Selected Poems
Page 11
a synthesis of something beyond
another sundown on the back lawn
under the retractable awning.
I want to stand beneath this tree.
I want to put my hand to its bark.
I’ll leave tonight, no, Tuesday.
I’ll head dead west and ask of all I see:
Which is the way, the long or the short way,
to the west shining tree?
Rue de la Vieille Lanterne
Gerard de Nerval (1808-1855)
Where are the shoelaces of yesteryear, Gérard?
Those with which you hanged yourself
from a streetlamp? Or, as some accounts say,
from a window grating, on this little rathole
street in Paris, where there’s a plaque for you.
Perhaps ‘window grating’ is less poetic in French.
Some called you an early, though not the last, poète-maudit.
A poet who walked a pet lobster on a blue leash
seems, however, hardly glum!
Some kind of hide, I’m assuming shoelaces
in the nineteenth century were stout
and long enough to wrap around
your neck a few times.
An early walker of a French dog,
is that who first discovered you, Gérard,
or the last drunk stumbling home?
The shoelaces of yesteryear, where did they go?
The same place as François Villon’s snows
of yesteryear, nearly four centuries before you took exit,
the same place as the snows of last winter, and all the winters
in between, and all snows to come.
Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding Down Your Throat (A Belgian Euphemism)
– Jenny
It tasted so good; the touch of it tasted so… God,
handless, must have had a hand in it; it wasn’t ‘like’ anything,
though language without simile is like a lung
without air, or air and nary
a lung to breathe. It was like the lip
of a small waterfall, its perfect curve,
the half-breath-held-split-moment
the last few inches of horizontal river
turn into the first few inches of vertical river.
It was like that, or, it was like, but better than,
the word ‘negligee’ or the word ‘nugatory’
or ‘lagniappe’ (pronounced lan-yap: a small gift or tip).
It was, too, like the color of the crow’s wing,
in which blue and green burn beneath the black.
I’d compare it to a perfect parabola,
at the exact peak of which
a man shot out of a cannon exclaims: Yes!
I’ll land dead center of the net,
let’s move the cannon back
twenty feet, increase the powder load, redo the physics,
let’s try it again right now!
It felt like holding an otter intent
on play, it was like a ptarmigan
on the tundra guarding her eggs,
it was like the moon in the glass eye
of a man lying in the grass
but not like the moon in his good
eye – that’s a little puff of cataract.
No, it was not like, nor unlike, anything.
It was her heart carving
the air as she spoke.
Not the Same Kind of Mud as in
‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’
The dust motes of mud at a pond’s bottom,
sluggish river, or swamp. The finest, most ethereal
of muds, rising in soft pinheads
from the density below; the fog of mud, what first
grips your ankle so whisperly, a little warmer
than the water above it, a satiny sock
saying, Dip your foot a little deeper into…
The mud of blur and smudge.
The almost drinkable mud.
The dusk of mud, the passage, the membrane,
the place between less creamy mud
and harder mud, riverbed.
Drifty elixir, reenvisioning
us, red-carpeting us, down.
Why
It is an execrable and damnable monosyllable, why; it exasperates God, ruins us.
JOHN DONNE, Sermon CXXX
Why so much bread rotting on shelves and the mice so fat they roll
to their holes
at night, their legs too short
to pass their bellies to the floor, whyzat?
What starts up the diphtherial winds, melanoma sunsets?
I was also wondering (So he stood in his shoes /
And he wonder’d. / He stood in his shoes /And he wonder’d.) why
the years come to resemble a greasy deck of cards,
why afternoons bleed,
why does my friend die
before I’ve met her in the flesh
which she ordered turned to ash
the minute she was dead?
Now that I’m asking: Why the incapables, thirsty
at the lip only, why
the incapables commanding the capables,
and howzit the broken, melon-kneed horse
is made to kneel
before the bullet to his brain?
I’m full of whys!
Why is there no limit to recrudescence?
Why did that man jump so high
he forgot to come down, why, in a place with no more air,
it still looks as if air remains,
why-o, why-o, why?
The Riverine Farmers
Farming by a river, your fields
within twenty feet of its banks’ shade trees.
Drinking from the river,
bathing in it, feeding your fields with its waters,
taking fish and, in winter, eels
from beneath the ice
at its crenelated edges,
thanking it for the silt it leaves after spring’s snowmelt,
sitting by it in August when it’s lowest,
its bigger bed-stones exposed.…
What we’d do, because there was a bow
in the river, what we’d do – my brothers
and I – was launch some boats of sticks
and leaves and race across the bow’s neck
to see which ones made it
around the bend’s swirling eddies,
then watch them ride the little rapids
that slid under the barbwire fence line
ending our land. The boys
sometimes threw stones at the boats,
making boy-noise explosions.
