I Wake To Sleep

"The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually.

I explain ontology, mathematics, theophily,

Symbolic and Aristotelian logic, says the tree.

I demonstrate perspective's and proportion's ways.

I elucidate even grayness by my greys and greys and greys.

Gravity's laws, the four dimensions, Sapphic imagery,

Come from contemplating me,

Says the tree.

I perfectly exhibit the functions of earth and air:

Look up, at and through, my branches, leaves, budded, or bare

Laid in their luminous degrees against lustrous infinity:

Your seeing related you to all of space, through me.

Here's aesthetics, too. No sight's nearer to perfectly fair.

I am mediate and immediate, says the tree.

I am variable, exquisite, tough,

Even useful; I am subtle; all this is enough.

I don't want to be a temple, says the tree.

But if you don't behave, I will be.

The slanting sun is breaking bread

With a bamboo cutting board,

Kindling color in the kitchen.

As a woman’s face, with more

Of a lesser hue,

Dims from a handheld screen.  

The yard-long tree is catching sky

And entertaining bird guests,

Nudging chins and whispering praise.

As a man’s thumb clicks

And lingers and clicks again

To separate words from   love.

With fire siren lung song,

My city nestles in

For the night.

And my city prepares

To sleep and dream

With a stretch and a yawn

For the night.

And the rivers arrive

Two

And sneak sustenance Into the cement skin

Of my city.

And my rivers arrive

These sirens

And they ask to come in

For the night.

And my city

And my rivers

Sore-backed, aching and sold,

Do not whisper,

They do not breathe.

They settle in

Here

For the night.

I wake up

In the middle of a full-moon night.

2:09 a.m.

And it’s like

My writing was inventing me,

Making me up,

Imagining what I look like.

And she spoke through me.  

She wrote herself.  

 She told me she was a poem and she loved me.  

And then thanked me for getting her in.  

She had been waiting some time

And the odds had looked dim.  

But she was here now.  

And she wanted me

To show her around.  

 And we just now

Happen to run

Into you.  

Tautness of texture, and earth brown.

A troubled Rothko: subtle, such subtle, change --

Even the slightest -- can stir pungent dusts

And move brushstroke-stars slightly

Around the heavens.

Squares and cones and dashes --

Adjacent to, overlapping or bellowed out --

A cello deep, cello deep,

Muscles its brown cloak, kicking up a dance of dust,

And buries the room, an audience ensnared,

Into the exhale.

 Chalk on stone, and skin on bone,

And dew drops on brushes or adagios.

We dirty our playing clothes -- Pollocked and smeared,

Sanded down to smooth -- to a cadenza.

Play loud, my son. Play loud!

Play abbreviations and hand tools and Indian spice,

And laugh long and hard with your kids.

 In the same way, puddles and streams

Creep and drain and draw toward

A current of expression -- a confident watercourse.

With the pride of Itzhak Perlman,

 The earth plays on to sway the sun

And settle her down for dusk.

    "The eyes open to a cry of pulleys

And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul 

Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple 

As false dawn. 

                        Outside the open window 

The morning air is all awash with angels. 

     Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses, 

Some are in smocks: but truly there they are. 

Now they are rising together in calm swells 

Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear 

With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing; 

     Now they are flying in place, conveying 

The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving 

And staying like white water; and now of a sudden 

They swoon down into so rapt a quiet 

That nobody seems to be there. 

                                         The soul shrinks 

From all that it is about to remember, 

From the punctual rape of every blesséd day, 

And cries, 

      “Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry, 

Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam 

And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.” 

     Yet, as the sun acknowledges 

With a warm look the world’s hunks and colors, 

The soul descends once more in bitter love 

To accept the waking body, saying now 

In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises, 

     “Bring them down from their ruddy gallows, 

Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves; 

Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone, 

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating 

Of dark habits, 

                                     keeping their difficult balance."

Decorative plaster smears stare down a neutral colored wall – nothing about this room seems fluorescent, or edifying – the frail neck of a soap dispenser – the looped yarn of carpet – crumpled paper towel –and the humming of central heating – stale air, cold near the windows and the doors – it’s a sock-foot environment – walled in, for protection and delineation: – This is the realm of great poetry. – This, with the lassitude and fatigue of parenting – and the sour intestinal suck of dinner: – This is the realm of great poetry. – Upstairs or down – doors left slightly ajar – books leaning on a shelf, with dust – Thomas Wolfe is in there, unfinished – and a flanking hodge-podge of portraits and pictures – creaking chair springs and the clearings of throat: – This is the realm of great poetry. – A man who is not a friend at work – a step-daughter’s agitations – a dog that barks too often – With attempts to love and be respected – a loosening of a leather belt – the plastic toys strewn and, just this once, left to lie – and a soapy, white film settled on chrome sink drain: – This is the realm of great poetry – and refrain. – I am open-mouthed and wide-eyed – sock-foot up – and wondering about the realms of kings – the gods of myth, like Wallace Stevens’s hero’s head – large eye and bearded bronze – and about the esoteric tobacco smoke of men in columned halls – and women who ended their lives in an oven. – I am sore-backed and innocent – cordial – and dreaming a realm of applause – wishing for the pats of honest men – and the gaze of young women – honors and rewards and a defendable purpose. – But those – the realms of gods and applause – are not the realms of great poetry – They are not the realms of ascension that my kitchen can provide – or the inside of a car – or this room, an open glen in the wildest woods of imagination.