Into the White

So on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac in the index for Stephen Dunn this poem gets typoed, and is called "Lineliness." That's poetry for you, and one why, perhaps, I'm giving most of my poetry books away since I've been a deceased poet for over decade now. But I'm not giving away my Stephen Dunn, not when he writes a poem like this one.

Loneliness

So many different kinds,
yet only one vague word.
And the Eskimos
with twenty-six words for snow,

such a fine alertness
to what variously presses down.
Yesterday I saw lovers
hugging in the street,

making everyone around them
feel lonely, and the lovers themselves --
wasn't a deferred loneliness
waiting for them?

There must be words

for what our aged mothers, removed
in those unchosen homes, keep inside,
and a separate word for us
who've sent them there, a word

for the secret loneliness of salesmen,
for how I feel touching you
when I'm out of touch.
The contorted, pocked, terribly ugly man

shopping in the 24-hour supermarket
at 3 a.m. -- a word for him --
and something, please,
for this nameless ache here

in this nameless spot.
If we paid half as much attention
to our lives as Eskimos to snow...
Still, the little lies,

the never enough.
No doubt there must be Eskimos
in their white sanctums, thinking
just let it fall, accumulate.

Ach, Marx the Spot

Sure it's a cheat not only to blog for the "day" at ten to midnight but also to post something you wrote years ago. All I can do is ask for forgiveness. In the meantime, here's something I should have posted for the weekend anyway, or perhaps never posted ever, as it's a poem from the vaults. This goes out to folks in Zeno's, btw...

BAR SONG

The month’s end and my friends
are down to singles,
their wallets fat and poor,
hungry bulging stomachs.

What can one do when
hands are empty and so much
needs filling?

There’s a song about this
American Reds in their cells sang
before they knew Stalin
was offing heads by the gross.

If someone told them
they would keep singing.

The words are gone,
Stalingrad is gone,
and the beer is almost gone,
but scraping our change
together buys us another
pitcher, if we stiff the waitress,
which we do.

Like the rest of us, she can
drown her sorrows by the glass
after work. What’s one tip
in a night lugging fuel
to fire the forgetfulness of drunks?

We worked hard, too, to buy
ourselves this bitter, this blind.
Unkind as dawn, we are, or
the fearful clarity of light
they throw on us at last call.

Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes

Several of us got together last night to try to watch the Perseids, and we saw some some, but when I hear 200 meteors an hour, I expect a Vegas in the skies. So, as with so much, I'm disappointed. But I have a history of that, and decided to fish out a poem from probably 16 years ago. Be kind to this poem--it's just getting its driver's permit.

PERSEIDS

And the lawn chairs, their tang,
their metal frames, soon fall.
But first, the clouds the meteors
could barely break through.
The clouds hid the showers.
We saw some, yes, like
the lights of planes’ tails
on trips only from sky to sky,
like clear nights above O’Hare,
and all arrivals dropping from radar.
If I couldn’t confirm a sighting
with another party-goer
it seemed unreal, everyone’s peripheries
linked like Venn Diagrams,
as letters on the blackboard of night
chalked and furiously fell.

Left, then.
The others uncocked their necks
and eyed a mid-evening brunch
of shrimp and grits and talked
and ate and were friends there.

Layne and I went wanting, still,
off to a bar where the too old
drink, cheaply, steady as breath.
In three days he would load
a truck and take his family south;
he’d landed a job he wanted
in the way want can be lots of talk
and even more need. But now,
that night the stars fell unseen,
that night we would weave boozily home
to women in beds with space for us,
we drank, wanting to want. How
silly, how much. How many women,
and just each one had her two eyes,
two arms, two breasts, hundreds
of hairs, thousands of things
close to her heart, her heart.
We lapped in beauty like the creamy nights
of sky the country offers, the Milky Way
a pepetual retch of starry, stretched effluent.
Why make grand this lust for beauty?
To just plain want--it’s nothing pretty.

