Bookmarker tag: misc/poetry (75 notes)

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear,
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

This empty street, this sky to blandness scoured,
This air, a little indistinct with autumn
Like a reflection, constitute the present---
A time traditionally soured,
A time unrecommended by event.

But equally they make up something else:
This is the future furthest childhood saw
Between long houses, under travelling skies,
Heard in contending bells---
An air lambent with adult enterprise,

And on another day will be the past,
A valley cropped by fat neglected chances
That we insensately forbore to fleece.
On this we blame our last
Threadbare perspectives, seasonal decrease.

Even so distant, I can taste the grief,
Bitter and sharp with stalks, he made you gulp.
The sun's occasional print, the brisk brief
Worry of wheels along the street outside
Where bridal London bows the other way,
And light, unanswerable and tall and wide,
Forbids the scar to heal, and drives
Shame out of hiding. All the unhurried day
Your mind lay open like a drawer of knives.

Slums, years, have buried you. I would not dare
Console you if I could. What can be said,
Except that suffering is exact, but where
Desire takes charge, readings will grow erratic?
For you would hardly care
That you were less deceived, out on that bed,
Than he was, stumbling up the breathless stair
To burst into fulfilment's desolate attic.

She kept her songs, they took so little space,
 The covers pleased her:
One bleached from lying in a sunny place,
One marked in circles by a vase of water,
One mended, when a tidy fit had seized her,
 And coloured, by her daughter---
So they had waited, till in widowhood
She found them, looking for something else, and stood

Relearning how each frank submissive chord
 Had ushered in
Word after sprawling hyphenated word,
And the unfailing sense of being young
Spread out like a spring-woken tree, wherein
 That hidden freshness sung,
That certainty of time laid up in store
As when she played them first. But, even more,

The glare of that much-mentioned brilliance, love,
 Broke out, to show
Its bright incipience sailing above,
Still promising to solve, and satisfy,
And set unchangeably in order. So
 To pile them back, to cry,
Was hard, without lamely admitting how
It had not done so then, and could not now.

Closed like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time are visited.

Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners, see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets momently
As it is carried in and stowed,

And sense the solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The fastened doors recede. Poor soul ,
They whisper at their own distress;

For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and fashions, there

At last begin to loosen. Far
From the exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And dulls to distance all we are.

When I see a couple of kids
And guess he's fucking her and she's
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise

Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives---
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide

To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That'll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark

About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
---The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused---nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear---no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meawhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Von den Großen dieser Erde
melden uns die Heldenlieder:
Steigend auf so wie Gestirne
gehn sie wie Gestirne nieder.
Das klingt tröstlich, und man muss es wissen.
Nur: für uns, die sie ernähren müssen
ist das leider immer ziemlich gleich gewesen.
Aufstieg oder Fall: Wer trägt die Spesen?

Freilich dreht das Rad sich immer weiter
dass, was oben ist, nicht oben bleibt.
Aber für das Wasser unten heißt das leider
nur: Dass es das Rad halt ewig treibt.

Ach, wir hatten viele Herren
hatten Tiger und Hyänen
hatten Adler, hatten Schweine
doch wir nährten den und jenen.
Ob sie besser waren oder schlimmer:
Ach, der Stiefel glich dem Stiefel immer
und uns trat er. Ihr versteht: Ich meine
dass wir keine andern Herren brauchen, sondern keine!

Freilich dreht das Rad sich immer weiter
dass, was oben ist, nicht oben bleibt.
Aber für das Wasser unten heißt das leider
nur: Dass es das Rad halt ewig treibt.

Und sie schlagen sich die Köpfe
blutig, raufend um die Beute
nennen andre gierige Tröpfe
und sich selber gute Leute.
Unaufhörlich sehn wir sie einander grollen
und bekämpfen. Einzig und alleinig
wenn wir sie nicht mehr ernähren wollen
sind sie sich auf einmal völlig einig.

Denn dann dreht das Rad sich nicht mehr weiter
und das heitre Spiel, es unterbleibt
wenn das Wasser endlich mit befreiter
Stärke seine eigne Sach betreibt.

Was sind das für Zeiten, wo
Ein Gespräch über Bäume fast ein Verbrechen ist
Weil es ein Schweigen über so viele Untaten einschließt!
Der dort ruhig über die Straße geht
Ist wohl nicht mehr erreichbar für seine Freunde
Die in Not sind?

[...]

Ihr aber, wenn es soweit sein wird
Dass der Mensch dem Menschen ein Helfer ist
Gedenkt unsrer
Mit Nachsicht.

You’re supposed to thank the fumes. To be grateful
for the toxic patch on the rail track.
For the craquelure
in the asphalt, seeping green—
it reroutes you, proffers with each commute a forced
adventure. Who’s to say what you’ll find
in your course of avoidance?
Ideally a willing stranger.
Maybe a glimpse of the most
expensive painting per square inch.
When you can no longer meet your needs
by working, you should feel joyous. No more daily
wear and tear on the blazer.
Now you can keep it pristine. Superlatively
inky. It’ll look smart at funerals.
Of course they’ll invite you to make some brief
remarks, and when you move to retrieve
from your pocket the paper,
out will come a whole sheath of solemn statements—
you’ve lost this year
how many? You’ll shuffle
through the pile. Where is the life
that lived in the body before you? Where is the right
one gone?

[...] And, friends
It is rotten, to have had history pull you up and spit you
Out again, for a few good moments, for nothing more
Than debt and waged servitude, all the hours stolen for gas bills,
Their world not built for you, its monstrous incursions
Of spectacular boredom, the sheer misery of getting by,
The mob's grief with a pang, ad now without a mob.
And the pangs ring harder as our bones chill, waiting,
We drink 'til dawn and hope to find something in it,
This city is full of wolves where nothing is plenty for them to eat,
They pull apart the sinews of matter, on which we expend
Ourselves paid down in rent and double rent. It is
The exhaustion, a cloth pressed firmly round the escape pipe,
Troubled air smothering and poisonous, nausea & inertia,
As smoke fills your tear ducts and the tongue dusts,
Two twins holding each of your hands and nailing you
To the floor. And what way to get out when the escape is full
Of rats and the hatches are being smoked out
With putrescent black smoke, all the exits bolted shut.

their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

When you leave the museum

of contemporary art, opening

the doors to midday, you may need

a few minutes to reset context:

the bike shackled to the sign

is only a bike, the sign only a sign,

no small white exhibit labels.

Out here birds are nothing

but their crumb-begging selves,

shitting on cars and waking us

before our alarms. Cars are cars,

shit is shit. You walk by some café

where a woman sits alone unless

you count the two dachshunds

eating torn bits of French bread

she’s tossed under the table.

