QUIET THINGS

*Due to tumblr suckage, if you are using the app, correct formatting is impossible. Apologies.

*Due to tumblr suckage, if you are using the app, formatting is impossible. Apologies.

*Due to tumblr suckage, accurate formatting on this is somewhat impossible. Apologies.

War, illness and famine will make you their favourite grandchild. You'll be like a blind person watching a silent movie. You'll chop onions and pieces of your heart into the same hot skillet. Your children will sleep in a suitcase tied with a rope. Your husband will kiss your breasts every night as if they were two gravestones. Already the crows are grooming themselves for you and your people. Your oldest son will lie with flies on his lips without smiling or lifting his hand. You'll envy every ant you meet in your life and every roadside weed. Your body and soul will sit on separate stoops chewing the same piece of gum. Little cutie, are you for sale? the devil will say. The undertaker will buy a toy for your grandson. Your mind will be a hornet's nest even on your deathbed. You will pray to God but God will hang a sign that He's not to be disturbed. Question no further, that's all I know.

Once I knew, then I forgot. It was as if I had fallen asleep in a field only to discover at waking that a grove of trees had grown up around me. "Doubt nothing, believe everything," was my friend's idea of metaphysics, although his brother ran away with his wife. He still bought her a rose every day, sat in the empty house for the next twenty years talking to her about the weather. I was already dozing off in the shade, dreaming that the rustling trees were my many selves explaining themselves all at the same time so that I could not make out a single word. My life was a beautiful mystery on the verge of understanding, always on the verge! Think of it! My friend's empty house with every one of its windows lit. The dark trees multiplying all around it.

One summer she goes into the field as usual stopping for a bit at the pool where she often looks at herself, to see if she detects any changes. She sees the same person, the horrible mantle of daughterliness still clinging to her. The sun seems, in the water, very close. That's my uncle spying again, she thinks-- everything in nature is in some way her relative. I am never alone, she thinks, turning the thought into a prayer. Then death appears, like the answer to a prayer. No one understands anymore how beautiful he was. But Persephone remembers. Also that he embraced her, right there, with her uncle watching. She remembers sunlight flashing on his bare arms. This is the last moment she remembers clearly. Then the dark god bore her away. She also remembers, less clearly, the chilling insight that from this moment she couldn't live without him again. The girl who disappears from the pool will never return. A woman will return, looking for the girl she was.

Going too fast for myself I missed more than I think I can remember almost everything it seems sometimes and yet there are chances that come back that I did not notice where they stood where I could have reached out and touched them this morning the black shepherd dog still young looking up and saying Are you ready this time

What is green in me darkens, muscadine. If a woman is inconsistent, good, I am faithful to ebb and flow, I fall in season and now is the time of ripening. If her part is to be true, a north star, good, I hold steady in the black sky and vanish by day, yet burn there in blue or above quotes of cloud. There is no savor more sweet, more salt than to be glad to be what, woman, and who, myself, I am, a shadow that grows longer as the sun moves, drawn out on a thread of wonder. If I bear burdens they begin to be remembered as gifts, goods, a basket of bread that hurts my shoulders but closes me in fragrance. I can eat as I go.

Silence is not everything. It is half of everything Like a house.

This doesn't happen: It happens to you.

I most remember the class where we lie on our backs, on the cold floor, eyes closed, listening to a story set in tall grasses, a land of flash floods. Ten babies slept in a wagon as a stream risen from nothing trampled like white horses toward them. We heard the horses, pulling their terrible silence. Then he asked us to open our eyes. Our teacher took from his pocket an orange square, dropped it: this had wrapped one of the babies. This was found after the water receded. I remember the woman with red hair kneeling before the scarf, afraid to touch it, our teacher telling her she could stop by saying, OK, Good. I remember the boy named Michael, who once told me he loved me. Michael approached with tiny steps, heel to toe, as if he were measuring land, and, all at once, he fell on the scarf. It could have been funny, loud, clumsy. Another context, another moment, it would have been ridiculous. Head down, he held a scarf to his eyes. My turn, I didn't move. I stared at the orange scarf, but not as long as I'd have liked to, for this was a class there were others in line for their grief. I touched it, lightly, with one hand, folded it into a square, a smaller square, smaller. What is lived in a life? Our teacher making up that story as he watched us lie on the dusty floor, our rising, one by one, to play with loss, to practice, what is lived, to live? What was that desire to move through ourselves to the orange cotton, agreed-upon, passed from one to another?

Rows of rectangles rise, set into brick. And in every rectangle, there is a lamp. Why should there be a lamp in every window? Because in all this wide city, there is not enough light. Because the young in the world are crazy for light and the old are afraid it will leave them. Because whoever you are, if you come home late but it looks like noon, you won't tense at the click as you walk in which is probably after all only the heat coming on, or the floorboard settling. So when you fling your coat to its peg in the hall, and kick off your heels, and unzip your black velvet at that odd vee'd angle as if someone were twisting your arm from behind, then reach inside the closet for a hanger, just to the dark left where the dresses live, what happens next is a complete surprise.

stars are bubbles of air rising through an infinite depth: we rise with them through this dark, slow motion snowfall in reverse sleep through our ascent bound at wrist and ankle by the chains from silver watches, anchors without weight: even as we dream we hold our breath against the moment when we crash up through the surface tension, as though through a sheet of glass, into still another depth with other stars, the fragments of our last collision in our wake eyes shut tight, and every mouth a photo of a scream

You nature poets think you've got it, hostages somewhere in Vermont or Oregon, so it blooms and withers only for you, so all you have to do is name it: primrose --and now you're writing poetry, and now you ship it off to us, to smell and envy. But we are made of newspaper and smoke and we dunk your roses in vats of blue. Birds don't call, our pigeons play it close to the vest. When the moon is full we hear it in the sirens. The Pleiades you could probably buy downtown. Gravity is the receiver on the hook. Mortality we smell on certain people as they pass.

Cat stands at the fridge, Cries loudly for milk. But I've filled her bowl. Wildcat, I say, Sister, Look, you have milk. I clink my fingernail Against the rim. Milk. With down and liver, A word I know she hears. Her sad miaow. She runs To me. She dips In her whiskers but Doesn't drink. As sometimes I want the light on When it is on. Or when I saw the woman walking Toward my house and I thought there's Francis. But then looked in the car mirror To be sure. She stalks The room. She wants. Milk Beyond milk. World beyond This one, she cries.

The female is fertile, and discipline (contra naturam) only confuses her --Gary Snyder i am a woman and my poems are woman's: easy to say this the female is ductile and (stroke after stroke) built for masochistic calm. The deadened nerve is part of it: awakened sex, dead retina fish eyes; at hair's root minimal feeling and pelvic architecture functional assailed inside & out (bring forth) the cunt gets wide and relatively sloppy bring forth men children only female is ductile woman, a veil thru which the fingering Will twice torn twice torn inside & out the flow what rhythm add to stillness what applause?

The Dharma is like an Avocado! Some parts so ripe you can't believe it, But it's good. And other places hard and green Without much flavor, Pleasing to those who like their eggs well-cooked. And the skin is thin, The great big round seed In the middle, Is your own Original Nature--- Pure and smooth, Almost nobody ever splits it open Or ever tries to see If it will grow. Hard and slippery, It looks like You should plant it---but then It shoots out thru the fingers--- gets away.