17 Regret poems

Then I realized I hadn’t secured the boat. Then I realized my friend had lied to me. Then I realized my dog was gone no matter how much I called in the rain. All was change. Then I realized I was surrounded by aliens disguised as orthodontists having a convention at the hotel breakfast bar. Then I could see into the life of things, that systems seek only to reproduce the conditions of their own reproduction. If I had to pick between shadows and essences, I’d pick shadows. They’re better dancers. They always sing their telegrams. Their old gods do not die. Then I realized the very futility was salvation in this greeny entanglement of  breaths. Yeah, as if. Then I realized even when you catch the mechanism, the trick still works. Then I came to in Texas and realized rockabilly would never go away. Then I realized I’d been drugged. We were all chasing nothing which left no choice but to intensify the chase. I came to handcuffed and gagged. I came to intubated and packed in some kind of foam. This too is how ash moves through water. And all this time the side doors unlocked. Then I realized repetition could be an ending. Then I realized repetition could be an ending.

To pass through astonishment and know much too late. And because habit makes us strange, I find myself Searching on a landscape that generates questions Beyond its ability to solve. That dark post Out there might be this poem standing as you would — Lead in the 4th grade play — under theater lights And your shadows that petal around you. And what Should be most memorable isn’t. So I recall Those prolonged moments of silence, incongruous And revealing as metaphor, most frequently. For instance: waiting at the bus stop in Pai in A midmorning the hue of the roadside guardrails That dot the cliff’s side like Morse code. Before leaving With trees (those felled, ones half-painted white, the burnt trunks ...    ) That passed by like the so many phenomena Of our days blurred together into a motion, At times, convincing as a nickelodeon’s, I waited under the thatched roof of the station With other travelers. With each in our common Solitude risen around like that Haydn piece In the tunnel I descended into on my Way out onto Broadway from the 1 train some months Ago, it seemed of Hopper. Star fruit on the ground Discolored, withering, blighted. Three of the town’s Strays hobbled by before midday’s heat stalled the town Like some lost Stephano, Trinculo, and their lamed, Dark sycophant — at least that’s what they were for me. It wasn’t comfort, never comfort, but something else. And when each moment with expectations for more Than it can hold leads to the next, and soon — as then — Expectation fills up the day as does your breath A balloon, the day floats with such care and strange hours. And both pleasure and pain are motions of the soul... Plato wrote — poetry’s banisher, beauty’s guard. 2 My hands grow differently used. While one hand thumbs Pages, the other hand steadies open the book. It’s the other hand that rests on the desk, forearm Paralleled to the table’s edge, all the fingers Except the thumb holding the blank field. One hand’s mole A gnat flattened between pinky and ring finger; The other hand’s palm-side, below the skin enough It’s likely a splinter left for years. Just one hand Fits my Discman, plugged in while watching those around (No news-as-white-noise here to occupy my sight): Kids who bus to school hours away toothpicking Slivers of chili-dappled mango slices in; A triple-sweatered lady palming back her hair In the thick Thai pre-dawn June; the one foreigner Other than us, earphone couched; and her shape, dozed slack, Coat-blanketed, neck against my side. One hand rests. Half a day ago, under a mosquito net, Flush with the desk fan sitting on the rattan floor, One hand kept on the steady act of beckoning Behind the tongue-swelled clit, uncreasing the ridged roof, Almost like the mouth’s roof as it slopes down toward teeth, Like rubbing the dampened cave wall, finger-darkened, As the guide turns his back to us. The other hand Traced its crook — that delta-creased pad set between thumb And fingers, hand’s most fleshy zone — on the torso. The other hand then stilled her hip, mosquito net, Weighted, walling out stitches of ants, from its hook A viscous drape like that through one hand’s two fingers. Oddly, only one hand drums along (the CD: Converge,Jane Doe) as the crowd would rupture outward Into a circle pit — a vortex in reverse — If this were a concert. The other hand just bides Its time. Milton’s clumsy other hand, God’s other Hand that Lessing chose, and that Spaniard’s other hand Riddled useless at Lepanto, a bullet lodged Into that scurvied poet’s chest, the other hand Remembers and betrays. The other hand cries out, Which was Keats’s living one? Neither hand scarred yet, Even after thumb-knuckle tempted a sander In shop class, impulse from imagining too much. One hand’s cushion bears the pencil (my friend whose tasks Are split between his hands — “I eat with my left hand, Punch with the other” — says we whack off with the hand We write). Each hand on different shaded denim thighs, The unclipped nails crude halos of sun-blocking hills. One hand lets forth words; the other hand holds it back. 3 Chased by a three-legged dog to the temple stairs, Past all the fallen star fruit (the veined tips the last To wither, the through-light flesh sun- and bug-eaten), We crossed paths with a one-legged man — wordless sounds, And that permanent wild gaze — crutching down the stairs (Four hundred!) as we stopped to catch a break mid-flight. Our breath would last us a run-through of the temple, And, in the first hallway — him?!, his phatic calls, tics, And unwilled smile facing the morning that just passed, The sun no longer in front of his propped body, But above it, the valley overabundant With the real light that stole our day. The fog too lifted Against my sight. We paused. Having just climbed the hill, We agreed to leave our shoes on despite sandals Stationed on the stoop, and then we turned towards that hall. “Let’s go,” he ends, befriended, prayer Phaedrus-empty. — The driver gases the bus off the parking brakes To idle back out the station; the attendants Scoop up the wood wedges and clatter the door shut; The passengers all shift. In the chapter among The deformed and footless, Zhuangzi ends, arguing For the greatest of men, a man void of feelings: “The Way gave him a face, Heaven gave him a form, Can’t you call him a man?” Yet there are things I love: The sun, you, travel. And back again, the thick fog Parts us from the obliterating Turner sun. Pretty soon, come day, the motorbikes The Rough Guide Says all tourists should try will buzz by those three dogs, All lethargic, the largest too tired to dry-hump, His red tip unsheathing (there’s no neutering here), The black one, bald in spots, wouldn’t even fight it off, The mottled one coiled back like the dog that badgers Bosch’s wayfarer, bandaged, poor bastard, with his gnarled stick, Not looking at us, but rather caught looking back, And above his head a doorway — no, the gallows? — The same one Brueghel’s final peasants romped beneath? My turn now to sleep. I can dab off from my jeans Your drool just reaching my thigh as you do, with care, From our sheets when — yet that stuff, all that stuff of ours Still spots our many beds with different aged salt-rings, Each gasp less a sound than a failure at silence. Before us another strange town, while for others School, home, maybe work, a field, someplace normal, there, Someplace beyond sight from its roadside stop. Abroad A month, toward a year in another country, Anne — Anacrusis: these days I’m lost in, reminded Of my presence as if catching a stranger’s wave To the yet-to-be-seen man behind you as yours. — traveled 2005 / written 2007–2008

