I see pain all over the place, visible as sunshine.
I miss your holding the hand, paw, wing,
standing beside the bed, the den, the hive,
the tunnel of every living thing, doctor.
I wish evil obeyed the law of motion,
that it produced something equal and opposite,
a good breeze for an ill wind.
The crow of truth is eating something dead
on the highway. I can’t tell what it was,
but you studied some who came back from the dead,
glorious accidents. Doctor Oliver Sacks,
you simply did not give up on the livingdying.
Because small realizations add up to larger understanding,
75% of Columbia University neurology students say
because of you they chose neurology,
because your empathy, empathy, empathy
taught them not just to study the brain, but the mind.
(You would not be a cardiologist,
because the heart is just a pump.)
You kept the periodic table always in your pocket.
It must have gone up with you in smoke.
I’ll place Oliver with Oxygen, Osmium and Iridium
when they let me remake the world.
I try to find you with a microscope, a telescope,
my own two eyes. What I see are books on my desk.
Johann Sebastian Bach does not play musical chairs,
but when I hear the Bach mass, or simply an aire,
I figure you’re around.
This afternoon I called at your country house,
nothing around but a fawn in the field,
two spiffy cars in the driveway.
In your well-kept garden, hydrangeas insist
death is an hallucination. What do flowers know?
Still, near Santa Maria in Trastevere,
I saw a painting called No War and another, I Love You,
by an American woman eating a peach.
I was reborn in old Rome, still remain,
not a marble fragment, not a painting, more like
the Cloaca Maxima, an old, stinking survivor.
Much I had seen I did not recall:
ugliness and beauty, part of me
as music, unfinished work,
the “wrong note” effect,
—what I wanted to forget
and what I wished to remember,
that her lips upon my flesh
said, “You are changing,”
then, “You will never change.”
*
It is time to uncover the mirrors—
there is no death in the family now.
It is time we wear each other’s skin,
fur, scales, feathers, our mouths covered with pollen;
let’s sing insect and reptilian songs.
It is time for the carnival of love.
I describe caprichos, I narrate beauty I fight for—
its protagonists and antagonists battle within the poem
down in the dirt. Beauty has a tale to tell:
ugliness and terror cut out of skin
and
marble—a labor Phidias knew something about.
*
I can hear the earthworm’s laughter.
Taught to respond to light, cut in half,
each new half responds to light—small stars.
It is time for asterisks, stars that point to human life.
May my liver, kidney and heart severed
recall good times—I was there
and I refuse to get out of here.
My head, severed from my body,
remembers love, perhaps irregular verbs.
*
What happened to pollen? We die without insects and birds.
My friend going blind thinks life is a dream.
I do not know why yet I live to say
I’ve gone to seed, I’m not sure of my name.
Winds carry pollen to quarreling cornfields,
on the same bush, a rose quarrels with a rose.
This dust produces that mud. I write in mud
with a stick, with my finger or my tooth.
I have found gardeners on their knees,
farm workers bent in the meat-eating sun
no less reverent than nuns. Every man’s soul
is an immigrant, enters a new country
without speaking the language, works long hours,
attends night school. Reaching Paradise,
sometimes he longs for the old country, his body.
*
In my ward of ninety-some “casuals”
at St. Albans Naval Hospital
I wrote a love letter for a one-legged marine,
his good leg eaten by rats when he was in the sand under a Jeep.
His last name was Love. On his own,
he dictated the titles of popular songs.
A couple of days later, remaking his bed,
a nurse told me Love died, “surgical shock.”
I was entangled, beaten by missing body parts.
Something of my body stays at sea, dismembered.
*
Virgil thought purple was the color of the soul.
Saint Jerome woke from a dream black and blue,
whipped at the judgment seat for reading Latin poets.
My body, bruised, turns purple, is hardly proof
my soul is at home in my body.
I walk knee-deep in a swamp, stinking of heaven.
A two-year-old child says, “How disgusting!”
I am surprised the child knows the word.
Entangled in water lilies and devil’s paintbrush,
I’m up to my knees in spirit.
Yes, yes, it pleases me to go into the dark.
