poems collected

Patent Pending

The slightest movement of the body,
whether of genuine revival
or only a false alarm
caused by pockets of air
trapped in the abdomen,
triggers a highly sensitive
release mechanism
housed in a spring-loaded ball
positioned over the heart.

If this ball is disturbed
by so much as a twitching nerve-end,
a message is transmitted
to a box on the surface,
which immediately flies open,
admitting air to the coffin.
A flag rises in warning,
a bell rings for half an hour,
a lamp burns after sunset.

Cuttings

This urge, wrestle, resurrection of dry sticks,
Cut stems struggling to put down feet,
What saint strained so much,
Rose on such lopped limbs to a new life?
I can hear, underground, that sucking and sobbing,
In my veins, in my bones I feel it —
The small waters seeping upward,
The tight grains parting at last.
When sprouts break out,
Slippery as fish,
I quail, lean to beginnings, sheath-wet.

Our Prayer of Thanks
Chicago Poems. 1916.

For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the sunset and the stars, the women and the white arms that hold us,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.
Our prayer of thanks.

The Question

We're eating outside with our friends,
Woodstock Buddhists; our kids and theirs
are lighting sticks on citronella candles
to throw them at the woods like burning spears;
the Rainbow Family of Living Light
are drumming in Magic Meadow; I've drunk enough
that all I want to do is close my eyes,
when a voice rings like a summons from the darkness:
my six-year-old son asking: "Dad,
is America good or bad?"

He's heard us talking; the litany:
stolen elections, torture memos, wars;
seen the picture of the hooded man
Haj Ali, our oppressor-victim,
arms spread, posed on his box
like Jesus on his mountain
blessing the peacemakers
(but for the dangling wires)
and wants to know whose side he's on:
his own or someone else's side against him...

What can I say? That depends
on what rots mean by ''good'' or ''bad''
or for that matter "America",
which might be a fool and his goons
war-gaming in the White House,
but might be, say, the Women in Black
down on the Green with their banner, Bring Our
Troops Back,
or the Rainbow People up in the meadow
drumming in the full moons,
or might just be just us and our friends...?

I think how I moved here;
settled with that long shock of ease
as if in my first lawn chair,
before it could dawn on me
I'd merely exchanged the curse
of being forever elsewhere
for that of the settler – worse,
the children of settlers,
for whom the root of existence
is precisely their fathers' sins...

He's waiting for his answer.
I open my mouth to speak
but something stalls me; a strange
heaviness on my tongue
as if after all I'd pledged silence
or struck some nocturnal pact
over whatever act,
doubtful or downright wrong,
secures our presence here,
and I can't seem to say a damn thing,

and he drifts away, back to his game
of fending off the trees
that look as though they'd marched up the hill
to mass at the edge of our lawn
while we sat here talking,
and a dim shame
clouds in as if there were really something to do
other than drink and chill
and listen to the drums beat
and try to keep our eyes open.

Anniversary

You'd figure the hawk for an isolate thing,
commanding the empyrean,
taking his ease in the thermals and wind
until that retinal flick, the plunge and shriek -
cruelly perfect at what he is.
With crepe myrtle igniting the streets
and flowering pansy underfoot
I'd get out there just after dawn each day,
before the sun made it over the mesquite and honey locust.
Cliff swallows rocketed low over grass,
dragonflies darted above:
every day, on the heels of first birdsong, juice-heads
sleeping rough by the culvert.
Before the heat,
before the ebb and flow of cicada whirr swallowed the world,
when the crepe myrtle was still in bloom,
when it was the flowering pansies' time in the park and untended lots,
and still a touch of cool in the air.
I remember once, a red-tail perched close by
on a branch or utility pole.
Maybe he came down for a better look,
but I think it was so that I might better see him,
who reigned over these few acres and beyond
and what it was about him so overmastering.
An ugly sheen encouraged some gold in his russet mantle.
His belly was white.
Look at me, he seemed to be insisting.
Behold, a pure wild heartless thing,
beautiful and horrible, nothing in-between.
I one day saw him tearing at his prey:
he was in the crook of a tree, low and close at hand,
fixed on it, drunk with it, mercilessly at it,
the sound like a cleaver tearing through meat,
cruelly what he was, nothing else.
But on another day, not long after, I heard him,
perched high on a branch, calling out,
crying out in distress, piteously,
kee-eeee-arrr, kee-eeee-arrr
a harsh, descending sound, and unrelenting,
kee-eeee-arrr kee-eeee-arrr,
panicked or wounded, terrible in his dismay,
until, suddenly, from some other corner of sky
another hawk flew down to join him,
not right there on the same branch but on another, close by.
And soon after that, off they flew together,
drifting, spiralling, higher and higher
in partnered loops, wheeling and diving,
enraptured by all they were, were able to do,
not as separate beings, but as two.

