Poetry 365

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven, But the needle pierces
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

And this hour, what is dead is worried
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

In little dark-ringed frames of light
the neighborhood is dining: heads nod
to one another; candlelight catches on things—
threads of it snapped by knives and forks,
the glass of water, the wine. No one

is not at home here except the man
walking the block alone and peering in
as if he were a visitor from beyond
and wanted to feast his eyes again
on this picture of felicity, trying to read

the lips winestained and quick in talk,
faces where light plays like a dog
in water—haloes of hair, hands flying.

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom, and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelay,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life’s dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead? lo! with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance—
And must I lose a soul’s inheritance?

Late at night, when you’re so lonely
your shoulders lean to the center of your body,
you call no one and you don’t call out.

This is dignity. This is the pure loneliness
that made Christ think he was God.
This is why lunatics smile at their thoughts.

Even the best moment, as you slip
half-a-foot deep into someone you like,
deepens to the loneliness in it

and loneliness that’s not. If you believe in
Christ hanging on the cross, his arms spread
as if to embrace the Father he calls

who is somewhere else, you still might hear
your own voice at your next great embrace
thinking Loneliness in another can’t be touched,

like Christ’s voice at death answering himself.

for twelve in their pickup trucks

As lemmings run into the sea, old priests appear
at the house of Thomas Aquinas an Thomas More
to fix their faith and Hume opens the door.
They ran that way before the sea was there.

Because they couldn’t remember the bypass
that cut across their roads and cut them down
a dozen farmers have died coming to town.
All they remembered was dust, gravel, and grass.

Saint Augustine! well hast thou said,
That of our vices we can frame
A ladder, if we will but tread
Beneath our feet each deed of shame!
All common things, each day’s events,
That with the hour begin and end,
Our pleasures and our discontents,
Are rounds by which we may ascend.
The low desire, the base design,
That makes another’s virtues less;
The revel of the ruddy wine,
And all occasions of excess;
The longing for ignoble things;
The strife for triumph more than truth;
The hardening of the heart, that brings
Irreverence for the dreams of youth;
All thoughts of ill; all evil deeds,
That have their root in thoughts of ill;
Whatever hinders or impedes
The action of the nobler will;—
All these must first be trampled down
Beneath our feet, if we would gain
In the bright fields of fair renown
The right of eminent domain.
We have not wings, we cannot soar;
But we have feet to scale and climb
By slow degrees, by more and more,
The cloudy summits of our time.
The mighty pyramids of stone
That wedge-like cleave the desert airs,
When nearer seen, and better known,
Are but gigantic flights of stairs.
The distant mountains, that uprear
Their solid bastions to the skies,
Are crossed by pathways, that appear
As we to higher levels rise.
The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
Standing on what too long we bore
With shoulders bent and downcast eyes,
We may discern—unseen before—
A path to higher destinies.
Nor deem the irrevocable Past,
As wholly wasted, wholly vain,
If, rising on its wrecks, at last
To something nobler we attain.

Like the one who demands
his horoscope from an astrologer and then
disappointed and depressed by the awful predictions
ambushes him and cuts his throat
(as if he could evade his fate).
Someone will discover
          the corpse and order
that it be cremated.
          Then
the ashes rising on the wind will draw a map
the sky       the stars
          and in the center that man,
roasting over a slow fire
because of the endless rage of a god
still recuperating from a wounded throat.

Vikram Babu asks:
          have you thought it over?


Como aquel que demanda
su horóscopo a un astrólogo y entonces,
decepcionado y triste por su horrible pronóstico
le embosca y le degüella
(como si así pudiese escapar de su sino).
Alguien encontrará
          el cadáver y hará que lo incineren.
          Luego
las cenizas al viento dibujarán un mapa:
el cielo y las estrellas,
          y en el centro aquel hombre
a fuego lento asado
por la infinita cólera de un dinos
aún convaleciente de su garganta herida.

Vikram Babu pregunta:
          ¿lo has meditado bien?

Why do we love you? So easy:
You have many faces
And each one shines upon us.

You become the one we need
Though we cannot name this need,
And you require little in return.

Each day, we marry our fingers
To the air you displace moving
Toward us and away. Our

Smallest suck them, hoping your
Sweetness might remain. Tell us
What to carry and we’ll go.

Our tails glow white in the moon.

The early morning stench
of chemical shacks is heating up
at first light, walking off
into the crêpe of a greening gravitational swamp
of idiot purchase,
of adamantine North Atlantic tolerance
for alligators and opossum—
in fact the blue-red sauce
the opossum bobs in
has risen with scallions, moons of garlic
and a lizard who fell
into the pot along with a high shelf’s
relics: a vulgar shaving of bone
from Jerusalem, a moody
saint’s letter of complaint about gallstones,
and a young Jesuit’s scalp taken twice somehow
by an old crazy Algonquin called Quiet Pierre
who turned cannibal himself
in a dark March storm, remembered
for the size of its hail, volleying thunder
and a lightning strike that melted a small church bell
down its rope onto the floor of the scented vestibule—
close, very close
to the center of the red old city
of Montreal.

The morning after the first Seder

Falling on the table, sunlight––the manna;
the shank and bitter herb, the egg, the Nile
of Manischewitz and white bone china––
the torah of the seder, as we slipped from exile.
By one o’clock, I found I was cocooned
once more, the whale fat with wine and guile
diving down, deep into the dune
sea of sleep. Now I awake in minyan,
sweeping up the matzah and macaroons.

Later the same day

I’ve passed through the washing up, been chastened
in Hebrew, Ma-Nishta-Na Ha Li la Hazeh,
managed to nap some more. There’s just one
seder to go, fresh-cut flowers outspread
in their vases, chiree, swtt, swtt of song
as birds zoom on fresh turned radish beds.
Pesah! Release from dull, cramped wrongs,
even as a distant train, moaning, passes,
a dark memory over all the flagstones.