Aren’t the dogs perfectly

curated and aren’t the branches

like bicycle spokes, the noontime light

a playing card whirring between them?

As if sunlight as sunlight isn’t

art enough, as if trees need to be

more than themselves to deserve

attention, which is a kind of love.

You’re a stranger in this city,

finding your way to the hotel

where you’ll sleep only tonight,

though when you arrive,

you’ll text your husband,

I’m home. It’s more than enough:

the city as itself and you as you

inside it, and home as home,

etcetera, forever.

There are poems of not-knowing that are, for me, very connected to this and have the same quality. One of my favorite haiku is by Basho, who is a poet I think of as actually having many connections to Emily Dickinson. It’s a poem that takes the classic, almost cliché subject of the haiku, the middle high part of the autumn season—the phrase in Japanese is aki fukaki, usually translated “deep autumn” or “autumn deepens,” and there are many such poems: “deep autumn the leaves are falling . . .” “deep autumn even now the quinces . . . ,” deep autumn this and that; the poem of Basho’s on this subject goes:

Deep autumn—
  my neighbor,
how does he live, I wonder?

Paraphrasing haiku, I know, is like explaining jokes; it’s a sort of hopeless enterprise. But what is deeply moving to me about this poem is the way it gets whatever it is in our bodies that groans with gorgeous and painful knowledge in the turning of the year. And it gets the feeling of separateness from other people that accompanies it. And the longing to be connected back to them. Or an awakened curiosity about them, as if, waking to the fact that there are other people with other lives, the speaker in the poem has a sudden taste of his own self, of his having one and being one. Both these poems borrow on long religious traditions. One might not think so, but to speak of “deep autumn” in the Buddhist tradition is to speak of a fundamental idea about nature, that it is impermanent and contingent, as much as talking about light recalls the Gospel of John for a Christian—both of them are poems of essential loneliness that have in them a long experience of religion and a longing for it and a deep separateness from it. And what they have pledged themselves to, as a representation of spirituality, is the work of imagination.

In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:

     The man pulling radishes  
   Pointed my way  
     With a radish.

Can you imagine the situation? The narrator of the poem is hiking along a road. He stops and asks for directions. And the fellow working in the field waves his radish—it’s a daikon, one of those long skinny Japanese radishes—and says, “Oh, it’s about four miles down the road on the left.” That’s my image of myself teaching poetry: I was the guy with the radish.

I was a worker once.
Lent my labor to
the appetites of mass.
Like a caged animal,
my master said,
beautiful, self-contained.
Only once was I asked to sacrifice
the fingers of my left land,
which I gave willingly
and mostly without regret.
I could follow
my master's reasoning.
I was sympathetic
to her plight.
The company had
its own hunger.
We all would
have to give.

What of the other workers?
Where did they figure in?
I kept my gaze
on the task
in front of me.
I waited for
my shift
to end.

You want more police, you said, more patrols,
all of the Aurora crap pushed away,
to some other neighborhood, some other
place, someone else's
problem now, another
community's fate.
Those people don't want
help, anyway.
They want to snort powder
in the back seats of cars,
to break into decent
people's homes, to make
your mom afraid.
Our system is capitalism
and democracy, which means
people will be poor.
Just keep them the hell away.

In the poem
I have been trying
to write you,
I tell you about the hole
in my car
where the radio used to be,
how it was taken
two days before
we shared garlic prawns
at the Thai restaurant on Eastlake,
everything civil,
our disagreements peaceful,
all of us equal
so long as our bank accounts were sturdy enough
to sustain cocktails and Pad Thai and beef salad
alongside talk of the homeless
and criminal justice and the mayor and your lawn

You see? I have been trying to write you a poem,
but all I can come up with
are these banal thoughts
and prosaic observations.

In the poem I have been trying
to write you, I tell you about the hole
in my car where the radio used to be,
how before work each morning
I look down at cords and wires
and Styrofoam.
How its absence reproaches me
like a wound, a rupture
between how I live now
and the experience that used
to belong to me.
I tell you about the thief,
who I never saw but now sense,
a small man a little ashamed
as he reached down to detach
the wires exacting the minimum
amount of damage.
I tell you about the pity
that he felt for me
and the lack of peace
that he held in himself.
I tell you about his sadness
and fragility and fear.

I tell you that the police
will not help you.
I tell you that the prawns
will not help you.
I tell you that playing civil
or socialized or familial
will not help you.
I tell you
that you will die.

At home, I tell my vegetarian friends
that I admire them,
and I do, I think, sneaking mouthfuls
of boiled bird
from the walk-in freezer
I am a dissolute
and undisciplined creature,
but I harbor no illusions
that I am alone.

you know how sometimes you want to write about the working class
you go to the factory district
but there is no working class
just a bunch of hipsters drinking coffee
when you see out of the corner of your eye a giant shadow
it must be a representative of the working classes
you think
and you prepare to write about
how the working class still lives and breathes
when the shadow comes out from around the corner
and puts its finger in your face
don’t write about me, it says,
I know your kind
you make things up that can never happen
then the rest of us spend a century cleaning up the mess

why don’t you write instead
about how with your elegant thin white fingers
that have known neither factory machines nor farm implements
(although, you know what, you can skip that part)
you break off a piece of delicious biscotti

yeah. that would be a lot more realistic
after all you’re so interested in realism

so why don’t you write about how on a sunny May afternoon
you pour yourself a glass of rich red wine
and it sends sparks off your glass, like a snow globe

and as for me I think I can live without
another poem about me, by you,
and anyway what new thing can you say about me?
I know everything about myself already
whereas about a sunny May afternoon
about how ineffably sad one sometimes feels
and how she has such enormous crystal eyes
this you know far better than I
write it. Write about
how a vase full of flowers
wakes up
and pours a child out of itself, with the water

just don’t write about a day in the life of the workers of AvtoVAZ3
and don’t write about young Lenin

write, like Mandelstam, about the yearning for world culture
put yourself somewhere between the bedroom and the chapel

just don’t write anymore about the foundation pit
and try to keep yourself from mentioning solidarity

I think you understand what I’m saying
go and write it
and we’ll read it when we have a break
or maybe we’ll go fishing
or to the bathhouse for a sauna
or maybe to pick mushrooms, the mushrooms are coming up you know
or maybe we’ll go to the theater with our wives using our union cards
or maybe we’ll see the football game, Spartak is coming on, who do you root for?

