bear with me it wasn’t long ago I was brainless
lazily pulling fireflies into my teeth chewing them
into pure light so much of me then was nothing
I could have fit into a sugar cube my body burned
like a barnful of feathers nothing was on fire
but fire was on everything the wild mustard
the rotting porch chair a box of birth records eventually
even scorched earth goes green though beneath it
the dead might still luxuriate in their rage my ancestor
was a dervish saint said to control a thick river of dark milk
under his town his people believed
he could have spared them a drought they ripped him to pieces
like eagles tearing apart a snake immediately they were filled
with remorse instead of burying him they buried a bag
of goat bones and azalea my hair still carries that scent
my eyes black milk and a snake’s flicking tongue
does this confuse you there are so many ways to be deceived
a butcher’s thumb pressed into the scale a strange blue dress
in a bathtub the slowly lengthening night I apologize
I never aimed at eloquence I told my mother I wouldn’t live
through the year then waited for a disaster sitting cheerfully
on cinder blocks pulled from a drained pond tossing
peanuts to squirrels this is not the story she tells hers filled
with happy myths fizzy pistons and plummy ghosts
it’s true I suppose you grow to love the creatures you create
some of them come out with pupils swirling others with teeth
Knocks on the door.
Who?
I sweep the dust of my loneliness
under the rug.
I arrange a smile
and open.
Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.
Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.
Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgiveable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.
Saturday night I buy a soda
Someone’s hand opens I hold it
It begins to rain
Avenue A is near the river
There is a whale swimming right now
who may have escaped a Nantucketer's harpoon in 1830
and a Japanese whale ship in 1950
who once heard the distant songs of 50,000 of her kind
then several thousand
then hundreds
but who can hear 25,000 again
singing in the warming water.
Tonight I’m fruit and clove. I’m bergamot.
I drop a teabag in the cup and boil
the kettle until it sings. As if on cue,
a part of me remembers how to brew
the darker things—those years I was a pot
of smoky leaves scented with orange oil.
Truth is: I don’t remember much of school,
the crushed-up taste of it. I was a drink
forgotten on the table, left to cool.
I was a rusted tin marked childhood.
I don’t remember wanting to be good
or bad, but only that I used to sink
in water and wait for something to unfurl,
the scent of summer in the jasmine pearl.
But what will you do without your hands
to be human?
I am tired of human
she said
I want to live on the sun—
Pointing to herself:
Not here.
There is not enough
warmth in this place.
Blue sky, blue ice
the blue rotunda
lifted over
the flat street—
and then, after a silence:
I want
my heart back
I want to feel everything again—
That’s what
the sun meant: it meant
scorched—
It is not finally
interesting to remember.
The damage
is not interesting.
No one who knew me then
is still alive.
My mother
was a beautiful woman—
they all said so.
I have to imagine
everything
she said
I have to act
as though there is actually
a map to that place:
when you were a child—
And then:
I’m here
because it wasn’t true; I
distorted it—
I want she said
a theory that explains
everything
in the mother’s eye
the invisible
splinter of foil
the blue ice
locked in the iris—
Then:
I want it
to be my fault
she said
so I can fix it—
Blue sky, blue ice,
street like a frozen river
you’re talking
about my life
she said
except
she said
you have to fix it
in the right order
not touching the father
until you solve the mother
a black space
showing
where the word ends
like a crossword saying
you should take a breath now
the black space meaning
when you were a child—
And then:
the ice
was there for your own protection
to teach you
not to feel—
the truth
she said
I thought it would be like
a target, you would see
I know where we are
she said
that’s the window
when I was a child
That’s my first home, she said
that square box—
go ahead and laugh.
Like the inside of my head:
you can see out
but you can’t go out—
Just think
the sun was there, in that bare place
the winter sun
not close enough to reach
the children’s hearts
the light saying
you can see out
but you can’t go out
Here, it says,
here is where everything belongs
It is foolish
to let a young redwood
grow next to a house.
Even in this
one lifetime,
you will have to choose.
That great calm being,
this clutter of soup pots and books—
Already the first branch-tips brush at the window.
Softly, calmly, immensity taps at your life.
I won't be able to write from the grave
so let me tell you what I love:
oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,
cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,
the children nearby, poems and songs,
a friend sleeping in my bed–;
and the short northern nights.
There is no chance that we will fall apart
There is no chance
There are no parts.
