246 Spiritual poems

I stood in a longhouse with a woman who may or may not be Mohawk. Some shift their opinions about her like meteorologists, as if her blood were a storm system tracked in its comings and goings. But the father of her two sons was, without question, Seneca. We knew that, in Haudenosaunee country, a father is to some degree irrelevant, that her own shifting identity would impact her sons’ lives like a gene vulnerable to betrayal, causing certain, terminal conditions. She waited on an elder she called Steam (warning I was not to call the elder woman by that name). Steam (not Steam) would observe the boys, understand their natures, give them their Creator names defining their lives during the next ceremony. I confessed my namelessness, confessed my longhouse- and fluency- deficient community, and confessed that my clan mother, three hours away, did not know me well enough to give me a name, confessed my community followed a more casual ceremony. You find your name after a social misstep, a dubious facial feature, a birth defect. Names offer the name-givers comfort, that your challenge is harder than theirs, no matter the truth. Our names are a convoluted toughening of our skins. My name is not like Steam (no one is forbidden to use it). No one calls me Batman because of my status, my utility belt, my impressive batpole, my agility, my muscles, my profile in spandex, my virtues, but because I wore the cape to an older age than I should have, and could continue to wear it now, as that shit is not going away any time soon. Even kids who only know Christian Bale or Michael Keaton, lurking in latex and leather hood, still think Batman is my name. And this is why I have no memory for when or how you became the Bumblebee, what it means, beyond the literal. You soar in gardens, spend days ensuring growth, and if metaphors are at work here, this one seems true enough to keep you in amber wings, fuzzy yellow rings, black lacquer torso, and sensitive antennae. What metaphor suits the night I left on the Amtrak for Chicago, past 1:00 a.m., while you stood on the platform, watching those cars pull out, the night I wanted to leap from the train, stay? I cannot invent new names for the ways we slow, struggle, attempt to maintain the illusion of futures without measure, defy actuary numbers and because I have gone closer to the light than you have, the story is easier to craft and finesse than it should be. Pollination trails are smaller than those I’m forced to fly in, and lying in Little Rock, Santa Fe, Manhattan, Minneapolis, Seattle, hotel rooms, the ellipse of your name trail winds me home, waiting, dusted in pollen and history.

Unless a grain of wheat goes into the ground and dies, it remains nothing but a grain of wheat. —John 12:24 The ingredients gathered, a few small red tufts of the dream spoor per sheaf of Demeter’s blonde wheat, reaped in mourning, in silence, ground up with the pollen and mixed into white wine and honey. These stored forms of light taken under the ground. Taken by mouth. First those who by birth hold in secret the word; then placed on the tongues of the new ones, into whose ears it is meant to be whispered. Word murdered, forgotten so long ago, placed as a kiss on the lips of the soon-to-be-no-longer breathing who mean to enter death with open eyes, with mouths saying Death, what death? We have no word for it in our country where the bride of a brighter oblivion reigns. Not the purple-haired god but the child queen, the raped girl, come back from the dead hand in hand with the child she conceived there, returned in a resurrected virginity, wind through green wheat. Present-day site of a minor refinery in Christ. Although by the tenth generation already the children of light (“in their dark garments”) had trampled and smashed and generally raped the two thousand years of this precinct and its holy meal, intolerable mirror. Men who’d designed and bowed down to a law derived from the sayings of one who appeared here to say that the law is abolished, it is too late, all that is over with. Men who bungled their way through the next eighteen centuries before finally descending into the earth themselves, and what they found there they used, and we thank you for destroying the destroyers of the world. And here at the end this is as good as any other entrance to the underplace, journey of the fallen leaf back to the branch, to the bees of Eleusis among olive blossoms, untroubled among crimson wildflowers. Four thousand years later: same flowers, same bees.

Sometimes up out of this land a legend begins to move. Is it a coming near of something under love? Love is of the earth only, the surface, a map of roads leading wherever go miles or little bushes nod. Not so the legend under, fixed, inexorable, deep as the darkest mine the thick rocks won't tell. As fire burns the leaf and out of the green appears the vein in the center line and the legend veins under there, So, the world happens twice— once what we see it as; second it legends itself deep, the way it is.