The View

The view is fine from fifty,
Experienced climbers say;
So, overweight and shifty,
I turn to face the way
That led me to this day.

Instead of fields and snowcaps
And flowered lanes that twist,
The track breaks at my toe-caps
And drops away in mist.
The view does not exist.

Where has it gone, the lifetime?
Search me. What’s left is drear.
Unchilded and unwifed, I’m
Able to view that clear:
So final. And so near.

Unending Love

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times,
In life after life, in age after age forever.
My spell-bound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms

In life after life, in age after age forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, its age-old pain,
Its ancient tale of being apart or together,
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge
Clad in the light of a pole-star piercing the darkness of time:

You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount
At the heart of time love of one for another.
We have played alongside millions of lovers, shared in the same
Shy sweetness of meeting, the same distressful tears of farewell -
Old love, but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

Today it is heaped at your feet, it has found its end in you,
The love of all man's days both past and forever:
Universal joy, universal sorrow, universal life,
The memories of all loves merging with this one love of ours -
And the songs of every poet both past and forever.

The Museum of Stones

This is your museum of stones, assembled in matchbox and tin,
collected from roadside, culvert, and viaduct,
battlefield, threshing floor, basilica, abattoir,
stones loosened by tanks in the streets
of a city whose earliest map was drawn in ink on linen,
schoolyard stones in the hand of a corpse,
pebble from Apollinaire’s oui,
stone of the mind within us
carried from one silence to another,
stone of cromlech and cairn, schist and shale, hornblende,
agate, marble, millstones, and ruins of choirs and shipyards,
chalk, marl, and mudstone from temples and tombs,
stone from the silvery grass near the scaffold,
stone from the tunnel lined with bones,
lava of the city’s entombment,
chipped from lighthouse, cell wall, scriptorium,
paving stones from the hands of those who rose against the army,
stones where the bells had fallen, where the bridges were blown,
those that had flown through windows and weighted petitions,
feldspar, rose quartz, slate, blueschist, gneiss, and chert,
fragments of an abbey at dusk, sandstone toe
of a Buddha mortared at Bamiyan,
stone from the hill of three crosses and a crypt,
from a chimney where storks cried like human children,
stones newly fallen from stars, a stillness of stones, a heart,
altar and boundary stone, marker and vessel, first cast, lode, and hail,
bridge stones and others to pave and shut up with,
stone apple, stone basil, beech, berry, stone brake,
stone bramble, stone fern, lichen, liverwort, pippin, and root,
concretion of the body, as blind as cold as deaf,
all earth a quarry, all life a labor, stone-faced, stone-drunk
with hope that this assemblage, taken together, would become
a shrine or holy place, an ossuary, immovable and sacred,
like the stone that marked the path of the sun as it entered the human dawn.

The New Yorker, March 26, 2007

Pull A String, A Puppet Moves

each man must realize
that it can all disappear very
quickly:
the cat, the woman, the job,
the front tire,
the bed, the walls, the
room; all our necessities
including love,
rest on foundations of sand —
and any given cause,
no matter how unrelated:
the death of a boy in Hong Kong
or a blizzard in Omaha ...
can serve as your undoing.
all your chinaware crashing to the
kitchen floor, your girl will enter
and you'll be standing, drunk,
in the center of it and she'll ask:
my god, what's the matter?
and you'll answer: I don't know,
I don't know ...