These words are body. I try to find something
man-made in the sun that is all over the place.
*
It’s no time to die, almost everything’s left undone.
Angel of Death, fly off with your black wings
with the first flock of starlings,
out of place among swans with your thick, dirty neck!
I am what others abandoned
that I save. Rather than bury my old Bible,
I leave fragile pages to songbirds
that build, warm their nests and eggs with psalms.
I wonder how my life might twine and untwine
if, like the brontosaurus, I had a second brain
to work my tail from the base of my spine.
Two egos at odds in one bed, two ids
might cause two dreams at once, hybrids,
one sweet, one nightmare: my bottom half in the mouth
of a brontosaurus, long as a railroad train.
She and I do what most would find uncouth.
Same time, I am in bed, young me with a beauty,
dreaming I’m having a birthday party—
I’m spinning, a butterfly breaks free
out of my ear that is a chrysalis,
circles the room, finds an open window, flies south
to join the millions it needs for company.
I wake, it’s morning, I read, a good guess,
what I never knew I thought before: poetry—
poets who simply honor the language.
I’m a psalmist with a Miss-directed penis.
Cupid plays at cards with me for kisses.
Venus, who never spanks, spanks me,
whispers to Mars in bed, “It’s time you turned the page
on Stanley being Stanley.
I thought he went out of style in the Ice Age.”
Lunatic solatic,
Mrs., Ms., Mr., Master, Misreader
I sign my name ice-skating
on a frozen pond. I skate
a letter “M,” circle an “O,”
gracefully skate “S” twice.
Still when spring comes
my name will be unspelled by the sun,
ripple somewhere, water again, cloudy,
water my houseplants.
I would never skate “David,”
my middle Psalmist name.
1.
We never made love, but still I believe
we share some intimate knowledge,
something no one else in the world knows—
who were your next door neighbors
when you were a child and teenager,
my parents’ friends.
We drove to the Chicago World’s Fair
that celebrated “A Century of Progress.”
(I sang on experimental television
before television, before you were born.)
I remember the sound of their voices,
Hannah’s intimate laundry, her wonderful brassiere
hanging in the bathroom—
I smelled the unimaginable.
I remember decent people, that Max bought
78 turns per minute, “classical”
RCA records every week,
a painting showing a Russian maid scrubbing a cello
hung in his music room,
that Hannah gave me tomato juice,
an extraordinary kindness,
instead of half a grapefruit I hated.
Our remembering might help them out of purgatory
if Dante was right. It helps me out. How about you?
2.
Writing this letter, I was slapped in the face
by a mandrake root.
It slipped my mind
how often you came closer to the truth
by making your reader believe what never happened.
Sometimes, lonely, or never lonely, Fernando Pessoa
accomplished this with five different names.
So your brother was born aged 8 or 10
in the intimacy of your bedroom,
you played, talked and bathed together,
your mother soaped you front and back
in an iron, lion-footed tub.
In those days, the soap was Ivory,
99% pure.
I will kidnap your brother,
use him as a sister, so he can help
with a poem about Lilly I can never write.
Still, your brother almost got you killed crossing the street.
You simply had to Stop, Look, and Listen to him first.
He did not cross at corners,
but he read lines to you before you wrote them.
For all I know, your neighbors had lilacs
and wild iris in their garden in Woodmere
that was farther away from the Atlantic than it is now,
but still, you could smell the salt in the air
when the fog came in.
My sister was a Unitarian,
she loved life, the God-given gift of the world.
She did not need Paradise to make her a Christian,
thought all religions that promised Paradise
offered a business relationship with a jealous God.
She made a funny face at the mention of early martyrs
who preferred to be fresh meat for lions
to living in the world, likely as slaves,
rather than praying for show to the Gods
Trajan or Emperor Augustus.
Her Lord preferred His followers deny Him
rather than sacrifice their lives,
He wanted the living to live, love strangers,
their neighbors, the Beatitudes.
She certainly thought it wise to hide your Judaism
from the public fires of the Inquisition;
she damned the excommunicators of Spinoza,
believed in doing what you could honorably do
to stay out of cattle cars.