Father stood at the river’s edge,
one hand in his pocket,
the other leaning on the walking stick
he needed. On the wind,
a quarter mile upriver, Mother was weeping.
Every year the river. Every year the weeping.
Every year the sowing,
most years the reaping.
Bricks Sinking in Deep Water
At what depth does their dull orange disappear?
I rowed out to where I know the water’s deep,
and in my rowboat a cargo
of bricks, fifty balanced
across the stem, just so.
At the bottom of this reservoir
was a town. Two towns, in truth.
Its people were paid an honest price
to leave, but no question: they had to move.
I anchor my boat forty feet above
what was once a pasture.
I take a brick from port first
and hold it by its upper right corner
and dip its lower left corner into the water
before I let it slip my fingers.
The next one I take from starboard,
but drop from port, and so forth and on.
It’s the sinestre hand that does the work.
> I never counted two seconds before one was gone
from touch, and sound, and sight. They sink until they stop
on now drowned and grassless land.
Why do I want to leave a small scattering
of man-made triangular stones
at the bottom of this no-bones
(the cemetery relocated)
body of water? In darkness, who does not love
the faint, hard, orange glow
of building bricks?
Dead Horse
At the fence line, I was about to call him in when,
at two-thirds profile, head low
and away from me, he fell first
to his right front knee
and then the left, and he was down,
dead before he hit the…
My father saw him drop, too,
and a neighbor, who walked over.
He was a good horse, old,
spavined, eating grass during the day
and his oats and hay
at night. He didn’t mind, or try to boss, the cows
with which he shared these acres.
My father said: Happens. Our neighbor,
named Malcolm, walked back to his place
and was soon grinding toward us
with his tractor’s newbackhoe,
of which he was proud
but so far used only to dig two sump holes.
It was the knacker who’d haul away a cow.
A horse, a good horse, you buried
where he, or she, fell. Malcolm
cut a trench beside the horse
and we pushed him in.
I’d already said goodbye
before I tried to close his eyes.
Our neighbor returned the dirt
from where it came. In it: stones,
stones never seen before
by a human’s, nor even a worm’s, eye.
With the back of a shovel
we tamped the dirt down.
One dumb cow
stood by. It was a Friday.
For supper we ate hot dogs, with beans
on buttered white bread. Every Friday,
hot dogs andOutline for My Memoir beans.
Outline for My Memoir
The time my horse got stuck in the mud.
(Two paragraphs; no, one.)
Went blind in right eye, took some medicine;
I could see again. Scary detail: when the doctor
first shined the little light
into my pupil, he drew back, startled.
(Three paragraphs.) Later, high school: broken heart.
(Since this happens rarely, milk for three, four
paragraphs.) Milk, speaking
of which: I helped my father peddle it,
in a square white truck in a small round town.
College, my twenties: I recall little to interest you.
I did cover many pages with writing,
and read, and turned a thousand
pages for every one on which I wrote.
(Don’t see how I can say what else happened then
and be honest.) My thirties? Wore funny glasses.
(Maybe a two-sentence self-deprecatory joke?)
My forties, fifties? The best part
was a child, named Claudia. I could say some funny
things about her, but so could every father.
Besides, family is personal, private, blood.
(With above exception of daughter, those two decades:
a paragraph, maybe two if I insert
journal entry on day of her birth?)
I can’t bear to write of her mother, whom I hurt.
Lately? Read like a hungry machine,
in a new room, in a house I love; there is still
my child to love, and friends,
and a beloved, named Jenny.
My vital signs are vital.
I tend a little garden, have a job.
(No way I could write more than a few sentences
on these years
under the sentence, again,
of happiness.) If I live a hundred lives,
then I’ll know more truths, maybe, and lies,
to write my memoir, novella-sized.
