I give my hand back to its place
in the country of hands
I give my legs back to the road
My flowing sex I give to the Mother of Water
My hair to the mountain peak
I give my eye back to the head of the chestnut pony
The low spark at the tip of my spine
I give to the backbone of stars
My sweat I give to the cloud
moving toward the warm gulf stream
The letters of my name back to the Father of Alphabets
The dark cave under the outcrop of my forehead
is making way for the prowlers of the sea
My lungs and ears and ambergris I give back to the wind
My sputtering desire to the more steadily burning sun
Not because it is all over
But that it might begin
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in The Darkest
Continent (For Now Press, 1967)
He is shaking the tree on which you grow
my love, shaking the tree with fury,
and as you toss you think: it’s the play
of the south breeze in no hurry.
He is picking you up from the earth
my love, picking you like an apple;
that is your flesh between his teeth,
that’s a bayonet on his table.
He is biting into your skin
my love, skin so soft and trusting,
bites till your bones cave in,
and skewers your cheeks for basting.
He is chewing you into pieces
my love, his chewing jaw like a harrow;
when he swallows he’ll leave no trace
oh, and no seed for tomorrow.
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in Bearings
(Harper & Row, 1969)
Fog-shrouded February barely gone,
and with my first steps out,
a powerful scent-driven
air’s full blossoming springtide knocks me
squarely on my knee-caps,
nearly to my knees.
My friend has died; he appears
walking away in a sky
that had not existed before
he occupied it
and now
inhabits
alone:
empty sky, no sun,
procession-of-one
returning a sum,
debt most
unforgiven, called in,
totalled. In moments of crisis,
as the heart’s submerged need springs
to the surface, new eyes
see such a prickly pair
we were! — yoked,
bickering brothers.
Yet how unstinting your generosity
rivaled in richness
your full-throated rhapsody!
If poetry is near able to say
things not heard in speech,
perhaps you’ll hear what I didn’t say—
here, in out of the unbound
stretch and reach and touch of
time in sound.
Mort, we should switch places. Have
you noticed how those who love life least
often live
longest? Something’s amiss.
Such a circus! Applause these days
would be white noise.
On the phone, you
could barely whisper
you were ready to go,
though you’d breathe easier
if the world’s cries gentled for the night;
you’d be elated, you laughed, near
healed, if drawn
out of midnight and daybreak’s light
dawn’s pink palm opened.
—From the book-length poem, Trace, to be published in 2012
—Also appears in SHJ Issue 3, Spring 2011, in
a trio of selections from the book
1.
They have grown steadily
marked by an early disquiet
that has never left them, and deepened
by the need to be taken to heart
as doubt of what they had
believed would last is
on the increase.
Some nights it pulls
their faces into lean strips
of licorice
as they twist
along the curves of drifting highways
they will be remembered
as disappearing on.
2.
Scattering as far as things can go in a self-
propelled wind, they switch
lines, lovers and the inherited
compulsions they were fed on
and feed each other
as ambitions.
Their ambitions have become
their faces. The holes they step into now
are in their heads.
Each of their lives bears that much
more of the chaos the friends are
rich in.
3.
Last seen, they were giving themselves
up to a beauty as punishing as it lay wholly
outside their bodies: to enter
is to be swollen out of this world.
I sometimes think there is another life
without memory or confessions
kicking out of it.
But if I had been told
that some day the sight of a room full of loved ones
could stir such an urge
for a getaway,
I wouldn’t have believed it.
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in Bits of Thirst
(Cedar Creek Press, 1972)
Each man to his forced march; this is mine.
In the end everything runs out, runs
under the wheels—a bandage unwinding
on the centerline. Sometimes when my ribs clang
like a metal signpost at the edge of town,
and so much of the dark I cannot shut out
crawls with me into my sleeping bag,
I try to think where the owl goes.
For years now, my life has taken
no sharp turns, no climb, no detour,
but moves in neutral
down this smooth tar lane, one way.
The towns, en route, the festooned, blazing towns,
are they dreams in my sleep, vanished
on waking? Even so, watching that white line
grow thin and luminous at night,
I feel the moon’s hub unhinge from center
and roll awry.
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in The Darkest Continent
(For Now Press, 1967)
I.
Dawn draws sleepless, raw eyes
to a day where the dark stays all day,
and late September leaves dance on
their own graves.
Renee is no more.
Though she calls
and cries for Mother
Morphine, it’s the drug calling
“Come to me who am
painless, boundless, endless...”
The anger of the terminally ill
against those caring for but unable
to ease them, and their final litany:
“I don’t care anymore.”
I give her a sip of ginger ale
to moisten her lips.
“Excuse me,” she murmurs when she burps.
And what about the dread in her eyes
when the storm knocks
out the house’s power?
2.
Near the end, when things are clear
but unrepairable,
what we had hoped to forestall
we wish would hurry. We wait
with such patience, you could say we wait
with abandon...and what we have abandoned
is time, no more
now than what’s already over.
3.
In all of autumn’s fading, rotting, falling—
a single death is a footnote, if that.
But the larger is not more real
than the small; in death, scale falls away.
Now her leaving brings the unapproachable
nearer, more near to the threshold
of the corridor of corridors
we had not prepared any feelings for.