When I was a small child
I thought my sister Lilly
was mysteriously related to water lilies,
daylilies, lilies of the valley.
Imitating her handwriting, I made my first e and l.
I am ashamed, when I was seven, she was four years older,
I wrestled her to the ground to show I was stronger,
proof the state is stronger than language.
Our dog took her side, barked, “get off her.”
It was a rare day I did not ask, “Lilly read me a story.”
When I stood one foot three inches taller,
she gave me her violin. When all I could play was “Long, Long
Ago,”
she taught me Mozart and Bach,
that all things in the universe showed the hand of God.
Years passed. I thought prosody survives history.
She read Rimbaud to me in French and English,
and Lorca, whose photo I hung next to my bed.
My sister wrote to me, “Please speak at my funeral.”
Not long after, I said, “To death there is no consolation....”
I read most of the lines I just wrote.
I insisted the chapel doors and windows were open
to a congregation of birds and insects. Loners
swooped in and out from noon to sunset.
Not a drop of excrement on the mosaic floor.
A hawk dropped a live mouse that prayed to live
on her coffin.
She would have liked that.
My sister Lillian was a Unitarian.
She insisted I not speak at her funeral.
She made necklaces, pressed butterflies.
Her husband invented our famous intercontinental
space rockets, miniaturized atom bombs
so they could be used as tactical weapons.
Her closest friend, who married a Haitian, and Black Americans
were not allowed in his house. She did not protest,
hold her breath, turn blue and faint,
as she did as a child to get what she wanted.
Lillian taught poetry, had four great-grandchildren,
she wanted our mother to have a Unitarian funeral.
Our mother was not a Unitarian.
My sister mailed me my mother’s ashes
first class. Later, I collected my dad’s, buried both
side by side, Montauk daisies between—
their unmarked rocks not too close.
For a wedding present two years after our wedding,
my sister gave us a folded check, $25 to “buy a tree”
and a rope ladder to keep on the top floor
in case our house caught fire.
I am grateful to the poet who taught me
how to get closer to something like the truth,
which is my understanding,
an unenumerated right, protected
by the 9th Amendment to the Constitution.
In our new society, all the old religious orders and titles
are ice creams: Rabbis, Priests, Mullahs,
Gurus, Buddhists, Shiites, Sunni, Dominicans,
Franciscans, Capuchins, Carmelites—ice cream,
never before have the kids had such a choice of flavors,
never before have the Ten Commandments
been so cool in summer. I believe
when the holy family rested on their flight to Egypt,
in the desert heat, they had a little mystical lemon or orange ice,
before chocolate and vanilla crossed the unnamed Atlantic.
Let us pray, not for forgiveness, but for our just dessert.
I woke at sunrise,
fed my dogs, Honey and Margie—
to the east a wall of books and windows,
a lawn, the trees in my family,
the donkeys and forest behind the hill.
Sunlight showed itself in,
passed the China butterflies on the window
so birds watch out, don’t break their necks.
On the back of a green leather chair for guests
facing me in sunlight and shadow, a sunlit Star of David,
two large handspans square.
I call to my wife to see the star
she first thinks I painted on the chair.
Soon she catches on—no falling star.
We searched the room and outside.
How did the star come to be?
Without explanation. None.
The star visited a few minutes, disappeared,
or became invisible. Why?
I wondered if it was le bel aujourd’hui
or a holiday some Jews celebrate.
Playing fair, I told myself: watch out for
a crucifix anywhere before which
contrition saves condemned souls—
watch in the forest for portraits of the Virgin,
the wheel of Dharma down the road
that teaches “save all living beings,”
when the moon is full a crescent moon
reflected on a wall or lake.
Watch for flying horses!
I read the news of commandments broken.
Thou shalt not kill.
I write between the lines
Thou shalt not steal
seventy-five years from the life of a child.
Next day, I found my Star of David
was a glass sun and star reflection of
a tinkling shimmering wind chime made in China.
A pleasing, godless today fills my study.
i.
That boy who made the earth and stars had to learn
to make a chair in his earthly father’s shop.
Above in the hip and valley of the rafters
held fast by joints his father cut
there is a haloed dove with outspread wings.