I apologize if I’ve offended you
the working class has a diverse range of entertainment options
we don’t always have a chance to keep up with contemporary poetry

all right
the main thing is don’t get depressed and start thinking of doing something stupid
I know you poets
first thing that happens you go shooting yourselves or tying up a noose
and then after that our kids come home from literature class all pale
like from another world
they start crying and yelling
dying isn’t anything new in this life
fuck it!

sorry
all right, off you go
before I mess up and say anything else
hurt your feelings
and then you’ll get all inward-looking
you’re the one who taught me
a class in itself must become a class for itself
so live for yourself a little bit
relax
take a break
learn to take some pleasure in life
and don’t be so quiet
why are you quiet all the time?
you scare me with this silence of yours
you’re a prophet, after all
so rise up and speak
inflame our hearts
with your elevated verbiage
nothing that is human is alien to us
in fact maybe it’s through you that we see it
otherwise what the fuck do we need you for
if not to tell us things that have never happened
and about paradise here on earth

They called the tower ugly; they named it an eyesore.
All around the beautiful people in their beautiful houses
Didn’t want the ugly tower to ruin their house prices.
Ten million was spent to encase the tower in cladding.
Had it ever been tested before except on this eyesore,
Had it ever been tested for fire, been tried in a blaze?
But it made the tower look pretty, yes it made the tower look pretty.
But in twenty four storeys, not a single sprinkler.
In twenty four storeys not a single alarm that worked.
In twenty four storeys not a single fire escape,
Only a single stairwell designed in hell, waiting
For an inferno. That’s the story of our times.
Make it pretty on the outside, but a death trap
On the inside. Make the hollow sound nice, make
The empty look nice. That’s all they will see,
How it looks, how it sounds, not how it really is, unseen.
But if you really look you can see it, if you really listen
You can hear it. You’ve got to look beneath the cladding.
There’s cladding everywhere. Political cladding,
Economic cladding, intellectual cladding — things that look good
But have no centre, have no heart, only moral padding.
They say the words but the words are hollow.
They make the gestures and the gestures are shallow.
Their bodies come to the burnt tower but their souls don’t follow.

Residents of the area call it the crematorium.
It has revealed the undercurrents of our age.
The poor who thought voting for the rich would save them.
The poor who believed all that the papers said.
The poor who listened with their fears.
The poor who live in their rooms and dream for their kids.
The poor are you and I, you in your garden of flowers,
In your house of books, who gaze from afar
At a destiny that draws near with another name.
Sometimes it takes an image to wake up a nation
From its secret shame. And here it is every name
Of someone burnt to death, on the stairs or in their room,
Who had no idea what they died for, or how they were betrayed.
They did not die when they died; their deaths happened long
Before. It happened in the minds of people who never saw
Them. It happened in the profit margins. It happened
In the laws. They died because money could be saved and made.

I was reading a biography of Pugin. Architecture
was how Pugin avoided God.
This much is evident. When he slipped out at night
to drift down to the water he was a smoke.
He did not look up at the moon. We can be sure
that any bargain he made was intentional
especially those he bound in straps made of snow.

I can write the saddest verses tonight

Write, for example, "The night is full of stars,
twinkling blue, in the distance."

The night wind spins in the sky and sings.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

On nights like this I held her in my arms.
I kissed her so many times beneath the infinite sky.

She loved me, at times I loved her too.
How not to have loved her great still eyes.

I can write the saddest verses tonight.
To think that I don't have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, more immense without her.
And the verse falls onto my soul like dew onto grass.

Rise up and be born with me, brother.

From the deepest reaches of your
disseminated sorrow, give me your hand.
You will not return from the depths of rock.
You will not return from subterranean time.
It will not return, your drilled-out eyes.
Look at me from the depths of the earth,
plowman, weaver, silent shepherd:
tender of the guardian guanacos:
mason of the impossible scaffold:
water-bearer of Andean tears:
goldsmith of crushed fingers:
farmer trembling on the seed:
potter poured out into your clay:
bring all your old buried sorrows
to the cup of this new life.
Show me your blood and your furrow,
say to me: here I was punished
because the gem didn't shine or the earth
didn't deliver the stone or the grain on time:
point out to me the rock on which you fell
and the wood on which they crucified you,
burn the ancient flints bright for me,
the ancient lamps, the lashing whips
stuck for centuries to your wounds
and the axes brilliant with bloodstain.
I come to speak through your dead mouth.
Through the earth untie all
the silent and split lips
and from the depths speak to me all night long
as if we were anchored together,
tell me everything, chain by chain,
link by link and step by step,
sharpen the knives you kept,
place them in my chest and in my hand,
like a river of yellow lightning,
like a river of buried jaguars,
and let me weep, hours, days, years,
blind ages, stellar centuries.

Give me silence, water, hope.

Give me struggle, iron, volcanoes.

Fasten your bodies to mine like magnets.

Come to my veins and my mouth.

Speak through my words and my blood.

When the trumpet sounded, everything
on earth was prepared
and Jehovah distributed the world
to Coca Cola Inc., Anaconda,
Ford Motors, and other entities:
The Fruit Company Inc.
reserved the juiciest for itself,
the central coast of my land,
the sweet waist of America.
It re-baptized the lands
"Banana Republics"
and on the sleeping dead,
on the restless heroes
who'd conquered greatness,
liberty and flags,
it founded a comic opera:
it alienated free wills,
gave crowns of Caesar as gifts,
unsheathed jealousy, attracted
the dictatorship of the flies,
Trujillo flies, Tachos flies,
Carias flies, Martinez flies,
Ubico flies, flies soppy
with humble blood and marmalade,
drunken flies that buzz
around common graves,
circus flies, learned flies
adept at tyranny.

The company disembarks
among the bloodthirsty flies,
brim-filling their boats that slide
with the coffee and fruit treasure
of our submerged lands like trays.

Meanwhile, along the sugared-up
abysms of the ports,
indians fall over, buried
in the morning mist:
a body rolls, a thing
without a name, a fallen number,
a bunch of dead fruit
spills into the pile of rot.

When they were called to the table,

the tyrants came rushing
with their temporary ladies,
it was fine to watch the women pass
like wasps with big bosoms
followed by those pale
and unfortunate public tigers.

The peasant in the field ate
his poor quota of bread,
he was alone, it was late,
he was surrounded by wheat,
but he had no more bread,
he ate it with grim teeth,
looking at it with hard eyes.

In the blue hour of eating,
the infinite hour of the roast,
[...]

And it was at that age ... poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river
I don't know how or when,
no, they weren't voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street it called me,
from the branches of the night,
abruptly from the others,
among raging fires
or returning alone,
there it was, without a face,
and it touched me.

I didn't know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
something kicked in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first, faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of one who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
the darkness perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the overpowering night, the universe.

And I, tiny being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars.
My heart broke loose with the wind.

