For The Anniversary Of My Death

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveller
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what


W.S. Merwin

***********************************************************


THE BIG HEART

"Too many things are occurring for even a big heart to hold."
From an essay by W. B. Yeats

Big heart,
wide as a watermelon,
but wise as birth,
there is so much abundance
in the people I have:
Max, Lois, Joe, Louise,
Joan, Marie, Dawn,
Arlene, Father Dunne,
and all in their short lives
give to me repeatedly,
in the way the sea
places its many fingers on the shore,
again and again
and they know me,
they help me unravel,
they listen with ears made of conch shells,
they speak back with the wine of the best region.
They are my staff.
They comfort me.

They hear how
the artery of my soul has been severed
and soul is spurting out upon them,
bleeding on them,
messing up their clothes,
dirtying their shoes.
And God is filling me,
though there are times of doubt
as hollow as the Grand Canyon,
still God is filling me.
He is giving me the thoughts of dogs,
the spider in its intricate web,
the sun
in all its amazement,
and a slain ram
that is the glory,
the mystery of great cost,
and my heart,
which is very big,
I promise it is very large,
a monster of sorts,
takes it all in--
all in comes the fury of love.


Anne Sexton

Marianne

You love Marianne and the slow
way she strums the base guitar.
You love the way her body molds
to the instrument and her spirit
soars above the crowds and you.

She is the untouchable. Two feet
from you and breathing the same
air your lungs take in and savor
like a mouth tasting for the first
time the exotic mango, the perfectly
seared steak. She is lovely,
isn't she?

Marianne lives in your dreams,
inhabits the hidden corners where life
resonates on an early spring morning
with its showy newborn crocus flowers.
She lives along the lines
of poles strung one to the other--opposite,
connective. She is all that romance
could ever capture (geese settling on a
still pond, sunsets over the Ohio,
driftwood carried in the ice floes).
You know I know.

I can't help but love Marianne--
her patchouli infiltrating
your bones and marrow, her beauty
the thrill of unearthing a piece
of fragmented pottery from an ancient
tomb. I love that about her too
and hope when you touch
her, the hairs on your arms
stand on end and the tip of your cock
settles comfortably into the warmth
of missing years. Give her a kiss
for me, and make sure she knows
who loved you well.


***********************************************


Found this in the archives and felt like playing around
with it but I can't now. Mostly I think I wanted to remember
how it felt to feel something other than this overwhelming
sadness.

Anger would be good. Love would be good. Passion too.


Maybe I will feel these things again soon.

*sigh*

Fame

Sometimes in the over-heated house, but not for long,
Smirking and speaking rather loud,
I see myself among the crowd,
Where no one fits the singer to his song,
Or sifts the unpainted from the painted faces
Of the people who are always on my stair;
They were not with me when I walked in heavenly places;
But could I spare
In the blind Earth's great silences and spaces,
The din, the scuffle, the long stare
If I went back and it was not there?
Back to the old known things that are the new,
The folded glory of the gorse, the sweet-briar air,
To the larks that cannot praise us, knowing nothing of what we do
And the divine, wise trees that do not care
Yet, to leave Fame, still with such eyes and that bright hair!
God! If I might! And before I go hence
Take in her stead
To our tossed bed,
One little dream, no matter how small, how wild.
Just now, I think I found it in a field, under a fence--
A frail, dead, new-born lamb, ghostly and pitiful and white,
A blot upon the night,
The moon's dropped child!

***************************************************************

Rooms

I remember rooms that have had their part
In the steady slowing down of the heart;
The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,
The little damp room with the seaweed smell,
And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide--
Rooms where for good or for ill, things died:
But there is the room where we two lie dead
Though every morning we seem to wake, and might just as well seem to sleep again
As we shall some day in the other dustier quieter bed
Out there--in the sun--in the rain.


Charlotte Mew

Gacela of the Morning Market
Federico García Lorca

Under the Elvira arch
let me see you pass
that I may learn your name
and cry.

What pale moon at nine
bled your cheek white?
Who gathers up the seed
that sets its snow aflame?
What tiny cactus spike
shatters your glass?

Under the Elvira arch
let me see you pass
that I may lap your eyes
and cry.

How it chastens me,
the market-call you raise!
What odd carnation, you,
amid the piles of wheat!
How far you are when close!
How near to me when gone!