To the boy the workbench with its candle seemed
an altar, the tools offerings. That boy
could speak the languages of Babel. “Bevel”
he learned refers to an angle not cut-square.
At first he heard angle as angel.
He heard “take the angel directly from the work,
the only precaution being that
both stock and tongue be held tight to the work . . .
The boat builder bevel is most venerable.”
The person of the dove shook head and halo
from side to side, vented a white splash
that smelled of water lilies on the boy’s cheek and shoulder.
Then a whispering Third Voice filled the workshop.
“It’s time to make an Ark to hold the Torah.
Learn the try-square, hammers and nails, veneers.”
It was Friday afternoon, just before sunset.
The boy went to the steps of the synagogue.
He told the gathered doctors: “God commanded Moses,
’Build the Tabernacle of acacia wood, gave
exact dimensions, in cubits and hand-breadths.’”
The boy’s mother called him:
“Carpenter, Yeshua, come to supper.”
ii.
At night the boy returned to the workshop.
He shoplifted himself from the Holy Books
and the forbidden Greeks. He grinned:
a god deceived his wife Hera, who threw snakes
in the crib of the misbegotten babe Heracles
who strangled them. The boy giggled at the great
deeds of Heracles and his labors, that he only
became immortal after being burned alive.
In the sawdust Yeshua smelled forests,
he could tell cedar from pine, from oak, eucalyptus.
He saw the valleys of death and life.
With his father’s tools he cut dovetails,
male and female angles, lapped dovetails
that show on one face but are concealed
on the other with lap and lip, secret dovetails
where the joint is entirely hidden.
The boy had spent a sad afternoon with the people.
Why were so many ears, eyes, and hearts deaf to him?
He told them it was written in Chronicles:
“The house of the Lord is filled with a cloud . . .
the Lord said he would dwell in the dark cloud.”
The boy had never heard the word kristianos.
He saw his face in a pail of water, a cloudless sky.
He heard a cock crow, drunken Roman soldiers
laughing in the street. It was morning.
It makes no difference if friends and family
are ashes thrown into the ocean,
or flesh and bone buried in holy ground,
their names barely attached. Awake or dreaming,
I see them as they were young and old, living
some other life, never in rags, never dressed to kill.
I don’t trivialize the dead,
put them in a playground on a seesaw
or climbing a maze.
I remember their voices like
warped 78-turns-a-minute records—
stumbling voices.
I drink “to life!”
drinking a little from each glass “to death!”
because everything that is has death in it.
Look, the dead are school teachers, they remember our names,
they grade us by number or letter;
they teach, “Fools, you don’t know
how much more the half is than the whole.”
The dead are trees. We are cut from their lumber.
And the dead are stars that no longer exist,
so far away their light is just reaching us.
Death is a doormat that says Welcome,
a good night’s sleep, a handful of stones.
To a little death before I die! La petite mort!
Because the breast taken from the child
is a first death, I drink “to a nursing mother!”
and a first death the Christ child must have suffered.
I do not sing of phantom paradise
but offer a little phantom pleasure,
justice delayed—a hacksaw
for the phantom pain Ahab felt
after his severed leg was replaced by whalebone.
A hundred years! Bottoms up!
Doctor, I could have asked but never did
why weren’t you a teacher or a drunk?
I could have asked you about your caring for
the wounded Nazi Luftwaffe Offizier.
Poet, you wrote love poems in your old age.
Jew, not by chance your son’s name is David—
honors the psalmist and Saint Davy.
We celebrate spring at the same table,
suffer the same wintry fever.
In a pub called The Good Life the landlord serves
with every glass of joy a tankard of sorrow.
Husband, I never asked about your marriage,
it would have been asking why there’s morning
and evening. Welshman, we first met at Hay-on-Wye.
You said, “The Welsh are a defeated people,
they identify with victims.”
I send you brotherly love.
You don’t need a brother, but I do.
It was a little like what I feel now
walking around the City
remembering the old buildings
where new construction is going on.
It is a little like getting older.