After the rape & the bloodbath, the savage king
& his men retired to a long shed built in an open
field by a thin river fashioned for this lull in the pillaging
so the horses could rest. One by one, they scrubbed
blood off their fingers & faces & sat down to devour
a feast of rice & goat served by the villagers.
The legend remains only in the name of a lodge
built in the same place, which from the Bengali means
the King’s Feedery, where the king took his meal.
We say Death stays here when it visits someone
in the family. The time it came for Grandfather, it arrived
late. Not at the wolf’s hour between midnight & first
light, but late morning on the highway, siren blaring
all the way to the nursing home. As if punishing us
for what it botched, it hung around for a few
months at the Feedery, then came for my aunt. Young,
suffering in a marriage, she was taken straight by her weak
heart. I imagine them, father & daughter, sitting still
across a table, sharing a meal of steaming boiled potatoes,
& always in the afterlife that vague dream of salt.
Death takes in threes, they said. We feared it would
come for one of us. In the trashed room,
they found Death’s ledger full of illegible scrawls
in a dark meter no one could understand.
Grandmother’s devastation circled complete, that year
a channel of clear water began thrumming beneath
her skin. We heard it rumble whenever she opened
her mouth to speak. When I think of love,
I think of her weeping as I left, her swollen lip
grazing the back of my hand through the car window. Brief
& bright her long blurred life now summoned
with Death lurking at the borders again.
Married at thirteen, adolescence lost
weeping into a cauldron of chopped onions. She talks
of the flimsy wooden hovel perched on four
fraying stumps & in her telling it is always
how she saw it first, herself decked in gold
with that sinking dread: a preface. I think of love
& I think how when they lifted Grandfather’s bier
she called out to him crying My child
my god  my child

Those mornings in the last days of December,
as the smog deepened over the mausoleum
& the ghost of the emperor’s first wife
lingered about the four gardens, weeping
over her dead child
until a solitary jogger tore the curtain of fog
with a flashlight, making her flee
through a chink in the heavy lid of the small red tomb,
I rose at dawn, washed my face with water
cold as needles & went to work, stomach taut
as deerskin stretched over the seat of a chair.
On the terrace garden above my office,
I drank coffee & smoked a long cigarette
as something unnameable loosened its grip on my neck.
I remember thinking then, This cannot be
the worst of my days, but mostly I remember
myself in some variation of afraid.
Why, I can’t tell.
I had a job, an apartment,
& a woman who claimed to be in love with me
less & less each day. The city’s gray tongue
licked the windows of our room & I knew
they would come for us soon,
that one of us would be called first
to initiate the slaughter, then later
led into a dim corridor to watch
through a one-way mirror the other
slipping on entrails, trying to clamber out of it.
At the parties, I got drunk & cursed everyone.
At home, I smoked anything the women
from the university brought me.
I wrote poems that went on for years into my sleep.
When we finally parted, the city shrank
down to the few bars, her dentist, the hospital
she drove me to where they treated
the third-degree burns from the hot oil
that jumped out of a pan one night
to grab the back of my hand.
The billboards outside the malls looked
vulgar, like my scarred hand in the yellow
light that fell on the pavement. But always
that serious joy in the drunken body
stammering home in the dark.
In the daylight I felt dizzy with fear
of running into her. This vast city
open to invaders & vagrants for centuries
now small for two.
A few things became clear to me then.
The body itself has no use for hope.
It hardens in grief to live beyond hope.
And the only real use of narrative is to cheat
that ancient urge inside us, pale animal
with its face resembling the inside of our death
masks, its long unheeded, persistent murmur
clearing into a deafening verdict: Leave.

From the library I procured a book and started reading the poems. There was no reason to think I was going to enjoy them. I was not a particularly artistic kid, and I didn’t work on our high school literary magazine, or write. Nothing was auspicious. I do not remember opening the book. Yet to this day I still remember reading the first few lines of “Musée des Beaux Arts”:

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along

and something just clicked. I can’t say I felt I immediately understood everything, but the poem seemed to mean something I could not quite put my finger on, something important to me.

I think this is one reason why Ashbery is often thought of as difficult or elusive. It can seem to readers either like there is nothing there, or that they are missing something. “The poem is sad, because it wants to be yours, and cannot,” he writes in another poem, “Paradoxes and Oxymorons,” which begins:

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.
Look at it talking to you. You look out a window
Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it.
You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birth is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remember how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled
bread,
the thing her father said to her that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as
numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

I am trying to pry open your casket
with this burning snowflake.

I’ll give up my sleep for you.
This freezing sleet keeps coming down
and I can barely see.

If this trick works we can rub our hands
together, maybe

start a little fire
with our identification papers.
I don’t know but I keep working, working

half hating you,
half eaten by the moon.

Did I think it would abide as it was forever
 all that time ago the turned earth in the old garden
where I stood in spring remembering spring in another place
 that had ceased to exist and the dug roots kept giving up
their black tokens their coins and bone buttons and shoe nails
 made by hands and bits of plates as the thin clouds
of that season slipped past gray branches on which the early
 white petals were catching their light and I thought I
 knew
something of age then my own age which had conveyed me
 to there and the ages of the trees and the walls and houses
from before my coming and the age of the new seeds as I
 set each one in the ground to begin to remember
what to become and the order in which to return
 and even the other age into which I was passing
all the time while I was thinking of something different

There were flies in every room that summer. Windows open, rolled
pages of newsprint at the ready in our grips.

The house passes a bailout for time. Every day

is shortened by two hours. It’s ratified

in the senate; the president, may he die, applauds.

They underpay workers to go around adjusting clocks

so the minute hands can keep up the pace. Watches

go on strike, then grandfather clocks, then phones. We go

back to sundials, and when it rains we hold each other’s

contacts up to our floor lamps (we have so many

floor lamps now) and wherever the spotlight falls

we wait until it turns green. No one assassinates

the president yet. Why depends on where

you’re reading this. There’s a law against spit now.

A city ordinance for limelight. All the op-ed pages

are in agreement about the uselessness of forms,

and in Alabama, we’re told a man had himself declared

legally miraculous. I disagree with the premise.

The alarm clocks have a picket line: they march

in figure eights around city hall, waking everyone up.

Young radicals get tattoos of the hours.

Nothing is done so much lately. There’s talk

of the rich being able to buy themselves another week.

The days are laid off. The seasons tighten their belts.

On Day 1, the photographer walks into camp
and immediately starts shooting. She shoots us

at breakfast eating our C-rations, in our hammocks
reading Stars and Stripes. She shoots us in her sleep.

You came one day and
as usual in such matters
significance filled everything—
your eyes, the things you
knew, the way you turned,
leaned, stood, or sat,
this way or that: when
you left, the area around here rose
a tilted tide, and everything that
offers desolation drained away.

