These retroactive small
instances of feeling
reach out for a common
ground in the wet
first rain of a faded
winter. Along the grey
iced sidewalk revealed
piles of dogshit, papers,
bits of old clothing, are
the human pledges,
call them, “We are here and
have been all the time.” I
walk quickly. The wind
drives the rain, drenching
my coat, pants, blurs
my glasses, as I pass.
There are continuities in memory, but
useless, dissimilar. My sister’s
recollection of what happened won’t
serve me. I sit, intent, fat,
the youngest of the suddenly
disjunct family, whose father is
being then driven in an ambulance
across the lawn, in the snow, to die.
Long over whatever edge,
backward a false distance,
here and now, sentiment—
to begin again, forfeit
in whatever sense an end,
to give up thought of it—
hanging on to the weather’s edge,
hope, a sufficiency, thinking
of love’s accident, this
long way come with no purpose,
face again, changing,
these hands, feet, beyond me,
coming home, an intersection,
crossing of one and many,
having all, having nothing—
generalities, all abstract—
no place for me or mine—
I take the world and lose it,
miss it, misplace it,
put it back or try to, can’t
find it, fool it, even feel it.
The snow from a high sky,
grey, floats down to me softly.
This must be the edge
of being before the thought of it
blurs it, can only try to recall it.
Love has no other friends
than those given it, as us,
in confusion of trust and dependence.
We want the world a wonder
and wait for it to become one
out of our simple bodies and minds.
No doubt one day it will
still all come true as people
do flock to it still until
I wonder where they’ll all find room
to honor love in their own turn
before they must move on.
and ends all delusions and dreams,
in despite of our present sleeping.
But here I lie with you
and want for nothing more
than time in which to—
till love itself dies with me,
at last the end I thought to see
of everything that can be.
No! All vanity, all mind flies
but love remains, love, nor dies
even without me. Never dies.
Roof pours upward,
crisscrossed with new
snow on cedar shingles
—grey-black and white—
blue over it, the
angle of looking through
window past the grape ivy
hanging from the top of it,
orange shaded light on,
place fixed by seeing
both to and from,
ignoring bricked window arch
across, just covered by
the light vertically striped
pinned to cross-rod curtain.
What would a baby be
if we could see
him be, what would he be.
What stuff made of,
what to say to us,
that first moment.
From what has come.
Where come from—
new born babe.
What would he like,
would like us.
Would us like him.
Is he of pleasure, of pain,
of dumb indifference
or mistake made, made.
Is he alive or dead,
or unbegun, in between time
and us. Is he one of us.
Will he know us
when he’s come,
will he love us.
Will we love him.
Oh tell us, tell us.
Will we love him.
FOR WILLY
Out window roof’s slope
of overlapped cedar shingles
drips at its edges, morning’s still
overcast, grey, Sunday—
goddamn the god that will not
come to his people in their want,
serves as excuse for death—
these days, far away, blurred world
I had never believed enough.
For this wry, small, vulnerable
particular child, my son—
my dearest and only William—
I want a human world, a
chance. Is it my age
that fears, falters in some faith?
These ripples of sound, poor
useless prides of mind,
name the things, the feelings?
When I was young,
the freshness of a single
moment came to me
with all hope, all tangent wonder.
Now I am one, inexorably
in this body, in this time.
All generality? There is
no one here but words,
no thing but echoes.
would one force another’s life
to serve as one’s own instance,
his significance be mine—
wanting to sing, come
only to this whining sickness . . .
Up from oneself physical
actual limit to lift
thinking to its intent
if such in world there is
now all truth to tell
this child is all it is
or ever was. The place of
time oneself in the net
hanging by hands will
finally lose their hold,
fall. Die. Let this son
live, let him live.
He wants to be
a brutal old man,
an aggressive old man,
as dull, as brutal
as the emptiness around him,
nor to be ever nice
to anyone. Just mean,
and final in his brutal,
his total, rejection of it all.
He tried the sweet,
the gentle, the “oh,
let’s hold hands together”
and it was awful,
dull, brutally inconsequential.
Now he’ll stand on
his own dwindling legs.
His arms, his skin,
shrink daily. And
he loves, but hates equally.
FOR PEN
Expect the unexpected
and have a happy day . . .
Know love’s surety
either in you or me.
Believe you are always
all that human is
in loyalty, in generosity,
in wise, good-natured clarity.
No one more than you
would be love’s truth—
deserve ever unhappiness.
Therefore wonder’s delight
will make the way.
Expect the unexpected
and have a happy day . . .