I remember my fear as a child
being pushed by tens of thousands
at Yankee Stadium Memorial Day,
afraid of falling, being pushed over and squashed,
not being able to find my father,
some shouting, some singing in victory,
then packed in the subway back to Queens,
lucky American, far from the cattle cars,
the ovens, franks and mustard on my lips.
SPRING POEM FOR CHRISTOPHER MIDDLETON
1.
It’s Monday, I phone. You answer, coughing, whisper:
“My doctor says two days and I’ll be dead.
I’m afraid of falling off the bed into my grave”—
that means to me a couple of twists
of the screwdriver or monkey wrench
and you’ll become unintelligibly human.
My mind is a waterbug. I write chatter . . . Life and death
are unhappy lovers. Is there a marriage,
is life the bride or bridegroom?
How many times can a father give the bride away?
Do life and death create a nation, like the marriage
of Fernando and Isabella—death Aragon, life Castille?
No reason, there are always the disasters of war.
Dear friend, death is part of life doesn’t work for me.
I prefer the end is part of the play.
Actors and gentles, there is a change of decorum,
a grave eccentricity performed in an O.
It is winter. The sun is like a slum.
Without a bone, your frightened dog
already shakes at the stench
of your death. Without philosophy,
he licks your face and feet
in hope of resurrection. A winter passion,
your life is disrobed before the public,
you are denied another Sabbath for no reason.
It should displease the Lord—this passing on
we know nothing of. I do not say the beads.
I pray there is a God of love who reads.
2.
Ten winter days have passed. I phone.
I’m certain telephones don’t ring
in Heaven, Hell, or Purgatory.
You answer, “Hello . . . the crisis is over.
Now my neurosurgeon says I have some time,
a day or two, a month, you never know,
. . . my handwriting is very shaky.” Hurrah,
it’s March, there’s reason to hope you’ll see
Texas summer corn, roses in Westminster in April.
Soon, I’ll send you this poem for a laugh.
Metaphor and reality have not come together.
I invented your good dog,
a gift to keep you from loneliness.
3.
(Is it better that the dead are buried
or go up in flames in clean clothes?)
In your poetry, you write under oath
not to treat as a thing of the mind
things that are of the mind only.
After their jealousy and lovemaking,
beauty and truth marry at the local registry,
take the vows of all religions,
or just have a long affair. I toast “To life!”
Christopher, brush away death by failing heart;
better Zeus, on a distant evening,
when you are surrounded by love,
ground you with a thunderbolt.
A hundred years! . . . Christopher died yesterday.
Metaphor and reality have come together.
to David Amichai
The dead poet,
father of the bridegroom,
invited the guests by printed invitation
that was placed, in love, by the son and his bride
on the father’s grave the morning before the wedding.
I brought colored stones from Long Island.
The happy ghost of the father
attended the wedding, cried out
like Hamlet’s father, “Remember me”—
but instead of asking for vengeance like the murdered king,
the five hundred guests
heard the poet’s voice among the blessings.
To Jane Freilicher
I was scribbling, “Goya painted with a spoon” when I heard Jane died,
I knew enough not to be surprised but I was.
Saturn gnawed his sons without a place setting.
I never got over the Berliner Ensemble’s Mother Courage,
when she screamed, “I bargained too much”
(for her murdered son’s life).
The actress wore a wooden spoon as a brooch.
Tongue tied, I kept “spoon.” It is not a decoration.
In a daydream, I avow without reason
Jane Freilicher painted with a spoon—
potato fields, Watermill, pink mallow,
her early painting Leda and the Swan,
nothing we see—and with everyday palette knife,
brushes or late-invented forks,
useful for painting hydrangeas and eyelashes,
proof painters work like translators,
English into Chinese, everyday English words:
daylight, flower, woman, moon
are different in Ming, Tang, and Song:
different characters, different calligraphy.
She painted with a silver or oak spoon
ponds or stars, bones were oblongs and triangles,
nothing we see. She painted light,
mastered it, was mastered by it,
moved the world by “tipping the horizon up.”
My honor: from a distance she painted
my house on Mecox Bay, my Corinthian columns,
my garden and sandspit
along the old Montauk road, my beach plums,
fireweed, roses of Sharon, day lilies, love
mostly washed out by hurricanes.
