Earlier Poems (5 page)

Although I'm good at that.

Work is not the term.

It destroys me, I adore it—

I'll look at it someday and noticing its utility still fails to surpass that of a lyre locked up in a glass case tuned an octave above human hearing,

I'll take an ax to it.

I'll stop speaking to it.

I'll sit alone in some shithole and inject it until the jewels roll out of my eyes.

I don't know what all I'll do,

snow of

unlit afternoon …

mute and agreed-to descent

Waking up at an improbable hour
in the small gray-lit Boston apartment
where I can never bring myself
to believe I actually live;
going off in the winter morning to teach
certain there's been a mistake,
knowing as I enter the classroom
the students will look in my face
with unanimous amusement
and lack of recognition,
that before I can utter a word
someone in a suit will appear
and ask me to come with him.

*

This won't hurt at all.
It does?
Well we haven't been taking good care of them
have we. Difficulty explaining to some
the concept of financial terror—
specifically, that if you're afraid to buy food
if you can help it you are not going to spend
$1,500 on a tooth;
difficulty of explaining anything
with your mouth clamped open.
Under anesthesia

I walk along a sunflower field I know of

*

It was still day
when I boarded the train.

The tunnel

then the Charles,
and soft blue lights of traffic in the rain.

*

Everyone in his right mind is asleep. A black car glides past, in its wake (the
speed blossoming coldly
through fingers and spine) a prolonged Coltrane scream

and a shiver of beauty open the night

I can remember you
mentioning once
how you'd wait until your mother was preoccupied
or gone, to dress
the doll all in white
for its little funeral—
how all the while it stared into your eyes
with its cold unbeckonable eyes,
and seemed to smile.
Why this
I couldn't say. And then again,
why not? It's easy
to remember anything.
I'll walk now, maybe.
The clouds' stature slumberously building
and blooming on the horizon,
identityless, huge
gesticulations from the trees,
a bird's voice
hidden back in the leaves,
the remote barely audible wake
from the roar of an airliner's engines
fill the dim morning.
Maybe your presence
will startle me now;

maybe I'll rise from
this chair.
Maybe the room will be empty.

The room will be empty, and you will not come.

Smell of winter pine trees in the air;
around me night, the wind, Marie, the stars.
Last night I dreamed I stood here,
this very spot—why I've come—
lights on in a house across the valley
where there is no house.
Stood here as I lay beside you
and looked so fondly at those lights
they might have been our home, and why not?
Everyone you see
lives somewhere.
How is this done?

Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know you're wounded.

Stupid, disappointed strategies.

Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much.

Friendless eeriness of the new street—

The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.

The sound of pines in the wind.
And to think you're the only person on earth
isn't hard, at the end
of the long journey nowhere.
Yet in the end I have come to
love this room and be the one
looking out on snowfields, blank
scores of wire fence in the deepening
snow, the wind through them a passage
of remembered music, bare
unbeckoning branches
with never a ghost
of a deciduous rustling,
the stilled river
with the sheet over its face—
going north in winter.
And it's all right
to glance out the window:
the fear will grow less
or more intense, but
it will always be there. Unseen
it's a palpable force,
isn't it. Like electricity
which can be employed,
as has been pointed out,
to kill you in a chair
or light your room.
But I'm through with that now.
I reach over and switch on the dark.
It's all right to pronounce a few words
when you're by yourself, and feel a little joy.

Hawk in golden space

Thick-leaved, darkly
beckoning trees
bigger than the house

Sunlit apparitional
peaks of a thunderhead
fading
to the east

Page
from conception to death mask

The stranger who approaches on the street and says, You don't remember me

I've gotten everyone who hurt me.

In a blackout a man loads his shotgun again.

Outside the genuine star-spangled twilight
of North Dakota
unfurls, twinkling and barking.

Then
he
becomes a ghost.
Big windblown rags of bitching crows
resettle
in the trees out back.

Neon sign missing a letter

Firearm with an obliterated serial number

There's always death
But getting there—
you can't just say the word

Rhode Island Artificial Limb Co.

Lights of the abandoned
households reflected
in the little river through the leaves

The posthistoric clouds

Wolf stars

Owl's head moth

Icon-yellow twilight

Sound of leaves & sea the silent sun

Will all have had ample experience when the last loneliness comes

Harbor bells in the blizzard

Say you wake
in the night
abruptly alone
in the midst of addressing
vast stadiums …

Or at an intersection windows shattered your forehead leaning on the horn a crowd materializing a light snow beginning

Like the taste of alcohol to children

No

That with which there is nothing to compare

Say you have no friends, or say you have to go to sleep

To see your friends

There

It's not so bad the stitches itch where they removed your rage is all

Where they removed those thoughts

And no one misses
them

After several weeks
everyone learns
how to tie his own shoe

You get a little doll that looks like you

I don't know where they come from.
I can summon them
(sometimes I can)
into my mind,
into my fingers,
I don't know why. Or I'll suddenly hear them
walking, sometimes
waking—
they don't often come when I need them.
When I need them most terribly,
never.