Green’s the predominant color here,
but in tones so various, and muted
by the flatness of sky and water,
the oak trunks, the undershade back of the lawns,
it seems a subtle echo of itself.
It is the color of life itself,
it used to be. Not blood red,
or sun yellow—but this green,
echoing hills, echoing meadows,
childhood summer’s blowsiness, a youngness
one remembers hopefully forever.
It is thoughtful, provokes here
quiet reflections, settles the self
down to waiting now apart
from time, which is done,
this green space, faintly painful.
Early mornings, in the light still
faint making stones, herons, marsh
grass all but indistinguishable in the muck,
one looks to the far side, of the sound, the sand
side with low growing brush and
reeds, to the long horizontal of land’s edge,
where the sea is, on that
other side, that outside, place of
imagined real openness, restless, eternal ocean.
Thanks for
what will be
the memory
if it is.
Tonight possibly they’ll
invite us down to the barricades
finally sans some tacit
racism or question of our authenticity.
has to face the prospect
of being blown up alone in
the privacy of his own home.
One can be looted, burned,
bombed, etc., in company,
a Second World War sequel for real,
altogether, now and forever.
Stand up, heart, and take it.
Boat tugs at mooring.
Just a little later, a little later.
More you wanted, more you got.
The shock of recognition, like they say,
better than digitalis.
You want that sailboat sailing by?
Reach out and take it
if you can, if you must.
You talk a lot to yourself
about what you don’t want
these days, adding up figures, costs.
Here in the rented house on the water
for the proverbial two months,
it’s still not enough.
You will remember little of yourself
as you used to be. One expects this
familiar human convenience. I want
a more abrupt person, more explicit.
Nothing you did was lost, it was
real as you were, and are. But
this present collection of myselves
I cannot distinguish as other than
a collection. You talk to yourself
and you get the answers expected.
But oneself is real. There is, presumably,
all that is here to prove it.
In these few years
since her death I hear
mother’s voice say
under my own, I won’t
want any more of that.
My cheekbones resonate
with her emphasis. Nothing
of not wanting only
common fact of others
frightens me. I look out
at all this demanding world
and try to put it quietly back,
from me, say, thank you,
I’ve already had some
though I haven’t
and would like to
but I’ve said no, she has,
it’s not my own voice anymore.
It’s higher as hers was
and accommodates too simply
its frustrations when
I at least think I want more
and must have it.
I was supposed to wake
but didn’t, slept
seeing the separate
heads and faces,
the arms, the legs,
the parts of a person
specific. As always
one was taken
where the horror dawns
and one has killed
or been killed.
Then to wake up would be
no help in time.
The grey light breaks into
dawn. The day begins.
The light now meets
with the shuddering branch.
What I see
distorts the image.
This is an age
of slow determinations,
goes up the stairs
with dulled will.
Who would accept death
as an end
thinks he can
do what he wants to.
With all I know
remembering a page
clear to my eye
and in my mind
a single thing
of such size
it can find
no other place—
Written word
once so clear
blurred content
now loses detail.
No resolution,
understanding
when she comes
abrupt, final
anger, rage
at the painful
displacement,
the brutal use
of rational love,
the meagerness
of the intentional
offering.
AFTER HARDY
Why would she come to him,
come to him,
in such disguise
to look again at him—
look again—
with vacant eyes—
and why the pain still,
the pain—
still useless to them—
as if to begin again—
again begin—
what had never been?
.
Why be
persistently
hurtful—
no truth
to tell
or wish to?
Why?
.
The weather’s still grey
and the clouds gather
where they once walked
out together,
greeted the world with
a faint happiness,
watched it die
in the same place.
Once started nothing stops
but for moment
breath’s caught time
stays patient.
There is water
at road’s end
like a shimmer,
a golden opening,
if sun’s right
over trees
where the land
runs down
some hill
seeming to fall
to a farther reach
of earth but
no woods left
in the surrounding
wet air. Only the heavy
booming surf.
He is thinking of everyone
he ever knew
in no order, lets
them come or go
as they will. He wonders
if he’ll see them again,
if they’ll remember him,
what they’ll do.
There’s no surprise now,
not the unexpected
as it had been. He’s agreed
to being more settled.
Yet, like they say, as he
gets older, he knows
he won’t expect it, not
the aches and pains.
He thinks he’ll hate it
and when he does die
at last, he supposes
he still won’t know it.
Say it,
you’re afraid
but of what
you can’t locate.
You love yet
distracted fear
the body’s change,
yourself inside it.
My love is a boat
floating
on the weather, the water.
She is a stone
at the bottom of the ocean.
She is the wind in the trees.
