153 Sorrow and grieving poems

I sit with my railroad face and ask God to forgive me for being a straight line toward the dead who were buried with their poor clothes in the Arizona desert of iron borders. This way of waving to the embers of the past, not apologzing for carrying torn rosaries inside my pockets where beads of worry became fossilized insects whose dry husks I kept since a child. Faces adopted me from boys who hated their parents. I was told not to repeat this, reminded by the priest who unmasked himself. I was told there was a great horror down the hallway of the smelly Catholic school. Once, my friend Joey jumped off the second floor window and flattened his brains over the asphalt yard. I see a hibiscus blossom. It is a bright yellow flower that lasts one day. Its shape brings tears, saves me from the hummingbird that dots the air with patterns resembling an alphabet too familiar to smell like a railroad worker. I love heaven when I admit the spikes and the railroad ties came from the labor of fate and not the labor of love. The tracks are my cross. The tiny car is full of sweating men. They look into the eye of the sun, hold their hammers over their blackened heads. If staring grows in the common search, a perfume dots the heart with greed. Silence between the lightning of pounding stakes. Once, I rode the train home to see if the smoke from the speeding engine was going to enter my lungs. I never wore the old, yellow hat of the crew, but returned the shovel and the bag of railroad spikes, thought I saw my grandfather, the foreman, running across the desert in overalls, changing his skin from brown to the black of the scorched engine. I live with my railroad face, its smoothness hammered by sweating crews that knew the line of hot iron was going to end in the west someday. I live with my railroad face and don’t know why the tracks disappear on the horizon. I cross my railroad face and comb my hair.

I saw how beautiful your mansions are — Your lakes and valleys and your peopled plain, But thought of  all that loss with all that gain, And one geography is not enough. One world, one world to loose the spirit in, Will not contain a continental ghost. I have a dream of   islands drunk and lost, Of   cities shining with a ripe decay Where old ships feed about their harbors' knees, — Far, far beyond your small and private seas.

The angels I love bicker over cod guts and snapper spines. They joust for flounder skulls and pick the bones clean, screaming. Their harsh, fine voices break across my town in a language lost to my kind, thoughtless in the clear now of now without death. Christ, walk down streets paved with rain to me and you drown in my choir, my angels beating prayer under wing which is the want I have not loved well. Where did my weather go? Meet me where my hidden weather went, where praise and rain are never spent. "Requiem" is from a sequence titled "Hard Weather Prayers."

for Shanshan The wave of that year flooded the sands on the mirror to be lost is a kind of leaving and the meaning of leaving the instant when all languages are like shadows cast from the west life's only a promise don't grieve for it before the garden was destroyed we had too much time debating the implications of a bird flying as we knocked down midnight's door alone like a match polished into light when childhood's tunnel led to a vein of dubious ore to be lost is a kind of leaving and poetry rectifying life rectifies poetry's echo

An early sadness for the future (as in dreams of myself young and sad) accompanies my departure towards a conventional story: a town of girls a New York City dormitory. And so a trail proceeds from our house on the top of the hill down the back way of former army barracks and past the borrowed church (ours had no tank) where I was baptized reasoning “it must be true” out of the love I had for my mother. And Tony’s house there across the street from it absolutely in the Mexican gully in dreams of which he and I still fight armed enemies he stepped on a land mine in Nam when I remind my brother, twenty years after his face contorts he knows the look of that death a week before he himself dies blood-tinged ruddy-winged, but that’s another dream-site the Needles Cemetery inelegant unbeautiful and dear and dry. See how many loves, how much thus sadness in the future begins to haunt that walk down that hill towards the highway away to the dormitory as I go to New York to sever love’s connections and make the “real ones” generated by actual mating by beauty and clothes the black wool suit with its three button jacket the oddly puffed-sleeved orange sweater and an orange and midnight- blue paisley waistless dress. New trail there, Brett knows my future love though I don’t hitchhikes with him to California years before I catch up to the poets in Iowa City that will be in ’69, my brother hasn’t yet signed up for Nam then when he gives me rattles off a rattler which I keep in my wooden India box I still have until they stink. I can’t keep track of the track there’s nothing but sidetrails of love and sadness so love is all that makes my people act they go to war for love you know, of who and what you are like I was baptized by the cruellest-lipped prissiest-mouthed man in the world for love, but I could just have gone swimming walked back up love’s hill back up at the house you can get to the pool barefoot if you can find enough bush or telephone-pole shadows. We’d all swim together I’d tread water dreaming of the future but a wilder larger eye birdlike distant holds the pool in its pupil anyone’s that too, and hold the enlarging water sad how not be why don’t the smart girls in New York know this why don’t you or I know what we know the eye and the water both enlarge still why don’t smart girls in Paris, yes larger but will never flood the containing eye, but why not and sometimes it does when you or your own are the news.

