Earlier Poems
Page 9
like lines of black cocaine. Unfinished,
unincorporated into something anyone is ever going
to see: they are mine, to deny their existence and share with no one, as I please. They fill me with joy while they're still unemployed, still about to be rising up through the trunk-spine and leaf-veins of the brain: before I shudder, close my eyes and see nothing but light where there's supposed to be nothing. Then open them on a new room, one with a window outside of which a different world has appeared, one embodying euphoric intimations of a life-beckoning beauty, death-beckoning beauty, what do I care— I've entered my vacant room as I must, only this time to find a nude woman who's kneeling with her slender forearms resting on the sill, who tosses her hair to one side as the breeze from the window blows through it, its dark blond torrent floating, color of a horseman's torch at dawn, and stares in my direction over her shoulder, sees no one and almost
smiles before her eyes
return to the window I, too,
continue to gaze out of,
unless I do dare to approach her, letting this page
go totally blank once again and the mere
words all blow away.
Black Box
The great black star-spoked hours
pass slowly
slowly
all morning long …
When I look back from here it seems all children must sense some vast inheritance
being withheld
life itself kept
deliberately from them
by their family the strangers
yet they all know the secret
of midnight
and wage a futile war for years
to stay awake
and see it
dawn
a black box of stars you could conceal in your fist if you knew where they kept it
The combination un divulged unknown perhaps except to those who do know where it is
The ones who command it is late go to bed
And you do for the time being In fact they are right it is late now
for them very late
All the while you are aware it is early
and getting earlier
One day I was suddenly wakened I'd finally escaped I don't know where or how I had managed it
Me
But somehow I was free I also had the box it was
still under my pillow where else like a gun
I was abruptly awakened
by eight numbers spoken in turn
by a circle
of eight diamond voices
identical
still vivid in my mind's ear
I reached for it and it was there beneath my ear and now
I also possessed the invisible key
I alone
could produce
with my voice with my soundless
mind's voice
From that day until this I've desisted
it was granted and that is enough
I ceased to obey
One will even after there is no one there to issue the command
And rose at last at my own
bidding
my own dawn
That's been a long time now
I can finally think
without fear
I will get something done now just watch
Because I live inside the dream the one I dreamed inside the life they forced on me
so long ago
Like a supper that's sadistically prepared from each and every food a child is known to gag on
day after month after year
One day the bird with diamond eyes discovers the door to its cage was always open
They can have their sunrise
The morning
with its billion suns is mine
Church of the Strangers
We were wandering
the vast church—
Our Lady of the Strangers.
No audience, and
no magician in sight.
Watching the one trick he knows every day
must get boring.
I have an idea.
What if you were faced every morning
with taking
from the golden chalice
a sip of the real
thing, flowing into, joining
and haunting your own blood.
Because no symbol's going to help us.
I mean it,
really gagging it down
if you dared to
pity the ones being tortured right about now
and experience, not your own pain for a change, but
your helpless desire to assist them. Who knows,
you might get around to it
someday, that is
at least admit you believe
in their existence: that
shouldn't be so hard. We have to live
in the dark ages now, and I use that term
literally—the last one
was a carnival. There are no symbols
with the efficacy we require.
Blood, the real
blood: this
might be worth showing up for.
But I'll bet pretty damned few
would be able to
make it, even Sundays. Hell,
no one comes as it is, only
you and me, trespassing
during the off-hours.
Just wandering through the vast
void, with its dim
gold light from noplace, breathing in
illuminated motes
of dust and incense—
you and me, characteristically
lost somewhere off in our own
spooky corners
daydreaming, too far away
to whisper the name
of the other, alone, maybe
meeting each other by accident
as everyone must.
To the Poet
Without a measurable tremor or wince, with a coldly trained eye and hand the surgeon makes the first incision in the sleeper's brain.
