misc/poetry
Leonard Cohen,
Philip Larkin,
Fernando Pessoa,
Pablo Neruda,
Mark Doty,
Alex Gallo-Brown,
Maggie Smith,
Robert Hass,
Matthew Zapruder
poems i like
There were flies in every room that summer. Windows open, rolled
pages of newsprint at the ready in our grips.
excerpt from a longer poem
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.
<3
Des Esseintes' Last Book
after Huysmans
It was red, which pleased him. Small
and hard, it fit in his palm
as if it loved him and was listening
to the strange, murmurous thumps
of his ambivalent heart. How sleekly
the pages brushed his skin, like sunlight
after a late afternoon bathe, when
suddenly the world is believable
and for an instant he does not want to die.
Yet the empty shelves still sing to him, those slim
alabaster brides, calling him in
from the garden, raising a glass of light.
Through the brambles, one breaks out onto
a rock-cut stair down to the sea.
pretty
Commencement
They're calling old people seniors
short for senior citizens but it's as though
they're still in college and can look forward
to graduate school at Purgatory State
or the University of the Damned and
I can see this poem is intent on being Catholic
though it started out agnostic
Maybe that's because I was talking
to Ed Webster on the phone tonight
and he described himself as an agnostic
who got a job teaching at a Catholic school
in the Bronx or maybe because I was reading
the classifieds in The Daily News today
and several greeted dead ones in heaven
in any case I like seniors maybe the rest of us
are juniors and sophomores and we still have
the junior prom and all that romantic angst
to go through before we reach the holy land
:)
The Autumn constellations
Begin to rise. The brilliant
Moonlight shines on the crowds.
The moon toad swims in the river
And does not drown. The moon rabbit
Pounds the bitter herbs of the
Elixir of eternal life.
His drug only makes my heart
More bitter. The silver brilliance
Only makes my hair more white.
I know that the country is
Overrun with war. The moonlight
Means nothing to the soldiers
Camped in the western deserts.
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.
aaahhh
Eight or seven years ago,
before my back
began to scream at night,
we worked a rusted freighter
held together by forgotten screws.
The cargo was burlap bags of coffee
and the lingering heat of Latin suns.
Spilled beans became
ball bearings beneath our feet
as we swung the sacks
into bulging stacks on pallet boards.
The talk was of other lives
and private selves
with dreams of suburbs
and hard-fought football games.
An older brother heard something
in my own embroidered tale
and said, What's
a nice, educated boy like you
doing in a job like this?
I said then,
and pray it can be said at the end,
I sold my body
to save my mind.
AHHHH
Time for a smoke,
the locker nearly full:
Fourteen tons of
Swanson Chicken Dinners
for the American
officers' club in Taiwan
(breasts, thighs, drumsticks);
Six tons of wings, necks, and backs
bulk packed
bound for Sonny's Supermarket
on Pago Pago;
three tons of chicken stomachs,
a gift from the White House
to the poor of Bangkok.
ahhhh