I hold her
in my hand
and cannot lift her,
can do nothing
without her. Oh love,
like nothing else on earth!
Wind lifts lightly
the leaves, a flower,
a black bird
hops up to the bowl
to drink. The sun
brightens the leaves, back
of them darker branches,
tree’s trunk. Night is still
far from us.
The words will one day come
back to you, birds returning,
the movie run backward.
Nothing so strange in its talk,
just words. The people
who wrote them are the dead ones.
This here paper talks like anything
but is only one thing,
“birds returning.”
You can “run the movie
backward” but “the movie run
backward.” The movie run backward.
A movie of Robert
Bresson’s showed a yacht,
at evening on the Seine,
all its lights on, watched
by two young, seemingly
poor people, on a bridge adjacent,
the classic boy and girl
of the story, any one
one cares to tell. So
years pass, of course, but
I identified with the young,
embittered Frenchman,
anguish and the distance
he felt from his girl.
Yet another film
of Bresson’s has the
aging Lancelot with his
awkward armor standing
in a woods, of small trees,
dazed, bleeding, both he
and his horse are,
trying to get back to
the castle, itself of
no great size. It
moved me, that
life was after all
like that. You are
in love. You stand
in the woods, with
a horse, bleeding.
The story is true.
Couldn’t guess it,
couldn’t be it—
wasn’t ever
there then. Won’t
come back, don’t
want it.
To be backed
down the road
by long view
of life’s imponderable
echo of time spent
car’s blown motor
town on edge of
wherever fifty
bucks you’re lucky.
Whether in the world below or above,
one was to come to it,
rejected, accepted, in some
specific balance. There was to be
a reckoning, a judgment
unavoidable, and one would know
at last the fact of a life lived,
objectively, divinely, as it were,
acknowledged in whatever faith.
So that looking now for where
“an ampler aether clothes the meads with roseate light,”
or simply the “pallid plains of asphodel,”
the vagueness, the question, goes in,
discovers only emptiness—as if
the place itself had been erased,
was only forever an idea and
could never be found nor had it been.
And there was nothing ever beyond.
Be as careful, as rational,
as you will but know
nothing of such kind is true
more than fits the skin
and so covers what’s within
with another soft covering
that can leave the bones alone,
that can be as it will alone,
and stays as quiet, as stable, as stone.
Sky cries down
and water looks up.
Air feels everywhere
sudden bumps, vague emptiness.
Fire burns. Earth is left
a waste, inhuman.
I was talking to older
man on the phone
who’s saying something
and something are five
when I think it’s four,
and all I’d hoped for
is going up in abstract smoke,
and this call is from California
and selling a house,
in fact, two houses,
is losing me money more
than I can afford to,
and I thought I was winning
but I’m losing again
but I’m too old to do it again
and still too young to die.
If it isn’t fun, don’t do it.
You’ll have to do enough that isn’t.
Such is life, like they say,
no one gets away without paying
and since you don’t get to keep it
anyhow, who needs it.
Two kids, small
black sculpture. In
trepidation she turns
to him who bends
forward to, as they say,
assist her. It is,
the proposal is,
her fear provokes her,
fear of a frog
crouching at the far
end of this banal, small,
heavy hunk of metal
must have cost a
pretty penny so
to arouse in mind’s
back recesses
a comfortable sense
of incest? Or else
the glass table top on which it sits
so isolates this meager action
—or else the vegetation,
the fern stalks, beside them
hang over, making privacy
a seeming thought
as Keats said, will never move
nor will any of it
beyond the moment,
the small minutes of some hour,
like waiting in a dentist’s office.
FOR JOHN AND DEBORA DALEY
Lunch with its divers
orders of sliced
chicken going by on
the lazy susan with
the cucumber, the goat cheese,
the remnants of the rice
salad left from last night.
All in a whirl the participants
and their very young
children eat, and
drink, and watch for
the familial move will
betoken home ground
in the heat of sultry summer
through the wall-to-wall
glass and beyond to the oaks,
the exhilarated grass, the
fall-off to the marshy
birds spearing fish.
Are we not well met
here, factually nowhere
ever known to us before,
and will we not forever
now remember this? One wonders,
and hopes, loves, conjectures
as to the lives of others,
all others, from other worlds
still here and always
everywhere about us, none
to be left out. No
memory, no thought,
less. Nothing forgot.
Step through the mirror,
faint with the old desire.
Want it again,
never mind who’s the friend.
Say yes to the wasted
empty places. The guesses
were as good as any.
No mistakes.
The last waltz
pale days
jesus freaks
empty hours
of sitting around
thinking and drinking
being home
in a rented house
for the summer only
while the folks are away
and we get to use it
so long as we pay.