The guardian angel sits in the tree above the black lip of street the man walks down. He calls the man Cargo. The angel sees a pinewood box in place of the man, and the street he walks is a boat, the hull like a coal crater. Somewhere in the real world there is such a boat and box. The angels call these overlays dreams, and believe they crop up because angels can’t sleep but want to — space falls apart when you have unlimited time. • The cargo is rattling in the boat. Maybe it’s just the waves, maybe it’s rats. What’s the difference? Either way: it’s the box. The angel sends the man a happy vision from his past — the time he fed birthday cake to his goldfish after an unsuccessful party. The angel thinks he’s applying lemon oil to the creaky, wounded wood of the box. He knows it’s palliative, but it’s beautiful. • The man reaches the end of the street. He’s a sick man and he starts to ponder death as he often does these days: All of death is right here — the gods, the dark, a moon. Where was I expecting death to take me if everywhere it is is on earth? At life’s close, you’re like the child whose parents step out for a drive — everyone else out on a trip, but the child remains in the familiar bed, feeling old lumps like new in the mattress — the lights off — not sleeping, for who can sleep with the promise of a world beyond the door? • That night the child dreams he’s inside the box. It’s burning hot, the heat coming from bugs and worms raping and devouring one another. He starts the hard work of the imagination, learning to minister to the new dream. Perhaps all that’s needed is a little rain — for everyone to drink and have a bath. Outside: a car humming, somewhere, his mother’s singing.

As you came from the holy land Of Walsingham, Met you not with my true love By the way as you came? “How shall I know your true love, That have met many one, I went to the holy land, That have come, that have gone?” She is neither white, nor brown, But as the heavens fair; There is none hath a form so divine In the earth, or the air. “Such a one did I meet, good sir, Such an angelic face, Who like a queen, like a nymph, did appear By her gait, by her grace.” She hath left me here all alone, All alone, as unknown, Who sometimes did me lead with herself, And me loved as her own. “What’s the cause that she leaves you alone, And a new way doth take, Who loved you once as her own, And her joy did you make?” I have lov’d her all my youth; But now old, as you see, Love likes not the falling fruit From the withered tree. Know that Love is a careless child, And forgets promise past; He is blind, he is deaf when he list, And in faith never fast. His desire is a dureless content, And a trustless joy: He is won with a world of despair, And is lost with a toy. Of womenkind such indeed is the love, Or the word love abus’d, Under which many childish desires And conceits are excus’d. But true love is a durable fire, In the mind ever burning, Never sick, never old, never dead, From itself never turning.

You fools who ask what god is should ask what life is instead. Find a port where lemon trees bloom. Ask about places to drink in the port. Ask about the drinkers. Ask about the lemon trees. Ask and ask until nothing’s left to ask. Translated from the Korean

That bag you packed me when you sent me to the universe— camp after camp I’ve opened it debating whether to unpack— Not yet, not yet— Why did I feel so much in it was dangerous on the playground, too good for everyday, feel those splendid fireworks hazardous to institutions, unmannerly to etiquette, so that, time after time, I found myself saying Not yet? At each new place I faced it, it suggested, Here spread out your things, put on this coat, open this bottle— No, not yet . . . sometimes throwing something out, giving things away, lightening my load. . . . The more I pull out, the more it seems, some days, is left inside, the heavier it is. Sometimes I think this package is almost a door the opening of which careening across heaven could be fatal. Some days now I wonder if I’ll ever dare face my given garments— permanently wrinkled, surely out of date— your travel-thought wasting in its tissue, flesh-corrupt— till I’ve absorbed it, like those stitches that dissolve in an incision where something’s been removed.