I regret the things i didn't say more than the things i said the unsaid piles up like old mail

If I could begin anything I’d say stop asking forgiveness, especially theirs which was always the fault mentioned in your condition. Nettles could be feathers the moment they brush your ankle. At the same time: floods, earthquakes, the various slaveries hunchbacked near the fence to catch your glance. What is it to say that among the hired boats we carried our bodies well, cracked jokes, left the gaps in our lives and not the page? This far to learn the boat does not touch the water! And if this is goodbye, it is a light nowhere near believing and I am happy and it is all right to make a distance of a nearness, to say, ‘Boat, I have left you behind. Boat, I am with you.’

I feel my failure intensely as if it were a vital organ the gods grew from the side of my head. You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer can sleep on that side it's so tender. I wasn't quite faithful enough to carry this sort of weight up the mountain. When I took my vows at nineteen I had no idea that gods were so merciless. Fear makes for good servants and bravery is fraudulent. When I awoke I wasn't awake enough.

After a series of indiscretions a man stumbled homeward, thinking, now that I am going down from my misbehavior I am to be forgiven, because how I acted was not the true self, which I am now returning to. And I am not to be blamed for the past, because I’m to be seen as one redeemed in the present... But when he got to the threshold of his house his house said, go away, I am not at home. Not at home? A house is always at home; where else can it be? said the man. I am not at home to you, said his house. And so the man stumbled away into another series of indiscretions...

No more be grieved at that which thou hast done: Roses have thorns, and silver fountains mud, Clouds and eclipses stain both moon and sun, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. All men make faults, and even I in this, Authórizing thy trespass with compare, Myself corrupting salving thy amiss, Excusing thy sins more than thy sins are: For to thy sensual fault I bring in sense— Thy adverse party is thy advocate— And ‘gainst myself a lawful plea commence. Such civil war is in my love and hate, That I an áccessory needs must be To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me.

Alas, 'tis true I have gone here and there And made myself a motley to the view, Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear, Made old offences of affections new. Most true it is that I have look'd on truth Askance and strangely: but, by all above, These blenches gave my heart another youth, And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love. Now all is done, have what shall have no end! Mine appetite, I never more will grind On newer proof, to try an older friend, A god in love, to whom I am confin'd. Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best, Even to thy pure and most most loving breast.

most of my regrets         have to do with water, light    filtered through shower curtain, your skin          like yellowed paper. i sat on bathroom                  tiles cold like clammy hands i didn’t want to hold and waited for you. i didn’t think to be embarrassed then. neither                           of us could sleep that night.        the floorboards creaked and    only now do i feel guilty about sneaking into bed with you. but that was months ago. in a room         i’ll never see again parts of us have begun to die. they say that every seven years your body replaces      each cell it has ever known. soon i will be new again. some nights in my dorm room i wake up crying and there’s nothing                          humble about it. when moonlight spills across    my bed like ilfosol-3, gets caught in my throat like a soreness, it isn’t because i miss you. rather, the dark room at my old high school where i used tongs to move your picture from one chemical bath to another. in a room i’ll never see again your face develops right in front of me. stop bath, 2014 by Allegra Lockstadt

I was a traveler in my day a business traveler, territorial in the grassy gaps. I sold bonds to clients hungry for bonds in the boundless sales call door to door among “folks.” It was a job I was born with. I had a heavy sample bag, rubber- banded stack of calling cards and leather binder (embossed) opening upon a vista of lamination, obligation rumination. I furnished a nation to the chemical engineers and wives of Schenectady, New York over coffee, over roast beef and piano, a kingdom, a nation, a principality, landlocked state, aspirational acreage spiritual fallout hideout. I showed a picture of my boy cross-legged in front of a backdrop of a glaciated hanging valley deep in the transaction among handshakes and signatures if it came to it This is my boy, I said Come to me. I was a traveler. Later I inspected the nickel mines near Sudbury telling my boy about the endless sheer black subterranean drop in the cage. I was telling the truth when I knew how to, as I had to as sales required, as stewardship permitted, long before disembodiment. I kept a picture of my boy in front of a cardboard tree and treehouse platform tacked to the upholstered partition above my desk. Once I brought him to the office. He stared at himself. “I had a treehouse then,” he said.