—From The Steel Veil (Coffe House Press, 2008)
On one of our long, wearing walks
down the dirt path fronting the length
and breadth of our patch of ocean,
back from Sunset
Nursery—me only half-kiddingly griping,
sorely hobbling on
the ankle sprained
at racquetball three months before,
and she, heartily, as is her way, more than half-
mockingly laughing me silly, laughing our loony
heads off ... As good as it gets.
While kvetching, I’m schlepping a sack of compost soil;
Naomi cradles and shades a potted, dancing-doll-legged
cymbidium orchid in her arms, white fluttering
blossoms, delectable yellow centers, edged
shell-pink membrane translucent as a newborn’s
eyelid, her open hand shields; the same hand
at the mom-and-pop grocery will pick the battered
bruised fruit and vegetables because no one else will.
With our swaying matching swag and all her gangling
angles softened with delight, each curl and petal—part
vein, part flame—in range of the ocean’s terrestrial
erasure...
We have bought, she and I, a piece
of the same action.
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in Millenium Fever
(Coffee House Press, 1996)
Another World Series in the record books,
and bereft now of baseball for the next six
winter months, I’m ready for grief counseling. Is this why
they come to mind, those sleek Young Turks (actually
Italians) who played as if they were royally born
to it? I see their jet-black T-shirts emblazoned
with Panthers in gold script on the back and black pants worn
loose that billowed in the summer air. On
weekends they were rumored to play, the benches along
the foul lines filled up long
before they appeared in Seth Low Park
where we kids used to choose up softball games in the black-
top outfield. Sandy Koufax, my classmate at Lafayette High,
and not yet the fireball southpaw he’d soon be,
lived a few blocks away. Playing ball was our break-away
to the diamond where there was no time. There we practiced
the magic of plucking a feather-stitched
sphere as from a flying stem. Besides, the thrilling game
they promised was made more seductive by the imminent
whiff of possible menace. For we’d seen them,
when behind in the score and their high-stakes bet
in danger of being lost, create a pretext—
a brushed back batter, a bumped runner—for an all-
out bat-swinging assault on their rivals.
And an umpire, paid to call
balls and strikes, who called against them, risked bodily harm.
When, as usual, regally late, they came
through the gate at the far corner of left field, their black
outfits set against the outfield’s flat black
asphalt top, they filed in, shimmering like heatwaves raised
as if wraiths from a further dimension in the distant haze.
Dragging duffel bags full of bats and gloves in a slow laze,
they shuffled, blinking, against the bright sunlight, as if hung-
over, looking weary, vexed, even from that distance. And strung
out behind them, their gorgeous girlfriends and wives,
some pregnant, though all much too voluptuous to be wives
for the child-bearing years of the rest of their lives.
Here came Paradise in pairs: two lips,
two eyes, two breasts, two hips.
The crowd on the benches made room for them, but
it was on their lovers’ laps they sat.
And we forgave them all their faults:
their arrogance, their tempers, their hangovers, and being late.
They’d shown up! And with such beauties, besides!
Nine innings...nine lives,
in which to look forward to them, sleek as their namesakes
in midday, moving with midnight
reflexes and fluid grace.
Afterward, we’d feel we could face
coming back into time for the sake
of being able to look forward to leaving again. Tall
blue sky. Bright sun overhead. The coin is tossed. Called.
“Play ball!”
—First published in Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems
1965–2001 (Coffe House Press, 2002)
For a long time now I have not been able to listen
to Dinu Lipatti’s slender, ascetic fingertips
pressing ever so gently firm on the piano keys
in his last recorded transcription of Bach’s Cantata
“Jesus bleibet meine Freude” given to me
by George Oppen the year he died.
It is too sad to hear
that severe, geometrically measured stroll of the soul
healthily light-stepping into heaven,
and has become sadder with each loved one’s death:
the slow, spare, stately pace wrenching the heart
with its graceful ascendancy over grief,
and staring as if straight into the face of God
either everywhere or nowhere, leaving us
nothing to say, nothing to hear as luminous
and meltingly tender as the air
fills with silence, and the heart with loss.
—From Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems 1965–2001
(Coffee House Press, 2002); first published in Sesame
(Coffee House Press, 1993)
The poems included here are from early work (“Hitch-Hiker,” “Feeding
Machine”) to most recent (“Requiem for Renee,” “Totalled”)
and deal with my responses to pressures of personal, political, and planetary events
which in my seventh decade I feel more urgently than ever. At a certain age, one
begins falling out of love with oneself and can better see what feelings and experiences
we share with others; not only with other people, but other sentient beings as well.
I have tried to make the writing a running account, precise perception—propelled.
To get the details and feelings of experience as accurately as I can in a propulsive
music to express the immediacy of being alive. Sometimes the poem is not limited
to reportage, but is an attempt to surprise or provoke some new expression or feeling
into awareness wherein the moment is the heart of time.
|
is an important American poet, Guggenheim Fellow, and author of numerous collections.
Two of his more recent, From Baghdad to Brooklyn: Growing Up in a Jewish-Arab
Family in Midcentury America, and Gorgeous Chaos: New and Selected Poems
1965-2001, are available from Coffee House Press.