Still dressed for the heat of the day
Layne wore shorts and stood,
when a woman began to rub his legs,
petting him down like a dog.
They called her the Uni-Witch for she gave
customers grief with their change,
came to the bar nightly with Women Who Run
with the Wolves, which she carried like a purse,
and never read. Want has a way
of saying both no and yes.
And Layne’s eyes, which should have been lit,
asked why of all of us, wanting
want, just once, to be as clear
as gin, as easy to order and down
and pay for. Instead, want impinges
like meteor showers, for no reason,
for nobody, everywhere, unseen.
Both noun and verb, it is our sentence,
our life, our hope, our jail, our criminal, our crime.

I Have Lit What's Left of My Life

People keep floating poetry around me--must be the residue of April's Poetry Month or something. So looking for sonnets sent me to Merrill and thinking about Merrill reminded me of this, still one of my favorite poems if for nothing else but being so gorgeous about the unsentimental--life's vaporous eddies and false claims indeed. But it's more than that, it seems true in so many ways, how we want to think our thinking makes us more than we want to think we are. Sink down with this, then.

Charles on Fire
by James Merrill

Another evening we sprawled about discussing
Appearances. And it was the consensus
That while uncommon physical good looks
Continued to launch one, as before, in life
(Among its vaporous eddies and false claims),
Still, as one of us said into his beard,
"Without your intellectual and spiritual
Values, man, you are sunk." No one but squared
The shoulders of their own unlovliness.
Long-suffering Charles, having cooked and served the meal,
Now brought out little tumblers finely etched
He filled with amber liquor and then passed.
"Say," said the same young man, "in Paris, France,
They do it this way"--bounding to his feet
And touching a lit match to our host's full glass.
A blue flame, gentle, beautiful, came, went
Above the surface. In a hush that fell
We heard the vessel crack. The contents drained
As who should step down from a crystal coach.
Steward of spirits, Charles's glistening hand
All at once gloved itself in eeriness.
The moment passed. He made two quick sweeps and
Was flesh again. "It couldn't matter less,"
He said, but with a shocked, unconscious glance
Into the mirror. Finding nothing changed,
He filled a fresh glass and sank down among us.

We Find the Body Difficult to Speak

It's poetry month, which is sort of like saying it's breathing week, but oh well. You see, I once thought I was a poet, but then decided two very important things: 1) I'd rather be happy than be a poet, 2) you can only write "language is a tool that fails us" poems for so long before you have to at least convince yourself. But poetry is everywhere, so it's one reason I don't have to write it, that it's pretentious for me to try to. Language is lovely--we're the ones who play hard to get. Still, today at a poetry reading by three fine poets (thanks, Bob, for getting me to go), I felt a bit of the old tug. So figured, hell, why not--I'll post my last poem. Bet you can guesss for whom and when I wrote it and everything.

ITALIAN LESSONS FOR THE TUGBOAT CAPTAIN

“I don’t want to go to your party
I don’t want to talk to your friends
I don’t want to vote for your president
I just want to be your tugboat captain.”
--Galaxie 500, “Tugboat”

You would think
there are too many
wings for flying.
Cherubim, they are,
but baby bodiless,
just heaven-sent similar
faces, smiles sort of,
and wings, six, each.
Only for an age
before science said science,
let alone a mouthful
like aerodynamics. Faith
just enough to be airborne.
The busy beating of wings
must make the air furious
yet the centered religious
seem serenely at peace.
Even the angels seem
untaxed by their burden
of wing waving work.

Enough of the angels,
this is about you, my....
Enough about art,
this is.... No escape,
and to know the goodness
in that, now a prayer
punctuated by an ellipsis.

Before the tourists
the tower leaned enough
for Galileo, for gravity,
for feathers, for cannonball.
For the Church
to say enough, faith
just is an is. Yet.
So. Even words have a science
we call logic, an architecture
of questions improbably
piled and somehow pretty.
This tower they cannot
close from us, we risk
the wobble and drop,
climb to spy dizzying views,
for love is as much
hypothesis as faith,
a pulling, a falling, a proving.

No yes big enough,
no beauty artful enough,
no enough to be uttered.

May marriage be
the perspective of our love,
all dimensions possible,
all colors crisp, and beauty
off-hand and everyday
and everywhere like air
stirred by angels somehow
untangled in their overdose of wings.

