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.

Every morning I wake
with blood on my pillow
and the taste of fresh blood
like iron against my tongue.

They say my gums are inflamed
and the bleeding will cease
at first frost—
Each morning the sun wakes me.

I think some nerve is exposed—
it is only August—
or a fine skin was peeled off
the night you were killed.

Conversations at breakfast
have the stripped truth of poems.
All day I wait
for a miraculous letter.

In fact my whole life
leans forward slightly, waiting.
Each day lurches downhill
to its red undoing.

I don’t need to know any more about death
from the Japanese beetles
infesting the roses and plum
no matter what my neighbor sprays
in orange rubber gloves.
You can almost watch them writhe and wither,
pale and fall like party napkins
blown from a table just as light fades,
and the friends
as often happens when light fades,
talk of something painful, glacial, pericardial,
and the napkins blow into the long grass.
When Basho writes of the long grass,
I don’t need to know it has to do with death,
the characters reddish-brown and dim,
shadows of a rusted sword, an hour hand.
Imagine crossing mountains in summer snow
like Basho, all you own
on your back: brushes, robe,
the small gifts given in parting it’s bad luck to leave behind.
I don’t want to know what it’s like to die on a rose,
sunk in perfume and fumes,
clutching,
to die in summer with everything off its knees,
daisies scattered like eyesight by the fence,
gladiolas open and fallen in mud,
weighed down with opening and breeze.
I wonder what your thoughts were, Father,
after they took your glasses and teeth,
all of us bunched around you like clouds
knocked loose of their moorings,
the white bird lying over you,
its beak down your throat.
Rain, heartbeats of rain.

The focal length is all wrong, I say
to the meteor shower.

Be calm, they say,
or the chimney swallows will steal

ember by ember
everything keeping you close to him

lying on the lawn, counting stars
shaken from the night’s branches

in summer storm.
I promise to pay the medical bill

for August’s sky: orbits of iron
pith & cloud-seed broken

against our atmosphere.
The telescope we built—

a cardboard tube, Teflon
& mirror—is a close for seeing

only what could have been,
can’t tell you anything

about this moment. Here, light
means destruction. A mattress

dragged across the wet field
means light. The swallows

ember in the chimney.
Lie still, the meteors say

above the apple’s barren
branches. Sometimes

the sky can only be torn apart
with the naked eye.

The aspen glitters in the wind
And that delights us.

The leaf flutters, turning,
Because that motion in the heat of August
Protects its cells from drying out. Likewise the lead
Of the cottonwood.

The gene pool threw up a wobble stem
And the tree danced. No.
The tree capitalized.
No. There are limits to saying,
In language, what the tree did.

It is good sometimes for poetry to disenchant us.

Dance with me, dancer. Oh I will.

Mountains, sky,
The aspen doing something in the wind.

So this is excellence: movement
toward the barely possible—
the puma’s dream
of running down a hummingbird
on a grassy plain.

I comes up out of the ocean
warm days. It reaches
for inland meadows and sighs
across grass in its cape of rain.

People come to their doors.
They look where the trees turn
grey, where hills have stepped back
of each other. Whatever it was,

It passed carefully, touching
farms, leaning over ponds,
bending down the wheat.
People stand long at their doors.

“You were good this time, August
Old Friend. So long. So long.”

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in the sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the arch-duke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

At first they look like any other birds
on gun line from the underbrush, so someone
calls them sparrows and someone who thinks
he knows, scarlet tanagers or something else
exotic, as if they’ve slipped captivity—
one of those white sky August days the hammer
of the heat picks out the old one of the child
locked in a car, while gathered above the blank
grave of the pavement, at the altitude of snow,
enough rain to almost forgive it all.
Only two are really red, the rest a buoyant
rust blood brown, young or female, all of them
with masks and crests that make them what
they are, explosions from the other side
or blown in, with the paper, with the storm.
Whoever starts the clapping is answered
by a show of hands to meet baptismal waters
and a couple, who are high, bird-dancing.
Whoever starts the shouting is quieted
by the lady who hears silences,
cupping her clownish ears. …
For a moment the ringing air is clean, then
for a moment nothing happens, nothing moved
except for the cardinals, in and out of trees.
And in that moment ends. The cloudburst
passes, the air turns to fire again,
the sirens sing their distances, the walls
of light burn down. And in no time,
in the time it takes the runoff to drain
back underground, there’s no one left
but lifers and the dealers and rain birds
swallowed upward b the sun, and rain, new rain,
in the rivers and the reservoir uptown,
ready to rise and to pour its heart out all over.

it’s our blood that’s dried up
and crumbles through our fingers
like faded leaves
but there is no fall in here
and summer is standing stock-still
like a white heron in green water