He knows the risks. He knows this disorientingly fragile
embodiment of his own feelings and thoughts; though he, like the patient—he's also the patient—
feels nothing, must feel nothing
if he is to open and explore
that which would make a normal person
vomit, black out and fall down.
He is in possession of the identical feelings and thoughts of anyone else, so awful and dark sometimes, in illness. He is ill himself, that's the point. And yet
his mask is secure, he bends to the matter
at hand, spelling life or death
for the one in his sheet
the color of a blank page. If he faltered,
if he could not suspend
feelings and thoughts which accompany
his nausea at what he's seeing
while he probes and explores, making himself
cold as the scalpel he holds like a pen now, or now grips in his hand like the pen the child's using for the first time, like someone eating meat,
then how would he ever be able to gruesomely proceed and save his life; how would he, lacking this horrorlessness, locate the source of the horror, and start to heal.
The Lemon Grove
In the windless one hundred degrees of eleven,
in the faintly sweet shade
of the grove just past town,
every day I would go to my tree
and sit down
with my back to it, open the notebook
and drunk with inspiration commence
describing.
It was demonstrated to me there
that nothing in the world can be described.
All attempts at pronouncing a place you loved
will have to be abandoned, oh
the ways the bright molested child has found to pass
his eerie day. And I
began to learn. (There are hidden things waiting to utter anyone who needs
them.) After days of frustration verging on blackout some things I saw and felt there became, in what was once their botched depiction of a place, a place, and the saying of it into being the power of loving precisely what is.
Observations
1
In real life
it's the living who haunt you.
Expect, in addition
to moments of anguish, the always-astonishing realization of just how generic one's most deeply personal torments really are.
And learn how to be alone,
now.
We end alone.
2
It is good to be loved but it isn't essential.
The need to love is,
infinitely.
Human beings routinely survive without love, but
you cannot survive without loving
someone or something
more than yourself. Since if you fail
to, you cease
to have a self at all.
Van Gogh's Undergrowth with Two Figures
They are taking a walk in the woods
of early spring or waning autumn.
In van Gogh, as in the works of most great masters,
all four or five of them,
there are no symbols. (Because
there are no symbols.) Only
things as they are
things as he perceived them
during visionary states,
normal states, incandescent
and lurid hangovers, creating from nothing
breakfast for a whore's little boy, or
as usual dying of loneliness, etc.
Still, besides an older man
in a formal black but somewhat shabby
suit and a girl in what will have been
considered a long pale-green dress
from the 1960s, it's hard not to
see a skeleton with clothes on and a woman
walking two or three Eurydicean paces
right behind him (one more
slip: at least he mixed his references here).
He has on what looks like a squashed-down top hat:
Vincent the mad, most regretfully
expelled, malnourished
and no doubt tertiary syphilitic lover
of the cosmos never lost his sense of fun.
The young woman's face is dead
white, though. In fact
she has no face;
and there's nothing, incidentally, in the least bit metaphorical about it. I can remember seeing this, once, outside the painting.
To a Book
How different the book looks to its maker: the botched phantom pages still there, interleaved before his eyes.
Before his eyes
the maybe five nights
when he fell asleep
the way a flower turns toward the sun.
Against all of the years
unable to sleep or go on.
So busy failing,
nobody knows what hard work that is.
Barely time for a coffee break,
never mind a vacation.
Some have worked their whole lives without finding
time to cry.
The Disappearing
There is a heartbreaking beauty about my crummy street tonight, at 2 o'clock in the first snow: I stand looking out
at this window, I think
how everything seen
is something seen for the last time.
At last I turn away,
I give up. I am tired,
I can't mourn anymore
the loss of what I never asked for
and never understood.
Place
Place where we're summoned and someoned without our knowing, without knowing why
Instruction is provided, more or less-
but that which reveals itself at first
as elementally suited to our little grasp,
within the scope of what we can endure,
does not remain so for long.
No,
it can only grow more foreign (impossibility become a possibility) the more you come to learn about things
here.
