Earlier Poems (8 page)

from its spot, it will not be disturbed
at its devotions. I stand in my own
fascination and envy, more
difficult to break at this point.
At last I return
to the house from this four o'clock watering,
happy for once
to have something important to tell you
when you wake up, when I
lie watching while the golden
petals of your eyes begin stirring, then
startlingly open
all pupil, meet mine
and cannot decide what I am
or if I'm really there.

Dream clock—next port of entry— …

By diurnal moonlight, by dream clock, by star-blueprint it approaches

*

Over here they are sharpening
the seeing-eye
knife,
etc.

*

Her hand on my
shoulder without a name

*

Tempus fuckit

*

Funny, I sometimes feel like a motherless child (trad.) too, unknown black voice

*

Friends never met

Put in the dark to hear no lark

*

Heart with a miner's face

*

Poem, my afterlife

Blue underwater statuary

And when the sky gives up its dead …

*

Thank you, I've just received yours

Unless all these years

I've been misunderstanding

the verses. In any event

I'll scratch your back, you knife mine

*

And when the sky gives up its dead

And the dead rise blind and groping
around for scattered bones, the skulls
they don like helmets
before setting out, bumping into another sadly
as they hoarsely cry
the full name
of some only friend

He
has
considered weeping, only he can't even bring himself to

take a stab at it. He just can't cry— it is terrible to cry

when you're by yourself, because what then?

Nothing is solved,

nobody comes;

even solitary children understand. This

apparent respite, apparent quenching

of the need to be befriended

might (much like love in later years) leave you

lonelier than when you were merely alone?

The unanswering cold, like a stepfather to a silent child

And the light if that's what it is

The steplight

No—

the light that's always leaving

The moon on her shoulder
like skin—
brightest and nightest desire.
Her eyes, unknown to him,
wide open. Dark
for dark's sake, he recalls:
the fallacy still
unavoidable.
Child,
the glass of sleep
unasked for and withheld.

I have been sitting here
all of the past
hour very sleepily watching the wind
as it blows through the black leaves
surrounding the house
in absolute silence, the leaves
swarming like huge moths' wings
in a futile but tireless attempt
to come through the windows. I am so tired,
I don't understand it:
I can barely keep my eyelids open,
barely remain sitting upright.
I have been by myself
far too long watching the wind
blow through the black-green leaves.
It has been so long
since anyone has called;
I can't remember the last time
I heard the doorbell ring.
And even if it did,
what difference would it make.
I don't detect the vaguest desire
to get up and answer the door,
to see another face. No,
I could quite easily remain here
like somebody pleasantly lapsing
into deep sleep, a sleep so profound
no phone or alarm clock or doorbell
could ever reach its lightless depths.
I really have to rouse myself, maybe
even call up a friend I have missed;
or go for a walk in my neighborhood's
shady decrepitude (where do they go
when August comes, where
do they all disappear to) …
And I fully intend to, I certainly should—
just give me a minute or two,
I am so incredibly weary
and I don't know why. I think
these leaves are wishing me
asleep.
That must be what it is.
I must have left a window open.
I can hear them all at once—
they've gotten in somehow
and now
they are covering my body. My face,
they are covering my face;
and I have passed the point
where I might have lifted a hand
to brush them away,
if I'd wished to.
I am drowning, I think:
I have been drowning
now for a number of years,
and I have had the strangest dream.

It's one of those evenings
we all know
from somewhere. It might be
the last summery day—
you feel called on to leave what you're doing
and go for a walk by yourself.
Your few vacant streets are the world.
And you might be a six-year-old child
who's finally been allowed
by his elders to enter a game
of hide-and-seek in progress.
It's getting darker fast,
and he's not supposed to be out;
but he gleefully runs off, concealing himself
with his back to a tree
that sways high overhead
among the first couple of stars.
He keeps dead still, barely breathing for pleasure,
long after they have all left.