I say “my,” but I never thought
I had good title to anything or anyone.
Then there was her battle of dreams
versus hallucinations, battles without a heroine,
the colors of fate, breathtaking, inevitable colors.
She would never forgive
those who think painting and poetry
function about the same as wallpaper.
Sometimes she painted small pictures
easily hidden from search parties
as Goya did, hiding from the Inquisition
because he painted nudes,
Protestant fields, Catholic fields, Jewish fields, like her.
She suffered the heresies of the Hamptons
where most painters of roses, whatever their personal faith,
and all poets, as such, are polytheists.
Again, she studied the many moods
of the sun and ocean through a window.
I studied Chinese at the Beijing railroad station,
eight thousand years or so of Chinese faces.
Every Chinese knows five cardinal relations:
ruler subject, father son, husband wife,
elder and younger brother, friend and friend.
I share the undiscovered country that begins
at the Southampton railroad station,
the beauty and color of Long Island
in the mist . . .
I sit shivering with the old-timers, gossiping
about the steam engines
from Penn Station to Montauk
100 years ago, faster than now, the island’s
chestnut trees harvested for firewood,
the cemeteries, a little away from the railroad tracks,
cornflowers and poppies,
off Routes 114, 27, Springs Fireplace Road,
overloaded with painters,
I kiss my Yoricks. I knew them well.
*
Jane, we watched the pagan ocean
that holds bottom feeders
that thrive in fiery volcanic waters,
and birds that never come ashore.
Often we met at the beach, half-naked,
barefooted or in sandals.
We knew where fifty-six swans nested,
that Long Island painters seldom painted
the night, or character. We chased whales,
saved wounded seals.
After an Atlantic hurricane, in our trees
with salt-drenched curled leaves,
thousands of fooled monarch butterflies gathered
on their way to Mexico.
We embraced 65 years ago—
not a long time for a redwood,
a long time for an oak or an elm.
The day you died,
I wish ex cathedra, Pope Francis said, “dogs go to heaven,”
so fawns, foxes, and rabbits aren’t left behind.
You understood shadow.
At first look, you never painted sorrow.
You picked up stemless flowers, homeless
like beauties standing on street corners,
gorgeous juvenile delinquents.
1.
I believe love saves the world from heartbreak.
I’m learning to play the concrete harp.
I’m tired of traveling by my name only.
It is time for tears held back and washed away,
days that mean “yes” and nights that mean “no.”
Look, the moon never disconsonant,
lies down, sleeps under a bridge.
Still, when I am asleep, at breakfast,
reading a book or walking across a street
thinking I am far from eternal sloth, a God
for his comfort will push me out of sight.
2.
Veiled Fortuna, because knowing who you were,
I made you laugh and gave you pleasure
when you opened your mortal dressing gown,
give me proof that has no text—life everlasting
is to be loved at the moment of death.
Now my thoughts drift to a Japanese woodcut:
a sacred lake, a child’s sailboat, the shore
a woman’s open thighs, her gorgeous vulva.
At a distance, a flowering plum mouths a tall pine.
Deep within her leaves there is a poem of the pillow.
to Willis
Years are numbered, as if they were the same,
some leap, some scythe-carriers are lame.
You know the date you were born
but nothing that happened for a couple of years
when you started remembering—an acorn—
you became an oak—forgot miracles. Your fears:
falling and fires—you knew love
before you knew the word. Mother’s milk
holds many secrets, some cruelty and
milk of human kindness. What are you made of ?
What are you from? Words different as silk
from linen and wool. I send a kiss and love
by email, modern love, not Adam’s stuff.
We are of clay, and from porcelain.
Death is a volcano, we must not fall in.
From now on every day is Christmas.
Amor pesetas y tiempo para gastarlas.
I believe in original blessing, not original sin.
I caught you and loved you when I was three
before I knew the word death—
it was a little like picking an apple off a tree.
At 20, I caught you, kissed you, and let you go.
You swam off like quicksilver.
The Greeks thought a little like that the world began.
You splashed and smacked your tail, made a rainbow.