If your hair was brown
and isn’t now,
if your hands were strong
and now you falter,
if your eyes were sharp
and now they blur,
your step confident
and now it’s careful—
you’ve had the world,
such as you got.
There’s nothing more,
there never was.
If happiness were
simple joy, bird,
beast or flower
were the so-called world
here everywhere
about us,
then love were as true
as air, as water—
as sky’s light, ground’s
solidness, rock’s hardness,
for us, in us,
of us.
Were you counting the days
from now till then
to what end,
what to discover,
which wasn’t known
over and over?
Set the theme
with a cadence
of love’s old
sweet song—
No harm in
the emotional
nor in remembering all
you can or want to.
Let the faint, faded music
pour forth its wonder
and bewitch whom it will,
still dancers under the moon.
The faces with anticipated youth
look out from the current
identifications, judge or salesman,
the neighbor, the man who killed,
mattering only as the sliding world
they betoken, the time it never
mattered to accumulate, the fact that
nothing mattered but for what one
could make of it, some passing,
oblique pleasure, a pain immense
in its intensity, a sly but
insistent yearning to outwit it
all, be different, move far, far
away, avoid forever the girl
next door, whose cracked, wrinkled
smile will still persist, still know you.
Just now at five
the light’s caught the north
side of the trees next
door, the extensive
lawn to the sea’s
edge where the marsh grass
seems a yellowish
green haze in late
afternoon. Above, the clouds
move over, storm’s edge
passes in bunches of fluffy
soft dark-centered blobs,
all going or gone
as the wind freshens
from the land, blowing out
to sea. Now by the edge
of the window glass at the level
of the floor the grass
has become particularized
in the late light, each
edge of grass stalk
a tenacious fact of being there,
not words only, but only words,
only these words, to say it.
If, as in a bottle, the message
has been placed, if air, water
and earth try to say so with
human agency, no matter the imperfect,
useless gesture, all that is lost,
or mistaken, the arrogance
of trying to, the light comes again,
comes here, after brief darkness is still here.
The ground seems almost stolid
alongside the restless water,
surface now rippled by wind
echoed by the myriad tree branches—
and thought is a patient security then,
a thing in mind at best or else
some echo of physical world
it is but can know nothing of.
Such flowers can bloom
blurred harsh
winter days
in house so
quietly empty.
Delight in leaves
uplifting to
cold neon or gangling
out toward faint
grey window light.
Steady, the evening fades
up the street into sunset
over the lake. Winter sits
quiet here, snow piled
by the road, the walks stamped
down or shoveled. The kids
playing, sliding on the old ice.
The dogs are out, walking,
and it’s soon inside again,
with the light gone. Time
to eat, to think of it all.
Snow lifts it
by slowing
the movement expected,
makes walking
slower, harder,
makes face ache,
eyes blur, hands fumble,
makes the day explicit,
the night quiet,
the outside more so
and the inside glow
with warmth, with people
if you’re lucky, if
world’s good to you,
won’t so simply
kill you, freeze you.
Dance a little,
don’t worry.
There’s all the way
till tomorrow
from today
and yesterday.
Simple directions, direction,
to follow.
Smaller, no recall
of not liking one’s mother
given as god was
there and forever
loving learned from her
care, bemused
distraction and
much else.
Break heart, peace,
shy ways of holding
to the meager thing.
Little place in mind
for large, expansive counters
such as Hulme would also
seemingly deny yet afford
with bleak moon late
rising on cold night’s field.
He’d like the edge
of her warmth here
“beside her to lie”
in trusting comfort
no longer contests
he loves and wants her.
I took the test
and I’m not depressed.
I’m inside here,
I’ve locked the door,
become a tentative
security system,
echoes, lights, long
empty hallways. Waves
crash against the breakwater.
It’s dark out there
they think until daylight
lets them off the hook
again till the phone rings,
someone passing
looks in.
“All girls grown old . . .”
broken, worn out
men, dead
houses gone, boats sunk
jobs lost, retired
to old-folks’ home.
Eat, drink,
be merry, you fink.
So careful
of anything
thought of,
so slow
to move
without it.
Saturday late afternoon
with evening soon coming
grey the feel of it
snow underfoot still
weather’s company
despite winter’s harshness
coming up the path
with the dogs barking
home is where the heart is
this small house stays put.
Go down obscurely,
seem to falter
as if walking into water
slowly. Be of good cheer
and go as if indifferent,
even if not.
There are those before you
they have told you.
Help heaven up out
of nothing before it
so deep and soft
lovely it feels to
be here at all now.