And soon enough the original problem presents itself
again
in reverse:
place where we're summoned, expected
to no one ourselves, still not knowing how.
A Place to Be
One of those last October days, late
on an afternoon already starting
to darken
this page. Sometimes
the way we think in secret's
strange, strange
and deadly. Sometimes
the grace of not thinking
at all
will descend: I have only
to begin gazing out
a window to become
the empty street
I peer into, the
soft yellow light
blowing through everything, one
of the no longer
here, beyond
fear, one
with you.
Boy Leaving Home
So it was home that left him
little by little, and not
the other way around. The others
disappearing, the house growing
emptier, gaining new rooms, one
he had so seldom entered
the view from the window
encompassed a landscape of cornfields and woods
he had never seen before—
it made his heart hurt.
Anxious trespasser, thief
who will take only what he can carry.
He thought he heard the front door open,
now he began to hear voices
filling the house, and he wondered
why he'd bothered
as long as he had
when he would not be asked to stay.
It would be easy enough to escape
once more—he knew all about that—
hiding under the bed until they were asleep.
He notices that he's referring to himself
as somebody else,
someone else in the past again.
But never mind that.
He is very tired of escaping;
and the reason the thought of it scares him
so much is as simple
as it always was:
absolute absence of option.
Because where?
Wherever you happen to go
it's the same thing all over again.
First, you find yourself there
waiting for you. And then
you have a place
you'll have to leave; you leave
to find a place …
So many rooms now, the house so much bigger,
homesickness already beginning
to tighten at his throat,
and he's not even gone. He is,
of course, quite gone. And yet
here he is—someone else figure it out.
Yes, it seems to have doubled in size;
either that or he has just turned four.
There's nothing that can't happen now.
The ceiling so high
he can lie on the bed in his sister's old room
and see the black-blue sky, as from down
in a well, stars appearing, the gold tinge of the crescent.
On some tomorrow's afternoon
all at once he will notice the light's
starting to shine through the walls.
Very faintly at first, but at last—
it is inevitable—
he will find himself staring right through them.
All the way down the untraveled
back road. And without even turning his head
on the pillow, past the crows' fields
throu
gh the first November snow,
the skeletal cornstalks' gold gleam
in the woods, in what's left
of the sun.
The time has arrived to get drunk,
he's decided.
He has never done this before
and so figures he'll just mix them all:
half a glass of something dark,
then one of something transparent, in a big jar.
He fills up this jar maybe twice
and maybe more than twice,
drinking it down as if it were water—
drowning in desperate green nausea, and wondering
what it will be like when it happens.
It is harder to tell, he supposes,
when no one is there;
but he's certain that his face is altered.
Into that of someone related to him, living
a long time before he was born;
perhaps it's changed back to his old face, or forward
in time, it's the face God had prepared.
There's been some massive reconstruction
no matter how you part your hair,
but the mirrors—you cannot look into them
since each has become a starless abyss
someone is sure to fall into.
They ought to put sheets over all of them.
The telephone begins to ring:
a brief game of Russian roulette?
He has five or six seconds to decide.
Now he's going to get to hear a little music.
It seems to be a bird's voice: one
he has never heard before, or noticed.
It's producing a kind of high fugue in the octaves beyond
which nobody can hear;
he feels he could listen forever,
except he's lost the power to shut it off.
That makes a difference. You have to
watch out for these figures of speech, don't you think.
He opens his eyes all at once,
the noon sun turning everything to a white blindness.
He slowly sits up in the dead corn stubble,
all the while gazing around;
a few silent crows perched nearby
on their stalks
incuriously staring—
crows with stars for eyes.
It is snowing lightly and the moon-sized sun burns white.
It appears he is fully dressed under his coat,
someone has put his gloves on,
thoughtful. He notices he's even wearing
that ridiculous Christmas scarf
his mother knitted the year he got tall
but not tall enough to keep
from stepping on it now and then,