Years do odd things to identity.
What does it mean to say
I am that child in the photograph
at Kishamish in 1935?
Might as well say I am the shadow
of a leaf of the acacia tree
felled seventy years ago
moving on the page the child reads.
Might as well say I am the words she read
or the words I wrote in other years,
flicker of shade and sunlight
as the wind moves through the leaves.
I lied about the whales. Fantastical blue
water-dwellers, big, slow moaners of the coastal.
I never saw them. Not once that whole frozen year.
Sure, I saw the raw white, gannets hit the waves
so hard, it could have been a showy blow hole.
But I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes, you just want
something so hard, you have to lie about it,
so you can hold it in your mouth for a minute,
how real hunger has a real taste. Someone once
told me, gannets, those voracious sea birds
of the North Atlantic chill, go blind from the height
and speed of their dives. But that, too, is a lie.
Gannets never go blind and they certainly never die.
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark
After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
Some kind of relaxed and beautiful thing
kept flickering in with the tide
and looking around.
Black as a fisherman’s boot,
with a white belly.
If you asked for a picture I would have to draw a smile
under the perfectly round eyes and above the chin,
which was rough
as a thousand sharpened nails.
And you know
what a smile means,
don’t you?
I wanted
the past to go away, I wanted
to leave it, like another country; I wanted
my life to close, and open
like a hinge, like a wing, like the part of the song
where it falls
down over the rocks: an explosion, a discovery;
I wanted
to hurry into the work of my life; I wanted to know,
whoever I was, I was
alive
for a little while.
It was evening, and no longer summer.
Three small fish, I don’t know what they were,
huddled in the highest ripples
as it came swimming in again, effortless, the whole body
one gesture, one black sleeve
that could fit easily around
the bodies of three small fish.
Also I wanted
to be able to love. And we all know
how that one goes,
don’t we?
Slowly
the dogfish tore open the soft basins of water.
You don’t want to hear the story
of my life, and anyway
I don’t want to tell it, I want to listen
to the enormous waterfalls of the sun.
And anyway it’s the same old story–
a few people just trying,
one way or another,
to survive.
Mostly, I want to be kind.
And nobody, of course, is kind,
or mean,
for a simple reason.
And nobody gets out of it, having to
swim through the fires to stay in
this world.
And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.
And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,
they can do it.
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It's simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
I have a terrible cold,
And everyone knows how terrible colds
Alter the whole system of the universe,
Set us against life,
And make even metaphysics sneeze.
I have wasted the whole day blowing my nose.
My head is aching vaguely.
Sad condition for a minor poet!
Today I am really and truly a minor poet.
What I was in old days was a wish; it's gone.
Goodbye for ever, queen of fairies!
Your wings were made of sun, and I am walking here.
I shan't get well unless I go and lie down on my bed.
I never was well except lying down on the Universe.
Excusez un peu… What a terrible cold!… it's
physical!
I need truth and aspirin.
For Emma
In another life we are neighbors
We trade sticks of butter for Triple A batteries
Gardening tips and plumbers
Garage codes and keys
We salute each other from our front porches
with icy popsicles
steaming mugs of coffe
arms full of packages
We do not need to catch up because I saw you yesterday
and I will see you today
or at the very worst, tomorrow
In another life, we have all the time in the world–
our baby monitors stretching across the back fence
every night, as dusk turns dark
In another life, the only reason we don't walk each other home
is because we're both already there
It is a kind of love, is it not?
How the cup holds the tea,
How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare,
How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes
Or toes. How soles of feet know
Where they’re supposed to be.
I’ve been thinking about the patience
Of ordinary things, how clothes
Wait respectfully in closets
And soap dries quietly in the dish,
And towels drink the wet
From the skin of the back.
And the lovely repetition of stairs.
And what is more generous than a window?
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
We pop into life the way
particles pop in and out
of the continuum.
We are a seething mass
of probability.
And probably I love you.
The evil of larvae
and the evil of stars
are a formula for the future.
Some bodies can
thrust their arms into
a flame and be instantly
cured of this world,
while others sicken.
Why think, little brother
like the moon, spit out like
a broken tooth.
“Oh,” groans the world.
The outer planets,
the fizzing sun, here we come
with our luggage.
Look at the clever things
we have made out of
a few building blocks —
O fabulous continuum.