From the third-floor window
you watch the mailman's slow progress
through the blowing snow.
As he goes from door to door

he might be searching
for a room to rent,
unsure of the address,
which he keeps stopping to check

in the outdated and now
obliterated clipping
he holds, between thickly gloved fingers,
close to his eyes

in a hunched and abruptly simian posture that makes you turn away, quickly switching off the light.

The thought of the camellia unfolds

*

The camellia you placed in the mirror

One of those that chooses you
nights
when you can't sleep

On the cool floor at your feet
lies one that fell
unnoticed the moment you entered

like a shooting star …

Nights when you look up afraid all at once

Anything can happen here

Every star in the sky may be nothing but light that still reaches your eyes though each of them died

disappeared as many years ago as people will live on the earth

Then who will see

the camellias that are breathing all around you

who will care

and yet the hand with which you hold the stem is still real

*

Waxy roselike petal eyelid of a sleep
you need never return from
though your head falls
at last
into a sleep even deeper the double
of your life before you were

*

Motionless uninterrupted by the open window still
as a candle's flame under a large glass
perfectly vertical
pointing
at the sky

sunrise sky mirrored in the camellias

before it disappears

*

Motionless yet growing

Tensed faces of the newly dead growing young again before our eyes

at the speed of the hour hand the moon setting on the hill

*

Leaves evergreen immortal for a little while

Formal
the unbreathing
the seemingly unbreathing
manifold flower that exists like the earth
before and beyond life
here forever
approximately

Oh live while you are here

*

Flower mysterious commonplace

Let's say of you in particular
why do you exist
when no one would notice if you'd never been
if you'd never breathed
like any human presence
like the world
the universe …

Mirror of creation beauty itself

for no reason miracle

beauty itself
or a torch that's passed on
both
as Agee noted

its face and sex are one

*

No one has seen the invisible rainbow arc of your fall

Longhaired star of the peripheral Vision

All we imagine but cannot perceive

or believe in

or instantly forget

Our own life a parenthesis of light

then abrupt transition
to an unknowing

where dark ascension
and falling
are one and the same

*

You reflect the hidden wildness
waiting in the wings of earth's

statelier weather

The undivulged grieving
of homesick faces
Dark green hair's-breadth vein or rivers flowing

returning

to a little spot in Asia 1660

*

Evergreen even in shade
nocturnal
bloom at noon

Breathing one another
what garden can contain them
Nagasaki
the Apple Blossom …

Under a glass sky each one has its own star all the sun it requires for the time being

*

Apparitional
once you appeared
in the Pacific northwest

No one was scared
the fools

An exotic curiosity perhaps

you had found a place that felt a little like your own and were promptly placed under a jar or glass house

At that time people sometimes just moved on the glass house fell into decay

Lightning maybe or slow-motion shattering silent over time And to no one's surprise

no one being there at the moment

the resurrection of your white face rose
there in the frost
in your reversed
mirror world like Persephone's
darker twin sister
who dies of spring

Your newly awakened
groped toward the cliffs
salt crystallizing like honey the petal-tongues
tasting the familiar
wind tasting their exile

blindly gazing toward Japan

*

Camellia scent
too subtle for the mind (perhaps
someday when the mind is human)

we've been given your visible presence
nobody knows why We don't even know why we were given our own

But who would choose smell over vision As post- or prehumans we are accustomed to disagreeing over everything it seems to be our job there's nothing we do better

and any fool can do it It's like breathing no doubt we would perish if it were to cease for five minutes

But in your presence could anyone ever

deny would anyone dare deny

it's a good thing you are here

Camellia visible as wind moving the leaves

moving our hearts

Camellia of the one-starred sea at dawn.