I forgot to tell you my husband
died. He was in Spain and something
strange happened with alcohol or water. He loved them
both so much. Which reminds me, do you want
to be cremated or buried? The difference,
if you do not know, is the ghost
or the body; heaven or sex.

Also I am planning a trip. No place special
just somewhere God has been.
Do you have any ideas? From there I will bring back
vials of ambergris. Did I mention I am carrying
his baby. I am in the tenth month and still
he does not show. The house hates me
and breaks everything I touch.

I myself prefer to be left
face up in a ditch and for someone to go
to jail because of what he’s done to me.
That way I can watch the stars
as they move toward the end of the sky
and he can plan his last
meal or some other consolation.

The awake, all straight-backed
and well-groomed, wait at a table
made of sharp sunlight. I’m late
as usual, but this is the morning

I give in, sign over everything:
pillow-gluttony, sheet-sickness,
the blanket’s wrapper like skin
on my skin, clock meaningless.

This solo has gone on far too long,
this cat’s life, drunk, disappearing,
the bed itself my ravenous lover;
goodbye, we will be acquaintances.

I must be alert to my own dying,
push away dreams’ hot reason.
I must walk on gravel and not hide
in cakey layers. The soft cloth

around me will bristle, hairshirt
an alarm: You’ll miss everything.
Get up, the day is waiting,
that crooked clown.

Allow me to apologize for my self-absorption. My virus
is your virus, ours is a virulent commonwealth.
We breed them together, refine them, borrow them
from friends and strangers, camels and bats,
as my body fights its infection the global corpus
combats our latest invader—retrovirus, ebolavirus, coronavirus—
we are besieged, we sicken, we counterattack, we die.
But illness leads you inward, away from the tribe,
the clan, the calculus of multitudes
vs. singletons that constitutes American thought.
Interiority is a mode of social distancing.
Here, in the hospital, I am me, alone, a being
frightened of its own mechanical failings,
like a bystander trapped in a broken elevator.
I feel, to myself, like a construct, a built thing, a city
in which I encounter my own bacterial hordes as strangers
passing silently through a maze of narrow alleys.
I watch my heart pulsing and I do not think,
That is me, there beats my engine,
I think, Ah, skillful machine, as if it were an iPhone.
I feel the body’s otherness all around me.
I compose the urgent letter in its envelope,
I carry the scepter in its keep.
It is a prison and a vehicle of emancipation, a strong horse.
My legs trot and canter, my hair grows unlicensed,
my lungs expand and contract automatically.
I am me, alone, but how do I happen
to be here? What am I
if not my body?
Who am I if not that it?
The doctors tell me the many ways I might die
but not how I come to be alive,
existence is a fever of unknown origin,
a pandemonium of desires—
I want to live, I want to breathe, I want
to see as vividly as Vermeer and as broadly as a common fly
and as encyclopedically as the mantis shrimp
though I cannot understand why
it would need to differentiate ten million colors
or how anyone could measure its ability to do so—
the Ishihara test?—simple questionnaires?
I want my heart to shake its defiant fist at the sky forever.
I want my soul to swell with sorrow as with joy.
Most of all, with a desperation that embarrasses me,
as if I had been jailed a decade, I want to go home.

When the ice will creak
Between green shoes, and from the pale
Blue bitter airs
Barbarous globes of spring
Will break through.

We will be far away.

We would like to return and look,
Caress the clover of the heaths
The doorposts of the new home
Cry in pity
Where our mother passed.

Instead we will be far away.

Instead we prisoners
Will laugh without respite
And hate as far as the knife
Blades are gripped.
Damned those who lead us.

Far, always far away.

And when we have returned
wild grass will cover the courtyards
and the breath of the dead in the air.
The creases on the hands,
the rust on the shovels.

And still we will be far.

We will still be far
From the face that welcomes us in our sleep
here, tired of hate and love.

But new hands will come
As new leaves do.

Now to our distant camps.

But the bud will open
And the water spring speak, as it once did.
You will shine, buried stone,
Our ancient human heart,
Raw shard, bare law.

In the gaze of the distant sky.

I dwell in Possibility—
A fairer House than Prose—
More numerous of Windows—
Superior—for Doors—

Of Chambers as the Cedars—
Impregnable of eye—
And for an everlasting Roof
The Gambrels of the Sky—

Of Visitors—the fairest—
For Occupation—This—
The spreading wide my narrow Hands
To gather Paradise—

Out of some simple part of me
which I cannot use up
 I took a blessing for the flowers
tightening in the night
like fists of jealous love
 like knots
no one can undo without destroying
 The new morning gathered me
in blue mist
 like dust under wedding gown
Then I followed the day
like a cloud of heavy sheep
  after the judas
up a blood-ringed ramp
into the terror of every black building

Ten years sealed journeys unearned dreams
Laughter meant to tempt me into old age
 spilled for friends stars unknown flesh mules sea
Instant knowledge of bodies material and spirit
 which slowly learned would have made death smile
Stories turning into theories
 which begged only for the telling and retelling
Girls sailing over the blooms of my mouth
 with a muscular triangular kiss
ordinary mouth to secret mouth
Nevertheless my homage sticky flowers
 rabbis green and red serving the sun like platters
In the end you offered me the dogma you taught
 me to disdain and I good pupil disdained it
I fell under the diagrammed fields like the fragment
of a perfect statue layers of cities build upon
I saw you powerful I saw you happy
 that I could not live only for harvesting
that I was a true citizen of the slow earth

Light and Splendour
in the sleeping orchards
entering the trees
like a silent movie wedding procession
entering the arches of branches
for the sake of love only
From a hill I watched
the apple blossoms breathe
the silver out of the night
like fish eating the spheres
of air out of the river
So the illumined night fed
the sleeping orchards
entering the vaults of branches
like a holy procession
Long live the Power of Eyes
Long live the invisible steps
men can read on a mountain
Long live the unknown machine
or heart
which by will or accident
pours with victor's grace
endlessly perfect weather
on the perfect creatures
the world grows

Montreal
July 1964

I once believed a single line
 in a Chinese poem could change
  forever how blossoms fell
and that the moon itself climbed on
 the grief of concise weeping men
  to journey over cups of wine
I thought invasions were begun for crows
 to pick at a skeleton
  dynasties sown and spent
to serve the language of a fine lament
 I thought governors ended their lives
  as sweetly drunken monks
telling time by rain and candles
 instructed by an insect’s pilgrimage
  across the page – all this
so one might send an exile’s perfect letter
to an ancient hometown friend

I chose a lonely country
 broke from love
  scorned the eternity of war
I polished my tongue against the pumice moon
 floated my soul in cherry wine
  a perfumed barge for Lords of Memory
to languish on to drink to whisper out
 their store of strength
  as if beyond the mist along the shore
their girls their power still obeyed
 like clocks wound for a thousand years
I waited until my tongue was sore