INDEX
A Bird, Whose Wingtips Were on Fire 84
A Clearing, a Meadow, in Deep Forest 150
A Delivery of Dung 158
A Frozen Ball of Rattlesnakes 156
A Library of Skulls 88
A Little Tooth 37
A Small Tin Parrot Pin 72
Amiel’s Leg 43
An Horatian Notion 41
Apology to My Neighbors for Beheading Their Duck 138
At the Far End of a Long Wharf 15
Autobiographical 56
Autobiographophobia 146
Backyard Swingset 25
Behind the Horseman Sits Black Care 120
Blue Vistas Glued 148
Boatloads of Mummies 105
Bodo 32
Bonehead 77
Breakbone Fever 115
Bricks Sinking in Deep Water 167
Burned Forests and Horses’ Bones 109
Can’t Sleep the Clowns Will Eat Me 117
Cellar Stairs 28
Cliffs Shining with Rain 141
Commercial Leech Farming Today 70
Cordon Sanitaire 91
Criss Cross Apple Sauce 67
Cucumber Fields Crossed by High-Tension Wires 74
Dead Horse 168
Debate Regarding the Permissibility of Eating Mermaids 100
Dry Bite 99
Elegy 159
Emily’s Mom 58
Endive 46
Every Time Someone Masturbates God Kills a Kitten 160
Floating Baby Paintings 34
Frankly, I Don’t Care 44
God Particles 133
Goofer-Dust 112
Grain Burning Far Away 81
Great Advances in Vanity 38
Grim Town in a Steep Valley 51
Guide for the Perpetually Perplexed 107
Her Hat, That Party on her Head 132
History Books 53
Hitler’s Slippers 122
Hospitality and Revenge 114
How Difficult 137
‘I Love You Sweatheart’ 62
In the Bedroom Above the Embalming Room 78
Invective 135
It Must Be the Monk in Me 19
Jesus’ Baby Teeth 136
Kalashnikov 48
Like Tiny Baby Jesus, in Velour Pants, Sliding Down Your Throat (A Belgian Euphemism) 163
Lumps of Sugar on an Anthill 124
Man Pedaling Next to His Bicycle 131
Midmorning 129
‘Mr John Keats Five Feet Tall’ Sails Away 60
Mole Emerging from Trench Wall, Verdun, 1916 143
Money 49
Monkey Butter 116
Myope 110
Nietzsche Throws His Arms Around the Neck of a Dray Horse 155
Not the Same Kind of Mud as in ‘Two Tramps in Mud Time’ 164
Old Man Shoveling Snow 26
Outline for My Memoir 170
Pecked to Death by Swans 55
Pencil Box Shaped Like a Gun 93
Plague Victims Catapulted Over Walls into Besieged City 76
Rather 101
Refrigerator, 1957 65
Regarding (Most) Songs 87
Render, Render 118
River Blindness (Onchocerciasis) 52
Rue de la Vieille Lanterne 162
Salve 86
Say You’re Breathing 98
Sex After Funerals 145
Shaving the Graveyard 54
Sleep’s Ambulance 123
Slimehead (Hoplosthethus atlanticus) 85
So You Put the Dog to Sleep 29
Stink Eye 125
Sugar Spoon 149
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy 16
The American Fancy Rat and Mouse Association 102
The Bandage Factory 96
The Big Picture 50
The Corner of Paris and Porter 94
The Dark Comes on in Blocks, in Cubes 20
The Devil’s Beef Tub 104
The Doldrum Fracture Zone 82
The Driver Ant 47
The First Song 127
The Fish-Strewn Fields 89
The Garden 35
The General Law of Oblivion 128
The Grand Climacteric 144
The Handsome Swamp 80
The Happy Majority 140
The Hungry Gap-Time 121
The Ice Worm’s Life 113
The Joy-Bringer 139
The Language Animal 92
The Lead Hour 126
The Magma Chamber 106
The Man into Whose Yard You Should Not Hit Your Ball 75
The Milkman and His Son 13
The Moths Who Come in the Night to Drink Our Tears 153
The Neighborhood of Make-Believe 42
The Night So Bright a Squirrel Reads 18
The People of the Other Village 40
The Poison Shirt 83
The Queen of Truth 157
The Republic of Anesthesia 130
The Riverine Farmers 166
The Shooting Zoo 142
The Swimming Pool 22
The Thirst of Turtles 14
The Voice You Hear When You Read Silently 68
The Year the Locust Hath Eaten 108
Their Feet Shall Slide in Due Time 134
This Space Available 69
Thomas the Broken-Mouthed 79
To Help the Monkey Cross the River 103
To Plow and Plant the Seashore 111
Traveling Exhibit of Torture Instruments 30
Unlike, for Example, the South of a Riptooth Saw 90
Upon Seeing an Ultrasound Photo of an Unborn Child 36
Walt Whitman’s Brain Dropped on Laboratory Floor 31
West Shining Tree 161
Why 165
Wife Hits Moose 21