of what might have been
aged them
Their million mute
unnoticed acts of insubordination
and inconsequential
cruelty changed them—
Yellow window
in the blue dawn
lost is lost
and gone is gone but
be there
if I wake again, don't abandon me
defend me.
Clearlake Oaks (I)
Konocti's summit
sunlit
on the other shore …
To sleep in the mountains
(when have I
ever slept) blissfully
sown
through an infinite imageless brightness—
inspected and forgotten by a grass-green dragonfly.
Clearlake Oaks (II)
The hawk rises
into the sun;
the lizard goes testing the dust
with its tongue—
stationary
hour, above
the windless
blond and shadow of the hill.
And I am
here to say this,
my mysterious
privilege and joy.
Mercy
I embarrass you, don't I— whining for change and making you quicken your pace; or worse staring as you pass by,
without the tact to disappear and die.
The Drunk
I don't understand any more
than you do. I only know
he stays here
like some huge wounded animal—
open the door and he will gaze at you and
linger Close the door and he will break it down
The Angel (I)
{in memory of Marguerite Young}
Decay of a tone, decay of the sun
Green eyes unseen among the leaves
The reader's lips
the dreamer's lids
Moon dissolving under the tongue
Messenger from a word a noun with an imaginary corresponding entity in space
The human face about to come
Midnight's world-altering name
And someone gives birth to a child
And laboring someone gives death to himself
The objects in the room lit up with pain
The Angel (II)
No one loves them because they are ugly
They are ugly because no one loves them …
One of the racists of beauty
I feel three green voices
gazing at me—
My very existence inexpiable—
the gardener at the tomb.
The Angel (III)
—the reality of the imagination —KEATS
In 4 o'clock in the morning insomnia's eeriest men's room—dropped in on while driving alone around town—after catching a glimpse of my face in the minutely blood-spattered mirror, suddenly into my mind, God knows from where, comes the vivid thought of transformations the face undergoes when it is crying: its ugliness. How ugly it is. When it ought to become beautiful to whoever looks on— not just any stranger's, but even the most beloved face grows ugly! How can this be? Aren't we most human when crying; and if we are most human, then aren't we approaching (we can only approach) a condition beyond what is human? I think the angels must look something like this, like somebody weeping—only there this expression is seen as one of great beauty and a sign of unsurpassable happiness. And yet can one speak of the angel at all?
The angel is a word. This
sound of human breath exists:
thus to the mind rendering visible
a being. And whether this being
occupies a place in space
is irrelevant, of no concern
to the physical being crying alone
and the unsayable solitude
of a grief for which I would like to envision
an unseen companion without
whom—let him be a word,
a sob, a thing imagined—
we are the ones who do not really exist.
Theory
What do I care about walking erect,
the fingers freed
to clutch large sticks, the hand
to hide behind the back—
bared teeth
slowly learning to form
an expression of welcome and pleasure …
Man was born when an animal wept.
The Door
Going to enter the aged horizontal cellar door
(the threshing leaves, the greenish light of the approaching storm)
you suddenly notice you're opening the cover of an enormous book.
One that's twice as big as you are—
but you know all about that:
the groping descent alone in total darkness,
toward—what ?
You know what you're looking for, and you forget; and maybe you have no idea
yet. But you know something is down there, and a light you need to find,
before you can even begin to search.
Thoughts of a Solitary Farmhouse
And not to feel bad about dying. Not to take it so personally—
it is only
the force we exert all our lives
to exclude death from our thoughts which confronts us, when it does arrive,
as the horror of being excluded— … something like that, the Canadian wind
coming in off Lake Erie
rattling the windows, horizontal snow
appearing out of nowhere
across the black highway and fields like billions of white bees.
Before the Storm
The poem seeks not to depict a place but to become one—
synonymous
summer and loneliness …
Mute child-ghost
of yourself
at the screen door
Tidepool: Elk, California
Skirting such thick undulating underwater hair, the unseen
crevice-haunting eel, the handlike crab
and moon-dilated anemones, I remember
hunting the tremendous boulders' undersides—, how then
armed with these long knives we pried
the abalone's unrelenting
nursing from its stone.
1969
Untitled
I have to sleep to think sometimes—
waking into sleep
where you find a world reversed
where muteness is speech, blindness
sight, deafness music
that haunts you alone, and that place
exists where the poem is not
written; it is the wrong
word; where the need to write
is not.
And the tedious prose of the world vanishes
from its ruined page leaving nothing
but the effortlessness of a window
looking out on precisely what is, i.e.
the unsayable mystery
pronouncing itself;
text one has long sought to translate,
even if poorly, only to read it—
here for some moments
weirdly improved on.
Without wearing out one's knees
or gnashing of teeth
or pulling out of hair
or disappointment, or terror
or life darkened, permanently;
but with a return
to the original
gratitude:
as once at fifteen
for perhaps half an hour—
I remember and await
Elegy: Breece D'J Pancake
We can always be found
seated at a bar
the glass before us
empty, with our halos
of drunk flies—
or standing
in the dark across the street
from the Sacramento
Coroner's. (An
d my friend
we're all in there
floating along
the ceiling, tethered
to our laughing gas canisters.) We are
old people shopping,
next winter's ghosts,
the prostitute
in her mortician's makeup
strolling York Avenue at 3 a.m.,
the fellow in Atlantic City
furtively pawning a doll.
Quick suture,
lightning,
hush-finger—
cheap eeriness of wind chimes—
summer thunder
from a cloudless sky …
The abandoned abandon.
There are no adults.
You're dead,
but look who's talking.
The Spider
For a long time I was attracted to small things. Spiders particularly: the spiders who lived in my house
were simply not to be found although I had no wish to harm them. It's true I might have frightened some
in my sleep, I might have stepped on one without seeing it, friendly. I did see one once
but it ran off
very quickly, like someone
who notices a large
crowd coming forward to stone him.
