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.
The Blizzard
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.
Mental Illness
A metaphor
one in which
the body stands
for the soul
who's busy
elsewhere
no doubt floating
facedown
down
a black reverie
Poem in Three Parts
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.
The Face
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.
Depiction of a Dream (I)
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.
Depiction of a Dream (II)
So far I have eluded them.
I don't have the faintest idea what I've done.
I do know it must have been terrible:
at this point every other person on the street
looks as if he could be a plainclothesman;
and whatever they did with the half of the town
they replaced, they were splendidly trained
in mimicking those former citizens' sullen
opinion of my presence,
their indifference to my comings and goings,
to the fact that I exist at all. I'm trying to get home.
A group of men approaches as I cross the park.
One of them is a good friend I remember from school,
one I lost contact with years ago. How wonderful!
I feel happy and safe for the first time
in so many months. We grin and embrace.
He asks about my life. I tell him
I will be teaching again very soon.
I'm afraid it won't be soon, he remarks,
with a sinister failure to alter the warmth in his voice
or the broad smile.
All at once the cuffs are on—
someone's soundlessly come from behind—
freezing through to the bones
of my wrist, like they do,
although he hasn't moved or ceased to gaze into my eyes
with the same protective look of sadness and delight
you develop at encountering some beloved person
long considered dead, or forever lost to you.
There are, incidentally, a couple of gun barrels
touching my head, coldly branding
their zeros in my temples.
The others all stand in a ring
surrounding me.
I start to cry.
I have to feed my cat first!
I have to feed my cat.
What's going to happen to my cat.
I think you had to be there.
New Leaves Bursting into Green Flames
This is why somebody loves
the poem, or attempts to
make up his own verses, in other words
devote his life to something
that's generally held to be
an occupation solely of the dead,
and so impossible. (In terms of livelihood
this is, in fact, correct.)
Those who inhabit the rest of this block,
the greater part of the city, the planet, to them
it is impossible, irrelevant, and again
on account of its clearly nonlucrative
nature, contemptible: but I will tell you
why one sits writing his poem, which is nothing
in the end but the longing to locate
the door to his own happy world
forever locked in his face otherwise;
to therefore see the world in terms of words, and pay
the price for this, in a strange
key. There is no point to it, one passing through this
fire, yet involved's an indomitable thirst
to attempt, without knowing how,
knowing only you're going to fail,
saying back to the earth
a few words which equal
or even rival its beauty,
its loneliness,
its disappointment and wrath.
And for what? My landlord never heard of me
and expects his rent just the same
as he expects it from the junkies,
giggling sophomores and cowering eccentrics
with whom I share this building.
I have gone on with it. I don't know why
except that I've never loved anything else,
its possibility anyway;
and it is the only thing that has never
permanently turned its back on me. And so
I've gone on, in this absurdly ugly place—
I have yet to hear a single note
of that famous still sad music.
I've done it for the sake
of maybe 10 minutes when I was fifteen:
when I—when it suddenly—but why describe it?
No one will understand, no one will care
that today, while waiting for the bus
I looked up from the tedium
of untreatable things
and found them again,
here. The few newborn
leaves more light
than leaf on a branch.
They were back—or I was.
For an instant no time had elapsed:
these leaves were not new,
they were the same ones, and I was not old.
Nothing had changed, they were the same
leaves that blazed before
my eyes all those years ago, mind blazing.
That moment so long ago,
I did not have to say, was this moment.
How could I go to the hospital
for my appointment now,
when I had gotten well?
So I just turned and walked
home. (I call it home.)
Having nowhere else to turn
this is where I generally go.
What difference does it make anymore?
And it was fine. I had not lived
my whole life in vain—
nothing had damaged that instant
those minutes I had lived
for all my life.
And anyone, in the words
of Andre Breton, who smirks at this
is a pig.
The Lord's Prayer
I have been attempting to pray
the Lord's Prayer for the first time
since I was a child. Only now
the problem is not one
of mystified indifference, on
the contrary. Now
my concentration is eclipsed
by many distractions, though I'm trying to mean it.
One question now is the existence
of the mad. One of the most bothersome
things about the mad:
they are so often right.
Look at Christ. And yet
as they are, after all, insane
most don't possess the social graces,
the finances or tact
that would be required, so
there is virtually no question
of their influencing or getting any
where near
the circles where the true and the delusional are
legislated.
I think of Pilate, eyebrows slightly raised in weary but astonished sarcasm, responding to the assertion, “I come to bear witness to the truth.” It's horrifying but I can never read this, that is PP's reply, “What is truth?”
without having to suppress a strong impulse to agree. This is the abomination of the secret
envy the sane feel for the mad with their constantly
menaced yet suicidal willingness to say what's true with a clear conscience; envy of the torturer
who will be going home soon, disgusted and tired from his day's legal work to supper and family.
We've grown a good deal more cunning— compassionate, we call it. Still, we don't take any chances. We keep them under control—just think, when we could so easily kill them just like in the old days of family and morality. But it's an easy task, since they are incapable of taking any action whatsoever save that of occasionally perceiving reality. The real one.
We do this for their own good, of course; they might hurt themselves, you see, especially
us. And we have any number of methods which involve both their concrete surroundings and the medicinal alteration of their capacity to think. I mean, look where it got them. For no one, absolutely no one harbors the slightest desire to be reminded of reality. Things are bad enough as it is. I myself have served with a believer's heart on both sides, and I must say I greatly prefer the company of the nuts, though I will side with the sane any day.
I will freely admit to being a little confused
by this. It's not so much a matter
of Lowell's off-the-cuff remark, “I am inclined to
believe that it is better to be happy and good than to be a poet.” It isn't that simple. In fact, it is excruciatingly mysterious. But perhaps the human race is not all dressed up in mystery at all, but in reality is the Void
in pathetically transparent drag, “or something.” “So to speak.”
Where You Are
Dawn finds you leafing through old address books.
You thought you had written to everyone.
Yes, you have. To everyone—some of them
also wrote to you. They wrote back to you. Years ago, now. You aren't there anymore.
Then what do you want them to say. Nothing has changed, nothing has happened
to them—the ones who lived, the ones still at the same address. How would you ever describe it. And why.
And what could they say. They are safe.
They have a life, why would they want to write.
Untitled
I like to see the individual verses
spread on the otherwise blank sheet of paper