Brown petals wind like fire around my poems
 I aimed them at the stars but
  like rainbows they were bent
before they sawed the world in half
 Who can trace the canyoned paths
  cattle have carved out of time
wandering from meadowlands to feasts
 Layer after layer of autumn leaves
  are swept away
Something forgets us perfectly

We meet in a hotel
with many quarters for the radio
surprised that we've survived as lovers
not each other's
but lovers still
with outrageous hope and habits in the craft
which embarrass us slightly
as we let them be known
the special caress the perfect inflammatory word
the starvation we do not tell about
We do what only lovers can
make a gift out of necessity
Looking at our clothes
folded over the chair
I see we no longer follow fashion
and we own our own skins
God I'm happy we've forgotten nothing
and can love each other
for years in the world

I had it for a moment
I knew why I must thank you
 I saw powerful governing men in black suits
I saw them undressed
in the arms of young mistresses
the men more naked than the naked women
the men crying quietly
 No that is not it
I'm losing why I must thank you
which means I'm left with pure longing
How old are you
Do you like your thighs
I had it for a moment
I had a reason for letting the picture
of your mouth destroy my conversation
 Something on the radio
the end of a Mexican song
I saw the musicians getting paid
they are not even surprised
they knew it was only a job
 Now I've lost it completely
A lot of people think you are beautiful
How do I feel about that
I have no feeling about that
 I had a wonderful reason for not merely courting you
It was tied up with the newspapers
 I saw secret arrangements in high offices
I saw men who loved their worldliness
even though they had looked through
big electric telescopes
they still thought their worldliness was serious
not just a hobby a taste a harmless affectation
 they thought the cosmos listened
I was suddenly fearful
one of their obscure regulations could separate us
 I was ready to beg for mercy
Now I'm getting into humilitation
I've lost why I began this
I wanted to talk about your eyes
I know nothing about your eyes
and you've noticed how little I know
I want you somewhere safe
far from high offices
 I'll study you later
So many people want to cry quietly beside you

A cross didn't fall on me
when I went for hot dogs
and the all-night Greek
slave in the Silver Gameland
didn't think I was his brother
Love me because nothing happens

I believe the rain will not
make me feel like a feather
when it comes tonight after
the streetcars have stopped
because my size is definite
Love me because nothing happens

Do you have any idea how
many movies I had to watch
before I knew surely
that I would love you
when the lights woke up
Love me because nothing happens

Here is a headline July 14
in the city of Montreal
Intervention décisive de Pearson
a la conference du Commonwealth
That was yesterday
Love me because nothing happens

Stars and stars and stars
keep it to themselves
Have you ever noticed how private
a wet tree is
a curtain of razor blades
Love me because nothing happens

Why should I be alone
if what I say is true
I confess I mean to find
a passage or forge a passport
or talk a new language
Love me because nothing happens

I confess I meant to grow
wings and lose my mind
I confess that I've
forgotten what for
Why wings and a lost mind
Love me because nothing happens

In the Bible generations pass in a paragraph, a betrayal is disposed of in a phrase, the creation of the world consumes a page. I could never pick the important dynasty out of a multitude, you must have your forehead shining to do that, or to choose out of the snarled network of daily evidence the denials and the loyalties. Who can choose what olive tree the story will need to shade its lovers, what tree out of the huge orchard will give them the particular view of branches and sky which will unleash their kisses. Only two shining people know, they will go directly to the roots they lie between. For my part I describe the whole orchard.

I stepped into an avalanche
It covered up my soul
When I am not this hunchback
I sleep beneath a hill
You who wish to conquer pain
Must learn to serve me well

You strike my side by accident
As you go down for gold
The cripple that you clothe and feed
Is neither starved nor cold
I do not beg for company
in the centre of the world

When I am on a pedestal
you did not raise me there
your laws do not compel me
to kneel grotesque and bare
I myself am pedestal
For the thing at which you stare

You who wish to conquer pain
must learn what makes me kind
The crumbs of love you offer me
are the crumbs I've left behind
Your pain is no credential
It is the shadow of my wound

I have begun to claim you
I who have no greed
I have begun to long for you
I who have no need
The avalanche you're knocking at
is uninhabited

Do not dress in rags for me
I know you are not poor
Don't love me so fiercely
When you know that you are not sure
It is your world beloved
It is your flesh I wear

You do not have to love me
just because
you are all the women
I have ever wanted
I was born to follow you
every night
while I am still
the many men who love you

I meet you at a table
I take your fist between my hands
in a solemn taxi
I wake up alone
my hand on your absense
in Hotel Discipline

I wrote all these songs for you
I burned red and black candles
shaped like a man and a woman
I married the smoke
of two pyramids of sandalwood
I prayed for you
I prayed that you would love me
and that you would not love me

I met you
just after death
had become truly sweet
There you were
24 years old
Joan of Arc
I came after you
with all my art
with everything
you know I am a god
who needs to use your body
who needs to use your body
to sing about beauty
in a way no one
has ever sung before
you are mine
are you one of my last women

He studies to describe
the lover he cannot become
failing the widest dreams of the mind
& settling for visions of God

The tatters of his discipline
have no beauty
that he can hold so easily
 as your beauty

He does not know how
to trade himself for your love
Do not trust him
unless you love him

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness —

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we’re to become part of it all,
won’t our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We’ll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we’ve made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that’s me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that’s what there were to experience.

Perhaps that’s why she’s a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won’t be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see.
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground

Blackboard covered with a dust
 of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
  wormed by turbulence: the rod glides

and the vet narrates shadows
 I can’t quite force into shape:
  His kidneys might . . . the spleen appears . . .

I can’t see what he sees, and so
 resort to simile: cloudbank, galaxy
  blurred with slow comings

and goings, that far away. The doctor
 makes appreciative noises,
  to encourage me;

he praises Beau’s stillness.
 I stroke the slope beneath
  those open, abstracted eyes,

patient, willing to endure whatever
 we deem necessary, while the vet
  runs along the shaved blonde

Today I’m herding the two old dogs
 into the back of the car,
  after the early walk, wet woods:

Beau’s generous attention must be
 brought into focus, gaze pointed
  to the tailgate so he’ll be ready to leap,

and Arden, arthritic in his hind legs,
 needs me to lift first his forepaws
  and then, placing my hands

under his haunches, hoist the moist
 black bulk of him into the wagon,
  and he growls a little

before he turns to face me,
 glad to have been lifted—
  And as I go to praise them,

as I like to do, the words
 that come from my mouth,
  from nowhere, are Time’s children,

as though that were the dearest thing
 a person could say.
  Why did I call them by that name?