Far from me
thinking
her long
warmth, close-
her face lights,
changes, how
I miss her,
want no
more time
without
her.
Oh like a bird
falls down
out of air,
oh like a disparate
small snowflake
melts momently.
Could walk on water backwards
to the very place
and all around was sand
where grandma dug, bloomers up,
with her pail, for clams.
Pushing it back to
night we went
swimming in the dark
at that light
house in N. Truro
with that Bill singing,
whistling on, later stuck
his head out subway train
N.Y. window, got killed on post,
smashed, he whistled
out there in the water
Beethoven’s Ninth, we
couldn’t see him, only
hear him singing on.
FOR R. G.
Rachel had said
the persons of her life
now eighty and more
had let go themselves
into the larger life,
let go of it, them
were persons personal,
let flow so, flower,
the garden, desire,
heaven’s imagination
seen in being
here among us every-
where in open
wonder about them, in
pain, in pleasure, blessed.
Water all around me
the front of sky ahead
sand off to the edges
light dazzle wind
way of where waves of
pleasure it can be here
am I dead or alive
in which is it.
Tell story
simply
as you know
how to.
This road
has ending,
hand
in hand.
1
Dumbass clunk plane “American
Airlines” (well-named) waits at gate
for hour while friend in Nevada’s
burned to ash. The rabbi
won’t be back till Sunday.
Business lumbers on
in cheapshit world of
fake commerce, buy and sell,
what today, what
tomorrow. Friend’s dead—
out of it, won’t be back
to pay phoney dues. The best
conman in country’s
gone and you’re left in
plane’s metal tube squeezed out
of people’s pockets, pennies
it’s made of, big bucks,
nickels, dimes all the same.
You won’t understand it’s forever—
one time, just one time
you get to play,
go for broke, forever, like
Thelonious, Bud Powell, Bird’s
horn with the chewed-through reed,
Jamaica Plain in the ’40s
—Izzy Ort’s, The Savoy. Hi Hat’s
now gas station. It goes fast.
Scramble it, make an omelet
out of it, for the hell of it. Eat
these sad pieces. Say it’s
paper you wrote the world on
and guy’s got gun to your head—
go on, he says, eat it . . .
You can’t take it back.
It’s gone. Max’s dead.
2
What’s memory’s
agency—why so much
matter. Better remember
all one can forever—
never, never forget.
We met in Boston,
1947, he was out of jail
and just married, lived
in sort of hotel-like
room off Washington Street,
all the lights on,
a lot of them. I never
Ina, but his daughter
Rachel I can think of
now, when she was 8,
stayed with us, Placitas, wanted bicycle,
big open-faced kid, loved
Max, her father, who,
in his own fragile way,
was good to her.
In and out
of time, first Boston,
New York later—then
he showed up in N.M.,
as I was leaving, 1956,
had the rent still paid
for three weeks on
“The Rose-Covered Cottage” in Ranchos
(where sheep ambled o’er bridge)
so we stayed,
worked the street, like they say,
lived on nothing.
Fast flashes—the women
who love him, Rena, Joyce,
Max, the mensch, makes
poverty almost fun,
hangs on edge, keeps traveling.
Israel—they catch him,
a bottle of scotch at the airport,
tch, tch, let him stay
(I now think) ’cause
he wants to.
Lives on kibbutz.
So back to New Mexico,
goyims’ Israel sans the plan
save Max’s (“Kansas City,” “Terre Haute”)
New Buffalo (friend told me
he yesterday saw that on bus placard
and thought, that’s it! Max’s place).
People and people and people.
Buddy, Wuzza, Si
Perkoff, and Sascha,
Big John C., and Elaine,
the kids. Joel and Gil,
LeRoi, Cubby, back and back
to the curious end
where it bends away into
nowhere or Christmas he’s
in the army, has come home,
and father, in old South Station,
turns him in as deserter, ashamed,
ashamed of his son. Or the man
Max then kid with his papers
met nightly at Summer Street
he gives him a dime for a tip . . .
No, old man, your son
was not wrong. “America”
just a vagueness, another place,
works for nothing, gets along.
3
In air
there’s nowhere
enough not
here, nothing
left to speak
to but you’ll
know as plane
begins its
descent, like
they say, it
was the place
where you were,
Santa Fe
(holy fire) with
mountains
of blood.
Can’t leave, never could,
without more, just
one more
for the road.
Time to go makes
me stay—
Max, be happy,
be good, broken
brother, my man, useless
words
now
forever.
—for Max Finstein died circa 11:00 a.m.
driving truck (Harvey Mudd’s) to
California—near Las Vegas—3/17/82.