Something about the thin shadow of a nail in the wall; the trees' shadows moving on the bed
while a being casts
its two inches of vision
from a remote corner of the ceiling
into the room.
Once, at dawn, when I was sick I went through the house with my drug-lit eyes, I stopped by the window
and sat down at the piano in order to type something about your childhood: a sip from an empty cup,
a doll cemetery.
A spider appeared, creeping
toward my fingers
like a little furry hand.
I lie down,
I press the place behind my ear
where the vein is.
Today
I observe the absence of my brother sentience: the spider who lived in my room
with its minute blood.
Bild, 1959
As the bourbon's level descended in the bottle his voice would grow lower and more indistinct, like a candle flame under a glass
Sunlight in the basement room
So he reads to me disappearing When he is gone
I go over
and secretly taste his drink
Mushroom cloud of sunset
Whispered Ceremony After Char
Like a kneeling communicant offering his candle
the white scorpion has lifted its lance and touched the right spot.
Ambush has instructed it in invisible agility.
Swollen currents will ravage this naive scene.
Narcissus, gold buttons undoing themselves in the field's heart.
The king of the alders is dying.
Train Notes
Voicing
in itself
was the allowing to appear
of that which the voicing one saw
because it once looked into him …
Green desuetude of railroad
tracks, wild
apples, aging limestone
angel's face and
changing
cloud
Green lightning past the last trees, they are pure gaze
I am wandering through the corridors of a deserted
elementary school
I am flying
over a dark sea
Jolted awake
I meet my own eyes
in the window staring back
from badly executed features
(Like a scar the face speaks for itself)
But irises, iris—a meteor, chrysalis, a woman's
name, a flower's unconscious light
Green eyes the altering light alters
Unlit
until the sun
Damned to language, we come from the sun
From stars and weather flowing in opposite directions Stars slowly silently flowing and setting, beginningless
Rorschach Test
{1995}
Voice
I woke up at four in the afternoon. Rain woke me. Dark. Mail—a voice said, You'll have mail,
scaring and gladdening my heart. Enough anyway to get it to leave the bed, attempt to make coffee, dress and begin limping downstairs. All
the boxes were empty. Of course. A voice said, He just hasn't come yet. But I knew: it is four in the afternoon—the others have already taken
the mail indoors. Hours ago. If this my box is empty now then it was always empty.
Rain. Darker
now. By the time I had walked, more or less, back up the stairs, the treacherous voice had nothing more to say.
Hope. They call it hope—
that obscene cruelty, it never lets up for a minute.
But not anymore—never again. If the telephone rings just don't answer it, said the voice. Very adaptable, the obsequious voice. If the mail does come put it in the garbage with its fellow trash;
or set it on fire in that big metal can in the alley, you know, your publisher. Dark. Odd. It was light when I finally slept, I hear myself saying so out loud. I suppose I am insane again,
on top of everything else. He talks to himself now, they'll say. Who. By the time you get back to your room you won't even exist. A bit mean now. And you will sit down in the chair with your back to the window, it observes.
After a little I know for a fact you will open your notebook and write all this down,
why I don't know. No doubt you will even show it to somebody, at some point: they'll talk to you, offer advice,
admit admiration for this phrase,
care now—how can you. No, I don't care what they say,
what they do to me now. I used to. Terribly. And then you didn't.
And then I didn't.
Infant Sea Turtles
Think of them setting out from their leather beached eggs to follow the moon to the sea and into the sea.
The ones who make it. Think of them
hatching, so strange—like some misshapen
birds who haven't yet grown wings.
But no, they are far in advance of that, returning
to the sea that vast tear we came crawling out of. Led there by what we call the moon: Eve, or cesarean child.
The moon which left the great scar called the sea when it tore itself from the earth's side and flung itself out into space,
lover or child, to escape—but not far enough.
The Comedian
I was mad when I got home
and smelled the alcohol.
I thought he was sleeping, though
the color of the skin, the
breathing and the drool were strange.
Impossible to touch him or get near.
He started, as I guess
I sort of barked at him through tears.
All I asked for was an ambulance
I'm sure, though don't remember phoning. Cops
searched for drugs in my empty film canisters.
Nobody really saw me.
The “Final Wish,” as he put it
in the almost illegible note that was pinned
to the wall like a crucifix over the head
of the bed of some lonely serious child:
something having to do with cremation
and scattering ashes on the Ohio. And do you know
I laughed. I actually laughed—what does he think this is—
left by myself in the house. It was a scream.
Heaven
There is a heaven.
These sunflowers—those dark, wind-threshed oaks— …
Heaven's all around you,
though getting there is hard:
it is death, heaven.
But they are only words.
One in the Afternoon
Unemployed, you take a walk.
At an empty intersection
you stop to look both ways as you were taught.
An old delusion coming over you.
The wind blows through the leaves.
Beginning of November
The light is winter light.
You've already felt it
before you can open your eyes,
and now it's too late
to prepare yourself
for this gray originless
sorrow that's filling the room. It's not winter. The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you're alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you're holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it's suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.
The Meeting
I happened to be in a strange city
drinking.
One of those dives where you enter
and just pull the covers over your head;
where the gentleman sitting five inches away
has lately returned from his mission in space
in the one coeducational toilet stall
existing on the premises,
and will continue to sit there forever, nodding
and peering down into his shot glass
like a man struggling to keep awake over a bombsight;
and the aged transsexual
whore who never got around
to the final operation in his youth
seems to be pursing her lips
in your direction, demurely, down bar.
One of those places with windows
the color of your glasses—
a fact which in no way compels you
to remove them. Nobody cares
about your eyes: they'll go on serving you