Nov 10, 2009

You

I thought to find You in that space
just to the left of Tennyson
that made the mist shine in his eyes:
those bellying tears about to break,
that shimmer of things not gazed-upon
alive like whitebait in his gaze,

for that elsewhere is nothing strange,
is no less than the dark in sleep
which needs some sheen to make it thrive:
an abstract moon, or wandering stars
that Yeats wrought in a fiddling song.
You, too, could make the darkness change,

could take the night and make a womb,
could give the emptiness a shape
and fill it with a flood of light.
So I pursued You in that place
but still and wide, where poets watched,
as on some corner in a tomb,

lids roughdried with a wind of years,
for something moving in the void
made vivid in a flash, a bolt
that proved the dark was really nothing
beside the vanity that is ours,
and that gravid absence that is Yours.



And still more blind swiping in the dark... though this was composed recently, mid to late 2000's.

The Poet

"You must do this", they said, and pointed outward,
as if I had some magic in me. "Make it
before the last light fades, see, it sinks downward
faster now." And so I figured, fake it.

They shook their heads and wondered how I did it;
they even said, "It's something, how you do it!"
I took the trifle in my hand and hid it,
looked skyward, shrugged: so that's a sunset? Screw it.

Guilt

That one bird singing in a crooked tree
I paused to listen to as I passed by
was like a bell rung on an empty sea.

From where I stood it wasn't hard to see
its blood-red plumage and its small black eye.
That one bird singing in a crooked tree

seemed desolate as any thing could be
for how it cried out; but that hollow cry
was like a bell rung on an empty sea.

There wasn't anything about but me.
The clouds were graven in the still, gray sky.
That one bird singing in a crooked tree

had only but to move to set me free,
to lean into the desert air and fly;
but, like a bell rung on an empty sea

it cawed its caw. I took the liberty
to cough, then cried; but still it sang. How sly
that one bird singing in a crooked tree,
like deafening bells upon an empty sea.

Bold Type Here

An inch below the headline
we know exactly where we are.
The mirror shows us the same face,
behind us the same cracked door.

We get the picture: black
umbrellas, yellow raincoats.
We've passed the same wet stops,
morning papers playing hats.

Landscapes fill in so quickly
we cannot help not seeing
vitreous squares that mean sky
and pristine hills sliding.

In no time we've got it cold:
the slightest pressure here,
the right and the wrong way,
the long and stupid sleep when it's over.

Passage

The old trestle seemed to go on
for miles. Steve and I crossed it
a few times one summer, his long

legs moving him quicker, his feet
surer than mine. I suspected
the platform, side-stepped cracks

and gingerly avoided sunlit gaps:
it was more than a hundred feet
to the road that ran between

the fields. I looked over, leaning
easily on the guardrail, watched
the birds fly under me.

One day Steve had a better head
start and got too small. I turned
back, knowing I'd never catch up.

A train was coming and I heard
the tall trestle squeal and shake.
Steve's face turned when he felt

the wheels, and I watched him angle
toward the rail. He looked over his
shoulder, saw the engine bearing down:

a black face that laughed through
the air between mountains, trusted
ancient ironwork would give it wings.

That smoking dragon clapped his back
with a scream as it passed; wind
shoved him, but he kept his pace.

When I met him in town he laughed
and had the better of me. He was sure
the trestle would pitch him over,

how it swayed from side to side
and groaned as if its back
would break. I'd never been on it

when a train came and I knew
I wouldn't be, ever. Birds look
stronger and faster flying overhead.

Interruptions

I.

You always seem to know the time and place
when I'm least inclined to listen. Your voice came sheering
with its syllabled static, and now my brain is laced
with dust again, things I'd found and set in line like dolls

for an honest accounting have fallen into a muddle.
I wanted to write of a summer, a once, with rod and reel,
the bridge over the creek, the lure that writhed
and left my fingers tacky, flung with a whizz and kerplunk

into the water. Fat fish wallowed deep, shadows
that moved with weak volition. I wanted one of those
stinkers weighing my line, a bug-eyed chump
with a chic piercing. You can't eat them, they told me.

Fish I can live without; but the bridge
with its quaint arch, its sense of somewhere else,
its buck and tremor under galoshes, remains
in high memory, not the killing, the wide-eyed

deaths drying in pails, the knife scrapes
or the funk of scales, but the scent and gossip
of the water, the queen's-hand-wave
of oak and maple leaves at the end of Augusts,

the green that meant too much to give up,
too much to let go of. I never really liked
fishing, and mostly merely tolerated those times
with friends at some dock or bridge

over water that seemed too scummy to forage in -
red and white and round, the bobbers bobbed
like miniature bell-buoys in the muck,
the silvery film where insects walked like Christs,

legs like hair on a forearm; under the water a worm,
pierced through his dark pink cumberbund,
longed in its simple way for a hole in the ground
where rain is a gift on the roof, and not the world -

but better you should think that I am
on about it sentimentally, so that
you keep your tongue plumb to your palate,
not wishing to disturb me.



II.

The little one stands at the gate and drops a car
onto my side, followed by a stuffed turtle,
so I have to get up and toss the things back over,
thereby initiating the Game. I begin to wonder

why I never wrote prolifically as a bachelor,
when the only distractions were the occasional
knuckles on the door, or the irritating whistle
of the telephone. Those things could be ignored.

One could maintain a decent train of thought.
One could even pack it in and go fishing.
a knife dissects a chunk of ham: smells and sounds
that contest the smoke of my cigarette,

the pacifying click of fingerpads
and keys. I had to trawl for a spoon among
floating soap film and bread crust: my new
pond and pined-for island, a fresh stink.