So I Won't Forget My Favorite Poems

I sleep reeking musk of leopards in love. My home is an amazement of leaves. Their     shadows paint weapons against me. If they stir, I am impaled by green laughter.

  After vespers, after the first snow has fallen to its squalls, after New Wave, after the anorexics have curled into their geometric forms, after the man with the apparition in his one bad eye has done red things behind the curtain of the lid & sleeps, after the fallout shelter in the elementary school has been packed with tins & other tangibles, after the barn boys have woken, startled by foxes & fire, warm in their hay, every part of them blithe & smooth & touchable, after the little vandals have tilted toward the impossible seduction to smash glass in the dark, getting away with the most lethal pieces, leaving the shards which travel most easily through flesh as message on the bathroom floor, the parking lots, the irresistible debris of the neighbor’s yard where he’s been constructing all winter long.   After the pain has become an old known friend, repeating itself, you can hold on to it.   The power of fright, I think, is as much as magnetic heat or gravity.   After what is boundless: wind chimes, fertile patches of the land, the ochre symmetry of fields in fall, the end of breath, the beginning of shadow, the shadow of heat as it moves the way the night heads west, I take this road to arrive at its end where the toll taker passes the night, reading.   I feel the cupped heat of his left hand as he inherits change; on the road that is not his road anymore I belong to whatever it is which will happen to me.   When I left this city I gave back the metallic waking in the night, the signals of barges moving coal up a slow river north, the movement of trains, each whistle like a woodwind song of another age passing, each ambulance would split a night in two, lying in bed as a little girl, a fear of being taken with the sirens as they lit the neighborhood in neon, quick as the fire as it takes fire & our house goes up in night.   After what is arbitrary: the hand grazing something too sharp or fine, the word spoken out of sleep, the buckling of the knees to cold, the melting of the parts to want, the design of the moon to cast unfriendly light, the dazed shadow of the self as it follows the self, the toll taker’s sorrow that we couldn’t have been more intimate.   Which leads me back to the land, the old wolves which used to roam on it, the one light left on the small far hill where someone must be living still.   After life there must be life.

When they were wild When they were not yet human When they could have been anything, I was on the other side ready with milk to lure them, And their father, too, each name a net in his hands.

There is magic in decay. A dance to be done For the rotting, the maggot strewn Piles of flesh which pile Upon the dung-ridden earth And the damp that gathers And rusts and defiles. There is a bit of this In even the most zoetic soul —  The dancing child’s arms Flailing to an old ska song Conduct the day-old flies Away to whatever rank Native is closest. Just today I was walking along the river With my daughter in my backpack And I opened my email On my phone and Duffie Had sent me a poem Called “Compost.” I read it To my little girl and started To explain before I was three Words in Selma started Yelling, Daddy, Daddy, snake! In the path was a snake, Belly up and still nerve-twitching The ghost of some passing Bicycle or horse. Pretty, Selma said. Yes, I said. And underneath my yes Another yes, the yes to my body, Just beginning to show signs Of slack, and another, my grasping In the dark for affirming flesh That in turn says yes, yes Let’s rot together but not until We’ve drained what sap Is left in these trees. And I wake in the morning And think of the coroner Calling to ask what color My father’s eyes were, And I asked, Why? Why can’t You just look — and the coroner, Matter-of-factly says, Decay. Do you want some eggs, my love? I have a new way of preparing them. And look, look outside, I think this weather Has the chance of holding.

That the light stalks your skin, no, that your skin makes it: a radiating hum, jive, a freedom, a beehive packed just as much with honey as does it hazard; also, a balm for where the sting sits, a treaty, country upon which I first laid   my claim, but was usurped; where carefully do I move to cross it again. Now   here come my lips to it, pink over your body’s   good bark. Now here is my mouth, entire. I’m scared of you, baby, it says, scared like a god is of his faithful, and like the faithful. Light -struck. Delighted. Terrorstruck. Come, lift up your gates, your countenance spread like a lily upon me:   whip me, I am so whipped. These are my eyes.

So far, have managed, Not Much. So far, a few fractures, a few factions, a Few Friends. So far, a husband, a husbandry, Nothing Too complex, so far, followed the Simple Instructions. Read them twice. So far, memorized three Moments, Buried a couple deaths, those turning faces. So far, two or Three Sonnets. So far, some berrigan and Some Keats. So far, a scanty list. So far, a dark wood. So far, Anti- Thesis and then, maybe, a little thesis. So far, a small Number Of emily’s letters. So far, tim not dead. So far, Matt Not dead. So far, jim. So far, Love And love, not so far. Not so love. So far, no-Hope. So far, all face. So far, scrapped and scraped, but Not With grace. So far, not Very.

