misc/poetry

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.

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 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—

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.

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.

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.

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