To Sleep

What is the charge, young god, what have I done
Alone to be denied, in desperate straits,
Epitome of Calm, your treasure, Sleep?
Hush holds enmeshed each herd, fowl, prowling beast;
The trees, capitulating, nod to aching sleep;
The raging floods relinquish their firm roar;
The heavy sea has ceased and the oceans curl
Upon the lap of land to sink and rest.
The moon has now in seven visits seen
My wild eyes staring; seven stars of dawn
And twilight have returned to me
And sunrise, transient witness of distress,
Has in compassion sprayed dew from her whip.
Where is the strength I need? It would defeat
The consecrated Argus, thousand-eyed
Despite the watch that one part of him keeps,
Nerves taut, on guard relentlessly.
Oh Sleep, some couple, bodies interlocked,
Must shut you from their night-long ecstasy;
So come to me. I issue no demand
That you enfold mine eyes with your wings—
Let all the world, more fortunate, beg that.
Your wand-tip's mere caress, your hovering form
Poised lightly on tiptoe: that is enough.

Salutation

O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.

Design

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth—
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall? —
If design govern in a thing so small.

XII. Here’s Our Clean Business Now Let’s Go Down the Hall to the Black Room Where I Make My Real Money

You want to see how things were going from the husband’s point of view—
let’s go round the back,
there stands the wife
gripping herself at the elbows and facing the husband.
Not tears he is saying, not tears again. But still they fall.
She is watching him.
I’m sorry he says. Do you believe me.
Watching.
I never wanted to harm you.
Watching.
This is banal. It’s like Beckett. Say something!
I believe

your taxi is here she said.
He looked down at the street. She was right. It stung him,
the pathos of her keen hearing.
There she stood a person with particular traits,
a certain heart, life beating on its way in her.
He signals to the driver, five minutes.
Now her tears have stopped.
What will she do after I go? he wonders. Her evening. It closed his breath.
Her strange evening.
Well he said.
Do you know she began.
What.

If I could kill you I would then have to make another exactly like you.
Why.
To tell it to.
Perfection rested on them for a moment like calm on a lake.
Pain rested.
Beauty does not rest.
The husband touched his wife’s temple
and turned
and ran
down
the
stairs.

—Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos

My Masters

My masters are not infallible.
They're neither Goethe,
who had a sleepless night
only when distant volcanoes moaned, nor Horace,
who wrote in the language of gods
and altar boys. My masters
seek my advice. In fleecy
overcoats hurriedly slipped on
over their dreams, at dawn, when
the cool wind interrogates the birds,
my masters talk in whispers.
I can hear their broken speech.

Kierkegaard on Hegel

Kierkegaard said of Hegel: He reminds me of someone
who builds an enormous castle but live himself
in a storehouse next to the construction.
The mind, by the same token, dwells in
the modest quarters of the skull,
and those glorious states
which were promised us are covered
with spiderwebs, for the time being we should enjoy
a cramped cell in the jailhouse, a prisoner's song,
the good mood of a customs officer, the fist
of a cop. We live in longing. In our dreams,
locks and bolts open up. Who didn't find shelter
in the huge looks to the small. God
is the smallest poppy seed in the world,
bursting with greatness.

translated by Renata Gorczynski

from Paradiso, XVII

Cacciaguida urges Dante to speak out

The light in which it had appeared to me,
That jewel of reserve, suddenly flashed
Like a ray of sun in the gold depths of a mirror,

And carried on: "Those alone who blush
Inwardly, at their own or their neighbours' shame,
Will find your tidings harsh.

But nevertheless, you must stake your claim,
In the teeth of lies, to absolute recall,
And let them scratch whose itch has been inflamed.

And if what you say is hard for them to swallow
At the beginning, let them digest it –
Nourishment will follow.