for Gerald Stern At sixteen I was so vulnerable to every influence That the overcast light, making the trash of addicts & sunbathers suddenly clearer On the paths of the city park, seemed death itself spreading its shade Over the leaves, the swan boats, the gum wrappers, and the quarreling ducks. It took nothing more than a few clouds straying over the sun, And I would begin falling through myself like an anvil or a girl's comb or a feather Dropped, tossed, or spiraling by pure chance down the silent air shaft of a warehouse, The spiderweb in one fourth-floor window catching, in that moment, the sunset. For in such a moment, to fall was to be simplified & pure, With a neck snapped like a stem instead Of whoever I turned out to be, Wiping the window glass clear with one cuff To gaze out at a two-hundred-year-old live oak tethering The courtyard to its quiet, The tree so old it has outlived even its life as a cliché, And has survived, with no apparent effort, every boy who marched, like a wilderness Himself, past it on his way to enlist in Lee’s army, And now it swells gently in the mist & the early sunlight. So who saved me? And for what purpose? Beneath the small angel cut from cheap stone, there was nothing But my name & the years 1947-1949, And the tense, muggy little quiet of a place where singing ends, And where there is only the leftover colored chalk & the delusions of voodoo, The small bones & X’s on stones signifying the practitioner’s absence, Entirely voluntary, from the gnat swirl & humming of time; To which the chalked X on stone is the final theory; it is even illiterate. It is not even a lock of hair on a grave. It is not even The small crowd of roughnecks at Poe’s funeral, nor the blind drunkard Laughing there, the white of his eyes the unfurling of a cold surf below a cliff— Which is the blank wave sprawl of fact receding under the cries of gulls— Which is not enough. * I should rush out to my office & eat a small, freckled apple leftover From 1970 & entirely wizened & rotted by sunlight now, Then lay my head on my desk & dream again of horses grazing, riderless & still saddled, Under the smog of the freeway cloverleaf & within earshot of the music waltzing with itself out Of the topless bars & laundromats of East L.A. I should go back again & try to talk my friend out of his diet Of methamphetamine & vodka yogurts & the look of resignation spreading over his face Like the gray shade of a tree spreading over a sleeper in the park— For it is all or nothing in this life, for there is no other. And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold, & Oswald will adjust The lenses on the scope of his rifle, the one Friend he has carried with him all the way out of his childhood, The silent wood of its stock as musical to him in its grain as any violin. This must have been what they meant, Lincoln & Whitman, joining hands one overcast spring afternoon To stroll together through the mud of Washington at the end Of the war, the tears welling up in both their eyes, Neither one of them saying a word, their hands clasped tightly together As they walk for block after block past The bay, sorrel, chestnut, and dapple-gray tail swish of horses, And waiting carriages, & neither one of them noticing, as they stroll & weave, The harness gall on the winters of a mare, Nor the gnats swarming over it, alighting now on the first trickle of blood uncaking from the sore; And the underfed rib cage showing through its coat each time it inhales Like the tines of a rake combing the battleground to overturn Something that might identify the dead at Antietam. The rake keeps flashing in the late autumn light. And Bakunin, with a face impassive as a barn owl’s & never straying from the one true text of flames? And Lincoln, absentmindedly trying to brush away the wart on his cheek As he dresses for the last time, As he fumbles for a pair of cuff links in a silk-lined box, As he anticipates some pure & frivolous pleasure, As he dreams for a moment, & is a woman for a moment, And in his floating joy has no idea what is going to happen to him in the next hour? And Oswald dozing over a pamphlet by Trotsky in the student union? Oh live oak, thoughtless beauty in a century of pulpy memoirs, Spreading into the early morning sunlight As if it could never be otherwise, as if it were all a pure proclamation of leaves & a final quiet— * But it’s all or nothing in this life; it’s smallpox, quicklime, & fire. It’s the extinct whistling of an infantry; it is all the faded rosettes of blood Turning into this amnesia of billboards & the ceaseless hunh? of traffic. It goes on & I go with it; it spreads into the sun & air & throws out a fast shade That will never sleep, and I go with it; it breaks Lincoln & Poe into small drops of oil spreading Into endless swirls on the water, & I recognize the pattern: * There there now, Nothing. Stop your sniveling. Stop sifting dirt through your fingers into your glass of milk, A milk still white as stone; whiter even. Why don’t you finish it? We’d better be getting on our way soon, sweet Nothing. I’ll buy you something pretty from the store. I’ll let you wear the flower in your hair even though you can only vanish entirely underneath its brown, implacable petals. Stop your sniveling. I can almost see the all night diner looming Up ahead, with its lights & its flashing sign a testimony to failure. I can almost see our little apartment under the freeway overpass, the cups on the mantle rattling continually— The Mojave one way; the Pacific the other. At least we’ll have each other’s company. And it’s not as if you held your one wing, tattered as it was, in contempt For being only one. It’s not as if you were frivolous. It’s not like that. It’s not like that at all. Riding beside me, your seat belt around your invisible waist. Sweet Nothing. Sweet, sweet Nothing.