They race this quick parabola
 faster than we do, as though
  it were a run in the best of woods,

run in their dreams, paws twitching
 —even asleep they’re hurrying.
  Doesn’t the world go fast enough?

We’re caught in this morning’s
 last-of-April rain, the three of us
  bound and fired by duration

—rhythm too swift for even them
 to hear, though perhaps we catch
 a little of that rush and ardor

—furious poetry!—
 the sound time makes,
  seeing us through.

Big blocks of ice
—clear cornerstones—
chug down a turning belt
toward the blades of a wicked,

spinning fan; scraping din
of a thousand skates and then
powder flies out in a roaring
firehose spray of diamond dust,

and the film crew obscures
the well-used Manhattan snow
with a replica of snow.

Trailers along the edge of the Square,
arc lamps, the tangled cables
of a technical art, and our park’s

a version of itself. We walk here
daily, the old dogs and I glad
for the open rectangle of air

held in its frame of towers,
their heads held still and high
to catch the dog run’s rich,

acidic atmosphere, whitened faces
—theirs and mine—lifted toward gray
branches veining the variable sky.

Today we’re stopped at the rim:
one guy’s assigned the task
of protecting the pristine field

a woman will traverse
—after countless details are worried
into place—at a careful angle,

headed toward West Fourth.
They’re filming The Hours,
Michael’s novel, a sort of refraction

of Mrs. Dalloway. Both books
transpire on a single June day;
that’s the verb; these books do

breathe an air all attention,
as if their substance were a gaze
entirely open to experience, eager

to know—They believe
the deepest pleasure is seeing
and saying how we see,

even when we’re floored
by spring’s sharp grief, or a steady
approaching wave of darkness.

In the movie version, it’s winter;
they’re aiming for a holiday release,
and so must hasten onward.

Someone calls out Background!
and hired New Yorkers begin
to pass behind the perfect field,

a bit self-conscious, skaters
and shoppers too slow to convince,
so they try it again, Clarissa passing

the sandblasted arch
bound in its ring of chain-link,
monument glowing gray against the gray

A little less now in the world to love.

Taxi on Bleecker, dim afternoon, after
a bright one’s passing, after the hours
in stations and trains, blur of the meadows

through dull windows, fitful sleep,
heading home, and now the darkness inside
the cab deeper than anything a winter afternoon

could tender. Nothing stays, the self
has no power over time, we’re stuck
in a clot of traffic, then this: a florist shop,

where something else stood yesterday,
what was it? Do things give way that fast?
PARADISE FLOWERS, arced in gold

on the window glass, racks and rows
of blooms, and an odd openness on the sidewalk,
and—look, the telltale script of cables

inking the street, trailers near, and Martian lamps,
and a lone figure in a khaki coat poised
with a clutch of blooms while they check her aspect

through the lens: Clarissa, of course,
buying the flowers herself.
I take it personally. As if,

no matter what, this emblem persists:
a woman went to buy flowers, years ago,
in a novel, and was entered

by the world. Then in another novel,
her double chose blooms of her own
while the blessed indifferent life

of the street pierced her, and now
here she is, blazing in a dim trench
of February, the present an image

reduced through a lens, a smaller version
of a room in which love resided.
Though they continue, shadow and replica,

copy and replay, adapted, reduced,
reframed: beautiful versions—a paper cone of asters,
golden dog nipping at a glove—fleeting,

and no more false than they are true.

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone’s now. Memory’s furious land.

The flowers that I left in the ground,
that I did not gather for you,
today I bring them all back,
to let them grow forever,
not in poems or marble,
but where they fell and rotted.

And the ships in their great stalls,
huge and transitory as heroes,
ships I could not captain,
today I bring them back
to let them sail forever,
not in model or ballad,
but where they were wrecked and scuttled.

And the child on whose shoulders I stand,
whose longing I purged
with public, kingly discipline,
today I bring him back
to languish forever,
not in confession or biography,
but where he flourished,
growing sly and hairy.

It is not malice that draws me away,
draws me to renunciation, betrayal:
it is weariness, I go for weariness of thee.
Gold, ivory, flesh, love, G-d, blood, moon—
I have become the expert of the catalogue.

My body once so familiar with glory,
my body has become a museum:
this part remembered because of someone’s mouth,
this because of a hand,
this of wetness, this of heat.

Who owns anything he has not made?
With your beauty I am as uninvolved
as with horses’ manes and waterfalls.
This is my last catalogue.
I breathe the breathless
I love you, I love you—
and let you move forever.

There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names to time.

Grave-markers are not high enough
or green,
and sons go far away
to lose the fist
their father’s hand will always seem.

I had a friend:
he lived and died in mighty silence
and with dignity,
left no book, son, or lover to mourn.

Nor is this a mourning-song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk,
fragrant, dark, and softly white
under the pale of mist.
I name this mountain after him.

Whatever cities are brought down,
I will always bring you poems,
and the fruit of orchards
I pass by.

Strangers in your bed,
excluded by our grief,
listening to sleep-whispering,
will hear their passion beautifully explained,
and weep because they cannot kiss
your distant face.

Lovers of my beloved,
watch how my words put on her lips like clothes,
how they wear her body like a rare shawl.
Fruit is pyramided on the window-sill,
songs flutter against the disappearing wall.

The sky of the city
is washed in the fire
of Lebanese cedar and gold.
In smoky filigree cages
the apes and peacocks fret.
Now the cages do not hold,
in the burning street man and animal
perish in each other’s arms,
peacocks drown around the melting throne.

Is it the king
who lies beside you listening?
Is it Solomon or David
or stuttering Charlemagne?
Is that his crown
in the suitcase beside your bed?

When we meet again,
you all in white,
I smelling of orchards,
when we meet—

But now you awaken
and you are tired of this dream.
Turn toward the sad-eyed man.
He stayed by you all the night.
You will have something
to say to him.

And cast ye the unprofitable servant into outer darkness:
there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

The first bridge on Constitución. At my feet
the shunting trains trace iron labyrinths.
Steam hisses up and up into the night
which becomes, at a stroke, the Night of the Last Judgment.

From the unseen horizon,
and from the very center of my being,
an infinite voice pronounced these things—
things, not words. This is my feeble translation,
time-bound, of what was a single limitless Word:
“Stars, bread, libraries of East and West,
playing cards, chessboards, galleries, skylights, cellars,
a human body to walk with on the earth,
fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death,
shadows for forgetting, mirrors which endlessly multiply,
falls in music, gentlest of all time's shapes,
borders of Brazil, Uruguay, horses and mornings,
a bronze weight, a copy of Grettir Saga,
algebra and fire, the charge at Junin in your blood,
days more crowded than Balzac, scent of the honeysuckle,
love, and the imminence of love, and intolerable remembering,
dreams like buried treasure, generous luck,
and memory itself, where a glance can make men dizzy—
all this was given to you and, with it,
the ancient nourishment of heroes—
treachery, defeat, humiliation.
In vain have oceans been squandered on you, in vain
the sun, wonderfully seen through Whitman's eyes.
You have used up the years and they have used up you,
and still, and still, you have not written the poem.”