Not Starring Chan and Tucker

Charles Simic read at UCSB tonight, and that got me thinking how my last few years of writing poetry I tried to do Simic poems. Not consistently, just when I wanted to be good. I'm not sure this poem (by me, not Simic) is good, but I like its spookiness, and I'm pretty sure it was an exercise that had to include 5 words, which five I can't remember (this is at least 12 years old). So be kind to it, you know how sensitive 12-year-olds are...

RUSH HOUR

Luminous traffic passes the chalk
which outlines a complaint of what was
(can you believe this hushed thing I say?),
the commuters ashamed flames hoping to be home.
Ignore it, it's discourteous to look, like feeling
embarrassed for the blue asthmatic coughing
like a lawnmower with a knife in its clockwork.

Time is left to memorize your buttonholes,
the rustle of language in your throat.
Over coffee you told me of the first day
your daughter was sexy in nylons,
and I wanted to kiss your shadowy cheekbones.

Exclaim all your secrets as if we're flung
wreckage in the desert. These are just
my diminished wishes, my invisible heart.
These words are printed about my wrist
like an emergency medical bracelet, or maybe
just a rubberband, worn to remind
myself of something, but then I
wear it daily. In the winter schoolyard
pink children are shorn of their pigtails,
each and every one, by an aproned man.
There are too many stars.
There is too much crying.

For the Little Red Schoolhouse of Our Mouths

I hadn't thought about Charles Simic in a few years, but it warmed my once-poetry-loving heart to hear he's our new Poet Laureate. His poetry is both instantly understandable AND mysterious, which makes it more mysterious, which makes it more like life. My guess is whatever Washington folks make these decisions didn't read all of his poetry, though, for our Poet Laureate has penned this work that admits to a lasciviousness that might shock the blue-bloods....

Breasts

I love breasts, hard
Full breasts, guarded
By a button.

They come in the night.
The bestiaries of the ancients
Which include the unicorn
Have kept them out.

Pearly, like the east
An hour before sunrise,
Two ovens of the only
Philosopher's stone
Worth bothering about.

They bring on their nipples
Beads of inaudible sighs,
Vowels of delicious clarity
For the little red schoolhouse of our mouths.

Elsewhere, solitude
Makes another gloomy entry
In its ledger, misery
Borrows another cup of rice.

They draw nearer: Animal
Presence. In the barn
The milk shivers in the pail.

I like to come up to them
From underneath, like a kid
Who climbs on a chair
To reach the forbidden jam.

Gently, with my lips,
Loosen the button.
Have them slip into my hands
Like two freshly poured beer-mugs.

I spit on fools who fail to include
Breasts in their metaphysics
Star-gazers who have not enumerated them
Among the moons of the earth....

They give each finger
Its true shape, its joy:
Virgin soap, foam
On which our hands are cleansed.

And how the tongue honors
These two sour buns,
For the tongue is a feather
Dipped in egg-yolk.

I insist that a girl
Stripped to the waist
Is the first and last miracle,

That the old janitor on his deathbed
Who demands to see the breasts of his wife
For the one last time
Is the greatest poet who ever lived.

O my sweet, my wistful bagpipes.
Look, everyone is asleep on the earth.
Now, in the absolute immobility
Of time, drawing the waist
Of the one I love to mine,

I will tip each breast
Like a dark heavy grape
Into the hive
Of my drowsy mouth.

To the Day We No Longer Need Memorials

For the Union Dead

Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gently tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble;
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.



(Poem by Robert Lowell; statue by Augustus St. Gaudens; endless war by human beings.)

Resembling All the Old Thinking

If you've been reading the comments, this work by James Galvin will make contextual sense. If you haven't been reading the comments, it's still a damn fine poem:

THE UNCERTAINTY PRINCIPLE

The real is not what happens but what is
About to happen,

Whatever you were dying for before.

Knowing is just feeling
With a sense of direction, and
Thinking tags after like a string of tin cans

Annoying everyone.
Something was about to happen.
Really.

My mother said I’d never make it back
In time by the way she looked at me forever.

She wasn’t thinking.

I pledge allegiance to her eyes,
Don’t envy me.

When you reach the North Pole the idea of north
Becomes unrealized, free.

Which north was true?
Which south was home?
What is it you are dying for?

Only the stars, which do not know, can tell,
Only the stars, which do not know, can tell.