Now I remember: I was telling strangers at the birthday party about all the ways in which our cells are trying not to be forest fires. How inside each cell is a tuning fork and inside each tuning fork, the coiled music of our DNA. I was floating somewhere between the beer cooler and the red eyes of three cigarettes the way I imagine silk floats inside a spider. Inside, my friend was calling his mother in the bathroom, while outside, the woman he wanted to love picked a hole in her tights. I was close enough to catch the blue smoke that escaped her like a bird, which was closer than the distance between the benzodiazepine in my pocket and the back of my throat. I was thinking about how I am always running towards or away from myself. Why I keep opening my eyes underwater, what I hope to see. We picked at a cake someone bought at a supermarket, toasted to mercy though none of us knew what it meant. My friend told me he wished for someone to treat his body like a public park. I’m sick of careful, he said, which got me thinking about why I feel some days like a narrowly avoided bike accident, and on others like I have been tree-ringed by the man who took my silence to mean yes. Which I guess is like asking why the mind has a shorter memory than the body. Whether the language of the body could ever fit inside a throat.

and so their sadness is perfect. The beautiful don't lack the wound. Hard, it is decorated with their face. No, we could not itemize the list.

to o my god, little fool’s breath triumphant, all the way under and am I not deserving?

Does it have chlorophyll or not if it has. Chlorophyll does it have anything but twisted metal visible above the water line or not if. Anything but twisted metal is visible above the water line are its angles in a closed angle root or not if its angles are in a closed angle. Root does it shine if it shines might you find Dark Age bone fragments within one hundred miles or not. If you find Dark Age bone fragments within one hundred miles is it. A sad irony or not if it is a sad irony does that imply secondary heat feelings in addition to rats chuckling. All night in the twisted metal or not if it does imply secondary. Heat feelings do they harrow even the keenest minds even. The judges of the dead. If they do not harrow. Even the keenest minds even the judges of the dead is. There a manifesto of feeble love and bitter love and was it paid for with booty or if not paid for with booty it is a walnut. If it was it is a pecan.

I do not expect the spirit of Penelope To enter your breast, for I am not mighty Or fearless. (Only our love is brave, A rock against the wind.) I cry and cringe When the cyclops peers into my cave. I do not expect your letters to be lengthy And of love, flowery and philosophic, for Words are not our bond. I need only the hard fact Of your existence for my subsistence. Our love is a rock against the wind, Not soft like silk and lace.

the Amen in the wound.

From my five arms and all my hands, From all my white sins forgiven, they feed, From my car passing under the stars, They Lion, from my children inherit, From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion, From they sack and they belly opened And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth They feed they Lion and he comes.

Translated by John K. Walsh and Francisco Aragon

is this? Whose shoes am I wearing? When did it get so cold?

There are many ways to understand the word lost, my love. When you were born, the last Pyrenean ibex, a tawny female named Celia, had not yet lived to see the view from Torla overlooking Monte Perdido, but her great- grandsire stood on the cliffs of Ordesa, positioned on hoof-tips dainty as dimes, and he shook his impregnable skull, a coffer of brass and nobility crowned with bayonets, as though in defiance of all who dwelt in the highlands from Catalonia to Aquataine. Their kind is vanished now. Forever lost. Perdido. And when you dressed in a Girl Guide’s uniform of Persian blue on Tuesday nights, my love, in the long-lost basement of Grace United Church, to play indoor baseball and make believe that faerie magic could make you rich or important or happy, pods of baiji dolphins still swam in a river you’d never heard of and would not think about until years later, when together we would learn from the evening news that the baiji were lost, at last, from the Yangtze, and in their place there came a universal emptiness. There are many ways to understand the word lost, but it does not help to imagine a secret place where lost things go. When last I held you in my arms, my love, the West African black rhinoceros was still magnificent and still alive, but now the gentleness of your breath on my bare neck is as lost as the dusty, confident snort of that once breath-taking beast. Great strength is no protection, and neither is love. We are born, and our births are lost. We can’t go back to them. Each embrace ends with an ending. When we become, what we once thought we’d be is lost. We keep becoming.

In my seeing there was a blank and he filled that blank with words, there were words for darkness which made it lift, there were words for cover which ripped them off, there were legs that crossed and hearts that crossed, promises red and read, and the pluck of banjo had a name for that twang, and the way he called the world into notice, that had a word, too. Once I saw I couldn't unsee and the worst was that the light glaring from the letters left blue haze under my eyelids. There are no photographs of this time and I can only go by what others tell me: I was blurred and erratic, I drew a circle of white chalk around me and called myself inviolate, I watched for horses on the horizon, my walls were under siege from smaller men who called themselves heroes. They say I reached over the balustrade and picked up the tiny ships and threw them over the edge of the world. I tore my hair, cut one breast from my body and plattered it as around my fortifications one man pulled another man behind his chariot. If they say that's how I was, that's how I was. I have no words for the one in the mirror who apes me every morning. She's not the one I remember imagining as a young girl. There must be a way to unsee how I tap the glass and she taps back, and which wall, which Cassandra weeping—everything I saw I spoke to his ear, and the wall crashed into place between us, the horse had a bellyful of it, the blank was full of small soldiers, and he turned from my beauty and said my name.