knee twice, my right once, my left twice again and in that way advance. The alphabet and the cello can represent horses but I can only pretend to be a dog slurping pudding. After the 55 minutes it takes to finish my legs tremble. All is forgiven. Yesterday is going the way of tomorrow indirectly and the heat of the sun is inadequate at this depth. I see the moon. The verbs ought and can lack infinity and somewhere between 1957 when the heat of the dry sun naughtily struck me and now when my secrets combine in the new order of cold rains and night winds a lot has happened. Long phrases are made up of short phrases that bear everything “in vain” or “all in fun” “for your sake” and “step by step” precisely. I too can spring.

Tremendous orange things are happening somewhere. I lay a wooden stick for stirring on the white note on the desk. I lay a stain on the clean note. Somewhere things are happening. Marvelous orange and purple things. Flooding rivers at dusk, wheels threading roads in the desert. Strangers. Strangers. Sea. Somewhere you are lying in a white bed. The clock on your thigh is ticking. Somewhere a human form is being lifted from the ground. Somewhere, yes, and I am counting. The clean note with its numbers has changed. I will remember. You are a location, with a bed. The road ends somewhere in the flooding river at dusk. Why here, strangers. A cartwheel in the stow hold of a ship. A stranger who wheels it on the ice. Somewhere the ship has frozen. The ship has frozen in the ice. A frozen form. The ship cannot be lifted from the purple sky at dusk. Stain in the somewhere. You are lying in a white bed. Why here is the river. On the thigh. Remember what we did with clocks. Orange and purple. Lovely trees in the frozen sky. Holding somewhere and threading thighs. Strangers. I lay a stain on the white bed. Remembering what tremendous purple things we did. The mind ends every thing stirring. Somewhere the ship is being lifted from the desert. Marvelous. You will change from the river location to the sea. Somewhere, things are happening. You are lying in the white bed beside the sea with coffee. I am lying in the white bed. Tremendous strangers. Blind roads in the sea.

It’s the last day, but I’m keeping the news to myself. If yesterday it made sense for letter carriers To carry letters from door to door, The job still ought to be worth doing. Why tell what I know and risk a walkout? Let firefighters race to the last fire. Let platoons of police set up their last lines So the factions that come to the demonstration Do battle only in words and gestures. The day is different, but only for me, Knowing as I do that it offers the last chance For a cautious investor to resist his nature enough To back a grocery in a battered district, And the last chance for the would-be grocers To open a bottle of good champagne In the kitchen of the friend who’s led them Through the small-print maze of the application. And now they’re toasting the months to come Scheduled to move the project along From drawing blueprints to cutting ribbons. Shall I tell them their expectations are dreams If the dreams impart to the day contour and substance? Though silent, I’m rooting for them to let the day Expand to include the days to be denied them. And I hope that the friend who’s pouring A final round in his kitchen isn’t disturbed As his small apartment fills with the sound Of squeaking from across the hall, though yesterday He banged on his neighbor's door for quiet. It’s his last chance to endorse a woman Bent on learning from scratch to play the viola, To respect her for finding an hour a day for practice, As if raising two sons alone And teaching civics at a high school Not renowned for civility weren't enough. Should I sit on a stone and lament That the day is her last if it still contains, Scrolled up within it, the years she'll need To master the art of voicing feelings Not now expressed, at home or in class, About the distance between the world She’d like to inhabit and the world she does? Some other prophet, convinced the future Depends on the flow of time to give it substance, May decide to speak out. I’m keeping silent As one of her sons sits at his desk Dividing a page into reasons for leaving home And reasons for staying. Now on this last day It seems that home is best defined as any region On earth that has much to teach him, And now as the region fit to receive the most Of whatever he’ll have to offer After he learns where his talents lie.

You and I inhabit thresholds, clinging to neither here nor there, and to and: this is a threshold of no relief, of interrogative light and obviated shadows, of questions flattened between clapboard slides, in laboratories of hanging frames—in a potential frame, the next moment slumps beneath the shadow of the overhang. They call it earthquake weather, a day like this, of reflected light and leveling heat of no relief, of corners around which and angles of incidence jellied in consommé, molded in amber lunches of tea and impossible: no incidents or tension, no reflection. No striations: rather, bangle, a broken shoelace and what are we going to do about that hair? We were in a boat. You were navigating and I was tending the lines, which flew from my hands, flapping like live wires on the wind. You watched the shadow of our sail on the water through the light reflected in your face, conducted a depth sounding: You went under, but not overboard, swam away to plot reliefs of ocean floors. It is far too shallow here to die. for Chip Madden

That which installs itself in the mind embraces sound Rebounding, rounding the fecund earth Birth, as in what is not, as in one makes one, is a mighty absence to understand (and there are those who fail to get their lessons done) Dun is the color of submission Unfledged, she leafs through what has been nothing never Never to be what she is/ or could /or hope to be Bewitched by dictions (fictions) on the surface — Face naming that which she must save, polished like an apple — Apple of the eye,amour of town and street, apple of the cheek Eaten with a dab of honey for a sweet year Ear to who am I in the suddenly-arriving what-comes-next Next to being, next to delivery, next to undergone Gone parenthetical but now revived as her eye Spies the sudden trespass of his unexpected welcome — Succumbing, coming unto him in full sun this morning Mourning what she need not beguile or lie beside

Simplicity so graven hurts the sense. The monumental and the simple break And the great tablets shatter down in deed. Every year the quick particular jig Of unresolved event moves in the mind, And there's the trick simplicity has to win.

So many gods! They’re like books—you can’t read everything, you never know anything. Happy the man who knows but one god, and keeps him a secret. Every day I have different beliefs— Sometimes in the same day I have different beliefs— And I wish I were the child now crossing The view from my window of the street below. He’s eating a cheap pastry (he’s poor) without efficient or final cause, An animal uselessly raised above the other vertebrates, And through his teeth he sings a ribald show tune . . . Yes, there are many gods, But I’d give anything to the one who’d take that child out of my sight. March 9, 1930

So they stood Upon ladders With pruning hooks Backs to the king Who took his leave Of gardening This morning I am forlorn As he was then No one born After the war Remembers when