Under the Elvira arch
let me see you pass
that I may suffer your thighs
and cry.

My Grandmother's Love Letters

There are no stars to-night
But those of memory.
Yet how much room for memory there is
In the loose girdle of soft rain.

There is even room enough
For the letters of my mother's mother,
Elizabeth,
That have been pressed so long
Into a corner of the roof
That they are brown and soft,
And liable to melt as snow.

Over the greatness of such space
Steps must be gentle.
It is all hung by an invisible white hair.
It trembles as birch limbs webbing the air.

And I ask myself:
"Are your fingers long enough to play
Old keys that are but echoes:
Is the silence strong enough
To carry back the music to its source
And back to you again
As though to her?"

Yet I would lead my grandmother by the hand
Through much of what she would not understand;
And so I stumble. And the rain continues on the roof
With such a sound of gently pitying laughter.

Hart Crane

*****************************************

My favorite Hart Crane. Easy to read. Beautifully written.

"Over the greatness of such space/Steps must be gentle"

I choke up every time I read those lines.

Time to go clear out the kitchen. New floor goes in
today.

I wait until I am jobless to complete my kitchen renovation.

Good thing Grandma gave me some money for graduation.
I know she's proud for me and of me and wanted to do
something, so she gave me some money, and I shall
purchase the tile with that money.

Glad Hart Crane came to mind this morning. Especially
this poem.

The Death of a Parent

Move to the front
of the line
a voice says, and suddenly
there is nobody
left standing between you
and the world, to take
the first blows
on their shoulders.
This is the place in books
where part one ends, and
part two begins,
and there is no part three.
The slate is wiped
not clean but like a canvas
painted over in white
so that a whole new landscape
must be started,
bits of the old
still showing underneath--
those colors sadness lends
to a certain hour of evening.
Now the line of light
at the horizon
is the hinge between earth
and heaven, only visible
a few moments
as the sun drops
its rusted padlock
into place.

***********************************

Departures

They seemed to all take off
at once: Aunt Grace
whose kidneys closed shop;
Cousin Rose who fed sugar
to diabetes;
my grandmother's friend
who postponed going so long
we thought she'd stay.

It was like the summer years ago
when they all set out on trains
and ships, wearing hats with veils
and the proper gloves,
because everybody was going
someplace that year,
and they didn't want
to be left behind.

********************************

The Five Stages of Grief

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after the amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two. I passed you the toast--
you sat there. I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining. What could I exchange
for you? The silence
after storms? My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string. In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep. I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing
though my feet slip
on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards; Acceptance,
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name is in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting.
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of. Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance. I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.



Linda Pastan
from Cardinal Evening (New and Selected Poems 1968-1998)

I'm drunk

and when is the last time you can remember
that you didn't try to get drunk?

I can't remember.

What is drunk? Who is an alcoholic?

****************************************

Once upon a time there was a girl. Beautiful
but unfit. She didn't fit in anywhere.

She wore hiphuggers and ....
what were those tops called? They were only
a small piece of fabric wrapped around the neck
and across the back. No bra. Halters? Maybe?

************************************

Once upon a time there was a girl.
She wore hiphuggers and halters.
The boys whistled at her from thier cars
and drove slowly down the streets
as she walked on. Her beauty became
the thorn in the proverbial paw.

I am confusing characters now. The mouse
aided the mighty king of beasts by removing
the proverbial thorn. There was no mention
of a lioness. But I am digresssssssssssing,
I fear.

Back to the garden. The garden I found
in my mother's closet. Adam and Eve
leaves to cover the beauty. Leaves to cover.
Leaves that fall every year and cover
beauty. Leaves that are beautiful.

But I digress again. My mother's closet.
My father's death. My inability to stay
sober long enough to think things through.

Through is just a word. Through is not
always through. It may be a passage.
It may be a destination.

It may be simply and all alone
just a word.

I am not through. I am somewhere in between
through and though. R dropped and justly
so. I am though. And drunk. And the keys
don't care and my fingers can still play

and tonight there are meteor showers
I planned to watch and may still, though
I may be out there to lose the spirits,
my face intently leaning toward the ground.

Through it all, however, I think I shall
still be asking why am I and am I.