Outside the leaves are quiet
as their shade. Hidden
inside them a bird is waiting
for it to get dark
to try its goodnight voice.
I have just looked in the mirror,
and come and sat down at the table.
What happens to our faces?

I dreamed you came and sat beside me on the bed

It was something that you had to tell me

I dreamed you came and sat beside me

Like a drowning at a baptism

Like an embittered shopper returning

The sad misspelled obscenities on men's room walls

Snow on dark water … Something

While the child's forehead, eaten with red torments, Appeals to the white swarm of indistinct hallucinations, Appear at his bedside two big charming sisters With slender fingers and silver nails.

They seat the boy beside a wide-open Window, where tangled flowers float in the blue air; Where their long and terrible fingers can walk Seductively through his heavy damp hair.

He hears their timid breathing's chant, the viscid Fragrance of the honey of vegetables and roses, Now and then interrupted by a startled hiss: saliva Or the desire for kisses sucked back from the lips.

He hears their black eyelashes flicker in the perfumed Silences; within his drunken sleepiness The stained nails of their sweet, electrified fingers Crackle with the deaths of tiny lice.

Now the wine of laziness rises inside him: A sigh into a harmonica, delirium. He feels a longing to weep which rises and fades Again and again to the rhythm of their caresses.

I know a little
about it: I know
if you contemplate suicide
long enough, it
begins to contemplate you—
oh, it has plans for you.
It calls to your attention

the windows of certain tall
buildings, wooded snowfields
in your memory where you might cunningly vanish
to remotely, undiscoverably
sleep. Remember your mother
hanging the cat
in front of you when you were four?

Why not that? That
should fix her. Or deep drugs
glibly prescribed by psychiatrists weary
as you of your failure to change
into someone else—
you'll show them
change.

These thoughts, occurring once too often,
are no longer your own. No,

they think you.
The thing is not to entertain them
in the first place, dear
life, friend.
Don't leave me here without you.

He slowly replaced the receiver like somebody who had just used it.

He slowly replaced the receiver

like somebody who had just used it

to strike himself

hard,

several times,

on the skull.

Midnight, blue leaves swarming against the glass.

The pregnant child alone on her front doorstep,

the starving moon.

He slowly replaced the receiver.

Whether I grow old, betray my dreams, become a ghost

or die in flames
like Gram,
like Frank,
like Thomas James—

I think for a while I'll come back as a guest to a childhood room where the sun is the sun once again and the wind in the trees is the wind in the trees, and the summer afternoon the endless summer afternoon of books, that only happiness.

I won't have written this.

Smell of leaves before rain, green

light that shines not on, but from the earth—

for me, too,

a hunger darkened the world, and a fierce joy made it blaze into unrecognizable beauty.

I lay on my back in the yard, my face among the stars. Night said, Don't go inside. There's murder in the house, but that is far away; don't answer when they call.

They used to call and call,
but it was so dark in the yard.
And I had gone so far away—
guided by the stars
I could set out from the burning house
and watch them sink inside.

I tried to stay inside,
thinking perhaps you would call,
cause silence in the shrieking house:
if I were in the yard
the voice behind the stars
might never find the way;

plus you can't be out there always. You are compelled to come inside at some point, leave the stars abruptly when the strange man calls your name into the long black yard, obey the catastrophic house.

I knew I had a real house, with a real father, a ways—

some states—beyond that yard. I was a happy child, inside. Until my name was called I lay on my back filling with stars,

I raised my hand amid the stars.
Tumultuous leaves hid the bright nightmare house.
Happy and evil for a moment, I called
drop H-bomb here—a little ways
from me, a bird spoke once. Inside
someone flung open the door to my yard,

but called my name into an empty yard. By now the house was only one more star— unwithstandable inside, but just a jewel-light far away.

Mood-altering cloud of late autumn

Gray deserted street

Place settings for one—dear visible things …

The insane are right, but they're still the insane.

While there is time let me a little belong.

And in the desert cold men invented the star

I basked in you;
I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)

Who knows but before their closed eyes both faces change in slow reverse

recapitulation
of the faces
each has never seen again:

fetally then
full-blown, in a moment
taking on the different

features of their secret
genealogies
of lovers,

until each has the face
that first troubled the other's
and both sleep with a stranger in their arms.

This was the first time I knelt
and with my lips, frightened, kissed
the lit inwardly pink petaled lips.

It was like touching a bird's exposed heart with your tongue.

Summer dawn flowing into the room parting the curtains—the lamp dimming—breeze

rendered visible. Lightning,

and then soft applause from the leaves …

Almost children, we lay asleep in love listening to the rain.

We didn't ask to be born.

I'd be entombed
inside a period

in the closed book
in the huge dark

of St. Paul's
where we used to meet,

wafted

downaisle toward
banked sunlight-colored candles.

I'd be in your mouth,
in that huger dark:

body that stands for the soul.

Word that means you are loved.

You are the bright yellow spider who hides in the apricot leaves, watching me work.

You are the redwood shade pouring down around me in blond columns, and you are the air

coolly and goldenly scented

as the certainty of sleep when I lie down weary

and at peace, and as the certainty that I will rise again