For Wally Roberts, 1951-1994 Palaces of drift and crystal, the clouds loosen their burden, unworldly flakes so thick the border zones of sea and shore, the boundless zones of air fuse to float their worlds until the spirits congregate, fleet histories yearning into shape. Close my eyes and I’m a vessel. Make it some lucent amphora, Venetian blue, lip circled in faded gold. Can you see the whorls of breath, imperfections, the navel where it was blown from the maker’s pipe, can you see it drawn up from the bay where flakes hiss the instant they become the bay? Part the curtain. The foghorn’s steady, soothing moan—warning, safety, the reeling home. Shipwreck and rescue. Stories within stories— there’s this one of the cottage nestled into dune snowed into pure wave, the bay beyond and its lavish rustle, skirts lifting and falling fringed in foam. But I’m in another season—my friends’ house adrift, Wally’s last spring-into-summer, his bed a raft, cats and dogs clustered and we’re watching television floods, the Mississippi drowning whole cities unfamiliar. How could any form be a vessel adequate to such becoming, the stories unspooled through the skein of months as the virus erased more and more until Wally’s nimbused as these storm clouds, the sudden glowing ladders they let fall? But that’s not the moment I’m conjuring—it’s when my voyager afloat so many months brought back every flood story I carried. Drifting worlds, and Wai Min takes a shape I tell Wally as steady watermarks across the cold bare floor— Chinatown, South Pacific flashing its crimson, neoned waves tranced across Wai Min’s midnight eyes behind black shades, and that voice unraveling past each knocking winter pain. It’s another world I’m telling, Cognac and squalor. The foghorn’s haunting drone blends with that halting monotone, scarlet watermarks, the Sinkiang’s floodtides murky brown, the village become water, swept away. Three days floating on a door, his sister, the grandmother weaving stories endless beneath the waxed umbrella canopy she’s fashioned, stories to soothe the children wrapped in the curtain of her hair, to calm the ghost souls’ blurred lanterns. How rats swam to their raft, soaked cats, spirits she said, ghosts held tranced by the storied murmurous river. I have no spell, simply the foghorn’s song when voices unbodied, drift over water past the low dune this cottage nestles in becoming shape in motion stilled. No boundaries on this point, foghorn singing its come-home incantation over the ruthless currents. And isn’t it so we’re merely vessels given in grace, in mystery, just a little while, our fleet streaked moments? As this day is given, singular, chilly bolts of snow chenilled across the sky, the sea. How to cipher where one life begins and becomes another? Part the curtain and here’s my voyager afloat, gentle sleeper, sweet fish, dancer over water and he’s talking, laughing in that great four-poster bed he could not leave for months, a raft to buoy his furious radiant soul, if I may hazard to say that? Yes, there was laughter, the stories, the shining dogs— gold and black—his company. Voyager afloat so many months, banks of sunflowers he loved spitting their seeds. Tick. Black numerals on the sill. A world can be built anywhere & he spun, letting go. . . . The last time I held him, the last time we spoke, just a whisper—hoarse—that marries now this many-voiced mansion of storm and from him I’ve learned to slip my body, to be the storm governed by the law of bounty given then taken away. Shush and glide. This tide’s running high, its silken muscular tearing ruled by cycles, relentless, the drawn lavish damasks—teal, aquamarine, silvered steel, desire’s tidal forces, such urgent fullness, the elaborate collapse, and withdrawal beyond the drawn curtain that shows the secret desert of bare ruched sand. I’ve learned this, I’ve learned to be the horn calling home the journeyer, saying farewell. And here’s the foghorn’s simple two-note wail, mechanical stark aria that ripples out to shelter all of us— our mortal burden of dreams— adrift in the sea’s restless shouldering.

Ah what avails the sceptred race, Ah what the form divine! What every virtue, every grace! Rose Aylmer, all were thine. Rose Aylmer, whom these wakeful eyes May weep, but never see, A night of memories and of sighs I consecrate to thee.

I am gut sad. I am flirting with the green waves, wandering the sand, feeding reflection into the seaweed foam. That Shaker’s moon is up. Crested by corn-colored stars and traced by those witchy scribblers who read the bone-smoke. No wind at all — no flutter for foxglove or elm. There is a church door. In the time when the people of  my hut lived, there was eating and thinking dished out to the poor and the soul-sick in this place. I am in my remembering. By the frame of  the door is a crooked black bench. It is oily with history of the rumps of sages, and the foot-sore who lingered in the storm. I am bent with weeping. This blue dream chucks the salt from me. I remember the walls god-bright with the king’s theology, the slow chorus of  the low bell, the full hymn of  the byre and field. Pathetic hut. Rain-cracked and wind-straddled. Your walls bare-nubbed by chill flagons of ocean spit. The saints are scattered. The high gable is an ivy tangle. The stink of fox is the only swinging incense. There is no stew for this arriving prodigal, no candled bed. My kin lie under the ground of this place. My shape is sloughed with grief. No more red tree between my thighs. My eyes are milk. Rage my pony. My face has earnt the grim mask. My heart a husky gore. But my hand. My hand reaches through this sour air and touches the splendid darkness of my deliverer. Translated from the Irish

There was a man whom Sorrow named his friend, And he, of his high comrade Sorrow dreaming, Went walking with slow steps along the gleaming And humming sands, where windy surges wend: And he called loudly to the stars to bend From their pale thrones and comfort him, but they Among themselves laugh on and sing alway: And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Cried out,Dim sea, hear my most piteous story! The sea swept on and cried her old cry still, Rolling along in dreams from hill to hill. He fled the persecution of her glory And, in a far-off, gentle valley stopping, Cried all his story to the dewdrops glistening. But naught they heard, for they are always listening, The dewdrops, for the sound of their own dropping. And then the man whom Sorrow named his friend Sought once again the shore, and found a shell, And thought,I will my heavy story tell Till my own words, re-echoing, shall send Their sadness through a hollow, pearly heart; And my own tale again for me shall sing, And my own whispering words be comforting, And lo! my ancient burden may depart. Then he sang softly nigh the pearly rim; But the sad dweller by the sea-ways lone Changed all he sang to inarticulate moan Among her wildering whirls, forgetting him.

Wheel of sorrow, centerless. Voices, sad without cause, slope upward, expiring on grave summits. Mournfulness of muddy playgrounds, raw smell of rubbers and wrapped lunches when little girls stand in a circle singing of windows and of lovers. Hearing them, no one could tell why they sing sadly, but there is in their voices the pathos of all handed-down garments hanging loosely on small bodies.