Funny what drowns a man gives you breath.
Where are you, in ocean, brook, or river?
You suffer danger, but cannot weep as I can.
They say one God made the Holy books.
I offer Him my flies, spinners, feathered hooks—
not prayers. I swim with you in the great beneath,
to the headwaters of the unknown, in the hours
before dawn when fish and men exchange metaphors.
My school saw the Red Sea parted—you speak
to me only in North Sea everyday English
or Cape Cod American—why not ancient Greek?
I speak the languages of all those who fish
for me, and I speak Frog, Turtle, and Crocodile.
The waters are calm, come swim with me a while.
Look, the little fish will inherit the earth
and seas. Fish as you would have others fish for you!
Swallow the hook of happiness and mirth,
baited with poetry, the miraculous rescue.
I read drowned books. The Lord is many.
I heard this gossip in Long Island Sound:
three days before he died, one Ezra Pound
told a friend, “Go with God, if you can stand the company.”
I can’t walk far or drive away.
I’m here, deep in snow.
Still, I can follow the heart
better than on a sunny day.
Snow, rain, and stars have a language
I’ve heard them speak,
beyond understanding, a language
they’ve written on earth from the start,
older than Chinese, Hebrew, or Greek,
indifferent to human weather
or where we gather.
I’m snowbound,
not sure if snow is prose—
ice, poetry—
or the other way around.
The winds live timelessly,
the weather comes and goes.
I adore a snow goddess
in her white drifting dress.
ROPE
If I held a rope in my mouth,
you pulled and I pulled,
I would not enjoy it for long—proof
I’m not your dog.
If you pull my tongue with your teeth
I might find it fun a little while—
proof of strength, tug of war.
Then there is a tug of peace,
a long kiss when we pull together against death
that is the opposite of everything.
Ill-mannered, it might have been a death,
a sudden inhaling and exhaling, something before,
after, or during speech, not a word,
nothing to do with discourse, not a breath,
yet a blessing to a drowning man. A blessing
to the infant after the mother’s breast.
I sing not of the wrath of Achilles
but of thin air and effect, a kind of aftertaste
that may be veiled, suppressed with a finger
to the lips, a sign of a certain changing, as water changes,
not tide, not pulse, not from the heart at all,
but a sign of life, a mumble within the body,
invisible, unintelligible, comic perhaps,
a poor, strutting player, signifying something,
unpersuasive, possessing tone, pitch, distantly
related to the yawn, the ah, without ecstasy,
no more important than this pounding
base bass voice.
1.
I take no pleasure in saying
I’m not a pacemaker or stallion on a dead run,
part of my history,
without a halter. When I was 23,
I pulled a wagon
from 10 Quai Voltaire,
desk, books, and pretty dresses,
to 13 bis Rue de Tournon.
I stir the summer dust:
a lady said she heard my heart
beating across the room.
2.
Years past, sometimes on a dead run, a dead walk,
I fainted like a Victorian girl.
Now, I wear a pacemaker connected to my heart
by reins and wires that protect my heart from beating
37 irregular beats per minute.
Yesterday, tomorrow, today
my heart is fixed.
My pulse, andante, seldom allegro,
continues with its versification.
Lady with the sweet countenance of a soup spoon,
lead my heart through enjambment, spondaic,
iambic syllable count, in and out of schemes,
to the last syllable of my heartbeat,
awake and asleep in praise.
When I was five I loved climbing a granite boulder,
almost a mountain. I kissed it and grown-ups laughed.
Standing on top, almost naked,
I could see to the other side of the lake,
the lily pads and forests. I felt immortal.
My father spent that summer
in Venice and Vienna.
I remember an August storm, I was in the clouds
surrounded by my thunder, rain, and lightning.
I loved them, but I lost my footing,
slipped down, tore the skin off my back.
I still have the scars and the granite dust
in the scars under my shirt.
Today I returned to the lake,
paddled along the shore. I had to trespass,
but I found my granite boulder.
I kissed her again.
Who else can I kiss that I kissed when I was five?
I kissed the flowers in her mortal crevices.
Does she dream she is a dancer, alabaster?
I held my boulder close as I could.