You sit in the unlit room watching
a storm as it slowly erases the street
and the neighbors: on one side
the mother of four
armed and dangerous grade-school-aged children,
and on the other those night owls, proprietors
of an open-all-night drive-by crack store.
You sit in the darkening room
gazing at the vanishing skyline
in the distance. How long has it been?
The room completely soundless.
Night wind around the house, the ticking
snow against the windows—
for some time you've ceased to hear them
or anything else, only the silence
such constant nearby noises
finally come to. The same
way the music has passed into silence
even as you listened, yet remains
filling the air, your very presence
flickering in a last
awareness of itself.
You are wide awake, your eyes are even open;
yet you only notice this music
which you carefully chose for yourself
long after it's ceased. And you wonder
where you might have gone
during this absence: it seems
to be night here. Yes,
it is night in the room.
But here, too, is a lamp within reach
on a small familiar stool-like table
beside you, beside the large chair
which so closely resembles the one
in which you are sitting. You reach across
to switch on this lamp and are shocked
by the telephone. You sit back and inhale
the black air deep into your lungs,
and listen to it ringing.
Then, for a while, to it not ringing.

A metaphor
one in which
the body stands
for the soul
who's busy
elsewhere
no doubt floating
facedown
down
a black reverie

i. The Gratitude

By no longer being

here,
you've made it easier for me to leave the world.

2. The Wound

The wound that never healed but learned to sing.

3.
Version of a Song of the Ituri Rain Forest Pygmies

The darkness—where is it?
Surrounding us
all.

If darkness is, darkness is good.

Is there a single thing in nature
that can approach in mystery
the absolute uniqueness of any human face, first, then
its transformation between childhood and old age—

We are surrounded at every instant by sights that ought to strike the sane unbenumbed person tongue-tied, mute with gratitude and awe. However,

there may be three sane people on earth
at any given time: and if
you got the chance to ask them how they do it,
either they would not understand, or

I think they might just stare at you
with the embarrassment of pity. Maybe smile
the way you do when children suddenly reveal a secret
preoccupation with their origin, careful not to cause them shame,

on the contrary, to evince the great congratulating pleasure
one feels in the presence of a superior talent and intelligence;
or simply as one smiles to greet a friend who's waking up,
to prove no harm awaits him, you've dealt with and banished all harm.

I think I have murdered a child.
It happened earlier today
while I was taking my nap.
I have to take these naps,
you see, because I never sleep.
And they usually serve well enough
as a means of reminding me
and sometimes revealing
facets, heretofore hidden,
of my terrible character. And yet
such numbing and saddening and
unimpeachable representations of it
are rarely required; the routine betrayal
of somebody who cares about me, the opportunity
to be betrayed and voluptuously wallow
in that, the conviction I'm being pursued
by unknown individuals who wish me harm
or death do the job for the most part. This time
I have murdered a child, I think
he was quite a small child, one of those
who can walk—sort of—and say a few words;
who still emit the faint light
which exists nowhere else, is a bit like
the radiance certain dim stars shed
only when your eyes are turned away
and perceive it peripherally, yet remains,
clever similes notwithstanding,
wholly beyond the power to describe.
It seems to me I'd been entrusted with him,
a little boy belonging
to neighbors I don't know,
and we found ourselves holding hands, walking
along the precarious margin
of some deafeningly traveled freeway;
then for some reason his tiny hand
(you know, one you might crush like an egg
merely by clenching your own slightly) slipped
through my hand and he suddenly
turned left
and stepped into traffic. Immediately
he was grazed by a car moving past
at too great a speed for the driver
even to notice, was spun to the ground
where I rushed to his side with a heart attack
managing to help him to his feet,
the left shoulder shattered, eyes conscious
but blank. We were able to enter unseen
the woods to the right, where I half ran,
gripping far too tightly his right hand, slashed
blind by low branches.
Abruptly, we came to
a lake shining brilliantly
just past a stand of pines.
I don't understand what happens next. Yet
what was I supposed to do? How could I
take him home in this condition?
I grabbed him by the ankles
and with one swing smashed his head
against a big stone. Now
he had no head and I had this small, almost
weightless object to dispose of. I put him
in the water and he vanished. I returned
to the house of his parents, and found them there
preoccupied with many other children,
hoping insanely no one would notice
the absence of mine and rehearsing,
the same way I have all my life,
a plausibly sorrowful lie
about the child that I had lost.
Trying to find my way out of the darkening
forest, the incomprehensible task
accomplished, leaving just one more, one
equally loathsome: surviving,
denying everything, trying
to go on without being killed
again.