We can never be with loss too long. Behind the warped door that sticks, the wood thrush calls to the monks, pausing upon the stone crucifix, singing: “I am marvelous alone!” Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield: rows of marrow and bone undone. The horizon’s flashing fastens tight, sealing the blue hills with vermilion. Moss dyes a squirrel’s skull green. The cemetery expands its borders— little milky crosses grow like teeth. How kind time is, altering space so nothing stays wrong; and light, more new light, always arrives.

A full year passed (the seasons keep me honest) since I last noticed this same commotion. Who knew God was an abstract expressionist? I’m asking myself—the very question I asked last year, staring out at this array of racing colors, then set in motion by the chance invasion of a Steller’s jay. Is this what people mean by speed of light? My usually levelheaded mulberry tree hurling arrows everywhere in sight— its bow: the out-of-control Virginia creeper my friends say I should do something about, whose vermilion went at least a full shade deeper at the provocation of the upstart blue, the leaves (half green, half gold) suddenly hyper in savage competition with that red and blue— tohubohu returned, in living color. Kandinsky: where were you when I needed you? My attempted poem would lie fallow a year; I was so busy focusing on the desert’s stinginess with everything but rumor. No place even for the spectrum’s introverts— rose, olive, gray—no pigment at all— and certainly no room for shameless braggarts like the ones that barge in here every fall and make me feel like an unredeemed failure even more emphatically than usual. And here they are again, their fleet allure still more urgent this time—the desert’s gone; I’m through with it, want something fuller— why shouldn’t a person have a little fun, some utterly unnecessary extravagance? Which was—at least I think it was—God’s plan when He set up (such things are never left to chance) that one split-second assignation with genuine, no-kidding-around omnipotence what, for lack of better words, I’m calling vision. You breathe in, and, for once, there’s something there. Just when you thought you’d learned some resignation, there’s real resistance in the nearby air until the entire universe is swayed. Even that desert of yours isn’t quite so bare and God’s not nonexistent; He’s just been waylaid by a host of what no one could’ve foreseen. He’s got plans for you: this red-gold-green parade is actually a fairly detailed outline. David never needed one, but he’s long dead and God could use a little recognition. He promises. It won’t go to His head and if you praise Him properly (an autumn psalm! Why didn’t I think of that?) you’ll have it made. But while it’s true that my Virginia creeper praises Him, its palms and fingers crimson with applause, that the local breeze is weaving Him a diadem, inspecting my tree’s uncut gold for flaws, I came to talk about the way that violet-blue sprang the greens and reds and yellows into action: actual motion. I swear it’s true though I’m not sure I ever took it in. Now I’d be prepared, if some magician flew into my field of vision, to realign that dazzle out my window yet again. It’s not likely, but I’m keeping my eyes open though I still wouldn’t be able to explain precisely what happened to these vines, these trees. It isn’t available in my tradition. For this, I would have to be Chinese, Wang Wei, to be precise, on a mountain, autumn rain converging on the trees, a cassia flower nearby, a cloud, a pine, washerwomen heading home for the day, my senses and the mountain so entirely in tune that when my stroke of blue arrives, I’m ready. Though there is no rain here: the air’s shot through with gold on golden leaves. Wang Wei’s so giddy he’s calling back the dead:Li Bai! Du Fu! Guys! You’ve got to see this—autumn sun!