Poetry 365

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights
that anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe that Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

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.

Lit votives tongue the air, horizon
red with the approach of dawn.

Brake lights strobe downtown,
the birds do not wish us to rise,

the results of gunshots well known.
Headlines stitch a fatwa across

each white-eyed gaze as Time
reaches for mirror shades,

eyes like shot deer salting
their wounds in pacific waves.

Lit votives tongue the air.
She murmurs inside a dream cave

beyond moonset, nudging into a warm
scent. Fossil wings gaining feathers, she flies

unalone, her lover quietly placing her tea close,
ridge spruce silhouetted by lacteal dawn.

Rush hour firing up, the street ready to splice
through faith at the drop of a sneer, sidewalk throngs

gazing at sliced sky, cement, children
at bus stops making churches with their hands.

Lit votives tongue the air, she dreams
beyond moonset, her thighs catching light.

Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?

broken wires
tubes
and rusty needles
in the nose
mouth
and penis.

on the forehead
misleading like a star
dullard or burnt-out bulb

in the spiraling wriggles
of the intestine
the putrid stench
of missing dreams

in sleep
when heavy footsteps come
and give key
it wakes up
grinding worn-out cogs

in the eye-wells,
the spinal passes
the skull-sky
at the bottom of the stomach

tongue-tied
and unable to down a drop of water
like the steel grandpa
who lay bedridden
for yet another lifetime.

After if rains you should sigh a little for the spongy world.
You should listen to the fish gasping in the underbrush
and the duck’s heart beating twenty yards away.
When the music arrives you should let it take you back across the river
into the kitchens where the clean hands are linked.
You should lie on the stones underneath the cold waterfall
and let you fingers drift hopelessly through the foam.
You should float slowly past the row of barking dogs
and visit the silent opossum in his grotto.
You should go to sleep between the sobs of the 9 o’clock local on the Jersey side
and the whines of Sea-Land and Roadway on the Pennsylvania.

Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the water lines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.

It is the morning. The country has slept the whole winter.
Window seats were covered with fur skins, the yard was full
Of stiff dogs, and hands that clumsily held heavy books.

Now we wake, and rise from bed, and eat breakfast—
Shouts rise from the harbor of the blood,
Mist, and masts rising the known of wooden tackle in the sunlight.

Now we sing and do tiny dances on the kitchen floor.
Our whole body is like a harbor at dawn;
We know that our master has left us for the day.

One fine day,
open as cut lips,
more than alive—asleep and beaten powerless
you and I
like students evacuating
a burning high school
then lying flat like a drunken one next to the old boiler
in a T-shirt consumed by snow
when us the janitor awakens
we shall be
heated like dead languages after school
safe still, exempt on the illegal floor
in the high observatory
we will pardon the imbeciles
as clear as intelligible
hardly have time for the brain that kills, bravo
then walking back to school, resolved
under the branches flinging marks
the snow is more than alive, it is asleep
in the little nit-brown street
infamous as sleet as the day repeats
Look at yourself! Look at yourself! That’s why I’m driving you away
With my infra-red powerful ray
In the absence of a sphere of Lucky Socrates!
Lucky Socrates!
Almost too seriously, and frighteningly, oh sleep.

Think of a sheep
knitting a sweater;
think of your life
getting better and better.

Think of your cat
asleep in a tree;
think of that spot
where you once skinned your knee.

Think of a bird
that stands in your palm.
Try to remember
the Twenty-first Psalm.

Think of a big pink horse
galloping south;
think of a fly, and
close your mouth.

If you feel thirsty, then
drink from your cup.
The birds will keep singing
until they wake up.

We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one

as the fire snaps in the stove
and out eyes close,

and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,

we drowse as horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold

surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.