Let your voice, like a storm-force gust,
Blow louder the higher the peaks it screams off –
You will only be doing yourself proper honour and justice.

That is why, in the giant scheme of things –
The mountain, and the anguished under-valley –
You were allowed to meet only the great and famous,

For the souls of your readers, undecided still,
Will not be convinced, if all they hear
Are unknown stories, good or ill,

Of those whose names have vanished with the years."

Translated by Harry Clifton

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend nectar
Requires sorest need.

Conversation with Murasaki

Murasaki - I imagined
a dye the colour of mulberries.
A burnet moth's underwing.

She brushes past Sei Shonagon.
Sleeves in tension.
Both brushes charged with silken resistance.

When she sang it was brocade.
When she modestly whispered,
a most delicate embroidery.

'Her sash matched her robe.
But did you notice the lining of her sleeve?
I could have laughed all evening!'

The wisteria in its tub, whose ancient stem
and transient clusters you comprehended clearly,
but which you did not know how to prune.

How many such cultivated
and also promiscuous ladies
have I wished to have been acquainted with?

Late afternoon rain,
then sun on the raspberries –
I so wanted to show you.

How vulgar would you think it
to express my predilection
for these extra yellow quinces?

Please tell me: how, culturally, could we
be more different? Yet I, with minor, bemused
reservations, am drawn entirely to your aesthetic.

So many little rules.
How delicious to break one!
We'll mend these fragments into something.

His long night's escapade.
Does inherited custom demand
rupture of tradition?

Dilapidated mansion. Tangled thickets.
Behind a screen,
she waits for moon-rise.

Having sunk to this obscurity
she still plies the koto.
No one behind screens to listen.

Shut in from sunlight,
she keeps company with rain and music.
Wasting beneath powder.

What happens in the Genji?
Births, fixation, death and an eroticism by subterfuge
delayed tantalisingly by the complicated exchange of waka.

The plum which in the 16th century was
supplanted by the cherry. Aesthetically staggered,
do they now blossom in competition?

Lamp light. Moon-rise.
I look up. Does the moon, too,
say I?

The floating world.
We move within it.
It. We. Tangle and illusion.

High above the city, he searches out
two things that grow together:
wild herbs and the sutras.

It is comparatively simple to satisfy desire.
But to die without studying the sutras...
Still, it makes little difference.

A poignant meditation on the doctrine of the anicca.
Then all at once
they're playing football.

Guarding against presenting things
only in the best possible taste,
thus he expressed an asymmetrical aesthetic.

A trunk that grew lichen.
A stone that happened to
lie on the mountain.

I know how loud and irregular noises
disturbed you. I too live
in your ideal silence.

To be old and still young.
At once female and male.
We are all one prison.

You would be astonished
at the squalor of European history.
But you would have liked Jane Austen.

Spirit possession.
The hysterical luxury
of existence as two people.

No longer even dust.
Your you became
someone else's brush strokes.

Waley on his deathbed.
Neither he nor his space.
But now equal with not-you in north London traffic.

'Genji was dead. And there was no one like him.'
Punks eat sushi.
Mono no aware. Lacrimae rerum.

These MSN and Myspace girls whose virtual selves
fire off keyboard fantasies: they, as with Genji's
women, gossip apprehensively behind their screens.

There they all must be
in Ambitabha's garden, where birds and rivers
sing unintelligibly in Sanskrit.

The Bridge of Dreams joins two absolute spaces.
We rush across the surface
not knowing where we were or where we're headed.

Hokku faxed from a tobacconist.
Syllabically hopping,
to Tokyo they yo yo.

—————

Murasaki Shikibu was the 11th century author of The Tale of Genji, which contains almost a thousand classical verses. Sei Shonagon was her contemporary and the author of The Pillow Book.

Koto: a zither-like instrument
Waka: classical verses
Mono no aware: 'the pitiful transcience of existence'
Anicca: impermanence
Ambitabha: the Buddha of the Western Paradise or Pure Land
Hokku: 17-syllable verse

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

As You Like It Act II.7