There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again,
There is a nearby street forbidden to my step,
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time,
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world.
Among the books in my library (I have them before me)
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year:
Death reduces me incessantly.

JAN 15, 2007   SICILY CAFÉ

And now that I kneel
At the edge of my years
Let me fall through the mirror of love

And the things that I know
Let them drift like the snow
Let me dwell in the light that’s above

In the radiant light
Where there’s day and there’s night
And truth is the widest embrace

That includes what is lost
Includes what is found
What you write and what you erase

And when will my heart break open
When will my love be born
In this scheme of unspeakable suffering
Where even the blueprint is torn

I used to keep a full picture of her
Hidden on my laptop
Then I thought:
I can’t do this again
And I dragged it (reluctantly)
To the little trash basket
Which I did not empty for quite a while

And the man fell silent, looking at the sunset.
But what good is a sunset to one who hates and loves?

PERHAPS THOSE WHO ARE GOOD AT SEEING ARE POOR AT FEELING

Perhaps those who are good at seeing are poor at feeling
And do not enchant because they don’t know how to act.
There are ways for doing all things,
And love also has its way.
Those whose way of seeing a field is by seeing the grass
Cannot have the blindness that makes a man stir feelings.
I loved, and was not loved, which I only saw in the end,
For one is not loved as one is born but as may happen.
She still has beautiful lips and hair, like before.
And I am still alone in the field, like before.
I think this and my head lifts up
As if it had been bent down,
And the divine sun dries the small tears I can’t help but have.
How vast the field is and how tiny love!
I look, and I forget, as the world buries and trees lose their leaves.

Because I am feeling, I cannot speak.
I listen to my voice as if it belonged to another.
And my voice speaks of her as if this other were speaking.
Her hair is yellow-blond like wheat in bright sunlight,
And when she speaks, her mouth utters things not told by words.
She smiles, and her teeth gleam like the river’s stones.

18 NOVEMBER 1929

I multiplied myself to feel myself,
To feel myself I had to feel everything,
I overflowed, I did nothing but spill out,
I undressed, I yielded,
And in each corner of my soul there’s an altar to a different god.

Put time to good use!
But what’s time that I should put it to use?
Put time to good use!
Not a day without a few lines . . .
Honest and first-rate work
Like that of a Virgil or Milton . . .
But to be honest or first-rate is so hard!
To be Milton or Virgil is so unlikely!

I got off the train
And said goodbye to the man I’d met.
We’d been together for eighteen hours
And had a pleasant conversation,
Fellowship in the journey,
And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave
This chance friend whose name I never learned.
I felt my eyes water with tears . . .
Every farewell is a death.
Yes, every farewell is a death.
In the train that we call life
We are all chance events in one another’s lives,
And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off.

BY THE MOONLIGHT, IN THE DISTANCE

By the moonlight, in the distance,
A sailboat on the river
Sails peacefully by.
What does it reveal?

I don’t know, but my being
Feels suddenly strange,
And I dream without seeing
The dreams that I have.

What anguish engulfs me?
What love can’t I explain?
It’s the sailboat that passes
In the night that remains.

12/18/63

The taste of death is sometimes in my mouth, these solitary evenings.

Each day I live means one day less to live.

That’s evident!

Before I die, I’d spend some time with her,

Just living.

Mornings are frantic, like all mornings,

The too fresh mind incapable

Of the maniacal decisions that produce art.

Exhausted by afternoon, I have completed my chores,

And am faced with myself and my hot-self again.

Then I work. I work like a worm in the earth,

I work like a termite fashioning a tunnel, a bridge.

I work for a future I can no longer see.

That’s my life.

Will I in five years, two years, one,

Gnash my teeth again (teeth long ago gnashed to bits)

And curse what I hesitate to call my fate, my pattern?

Or should I call it my stupidity?

Who but an imbecile would have chosen such a hard way?

Or shall I in five years or one,

Grow like an oak dressed in evergreen.

Happiness having swollen in me, become me,

Because of the devotion which she swears?

This I argue with myself on paper.

That is what I feel like sometimes,

Paper.

De Iuventute

When I was a young man
chasing girls I was so
hot to get into them I
never had time to learn
to savor the pleasures
of it. Fuss and rush
was all it was. And on
to the next.

Now that I'm old and
girls will have none
of me I must try to
imagine what it would
have been like with
each of them if I
had taken some pains
to learn to please them.

Santander Bank was smashed into!
I was getting nowhere with the novel & suddenly the
reader became the book & the book was burning
& you said it was reading
but reading hits you on the head
so it was really burning & the reader was
dead & I was happy for you & I had been
standing there awhile when I got your text
Santander Bank was smashed into!
there were barricades in London
there were riot girls drinking riot rosé
the party melted into the riot melted into the party
like fluid road blocks & gangs & temporary
autonomous zones & everyone & I
& we all stopped reading

Don’t believe everything you see on YouTube
& I don’t mean don’t believe it

The way you wouldn’t believe something
On the cover of the National Enquirer; I mean
Don’t believe it like so many people

Believed lonelygirl15. Don’t place
Too much importance on a person’s intentions
Which for most people become clear

Only with time. You know
There are so many videos that will show you
How to do your hair like your favorite soap star.

It’s kind of incredible the innovations
That have been made in hair care products. Life
Before conditioner was never good

& it didn’t get better, but now when you get
Out of the shower it’s easy to untangle your hair. It’s not
A metaphor or universal but the idea is your hair

Will be soft

DOG POEM

On this day 11 years ago my father died.
I watched him refuse death.
There was no reason to share this.
It was an indignity.
There is no refusing.
The brain stops even if until the last it performs miraculously the
duty of remaining illuminated.
He died on an evening like this warm one in November.
Loose leaves blew around the parking lot as I drove away from the
place of his death, a hospital.
I smoked with my mother's second sister just beyond the gate of the house my parents bought, owned and lived in together for twenty-six years.
I lived in that house, but did not live there then.
We smoked and a reporter came to the gate and asked her
questions.
She was ashamed.
There was no need to answer her.
We did not answer.
We smoked.
The night was strangely warm, like so many peculiar Halloweens,
November in just a few days.
Autumn quiets or casts itself between the warm parts of air.
It fills spaces of warmth with cold.