Learning by Rote

Learning by Rote

Martina Reisz Newberry poems

Deerbrook Editions

PUBLISHED BY

Deerbrook Editions P.O. Box 542

Cumberland, ME 04021 207.829.5038

www.deerbrookeditions.com FIRST EDITION

Copyright Š 2012 by Martina Reisz Newberry all rights reserved

page 97 serves as an extention of this copyright page ISBN: 978-0-9828100-2-6 Cover photo by Brian Newberry Book design by Jeffrey Haste

Contents

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Section I Spiders Unfit Ghazal Guerilla Whining Stoplight Voodoo Endearments The World Is Not Ending Night Fever Welcome Mat Eve’s Journal Litany “Tea” #2 The Strobe That Is Television Doing Crazy Time At Napa State Hospital Espresso Three Haibun For My Friend Learning by Rote In The Night Kitchen Pursuit They Have Moved Off Now Totems Not To Fear The Dark The Fall Of Icarus Learning To Dream Pantoum Of Woman In Coffee Shop Window Above Us On The Hill Keening Remembering English Ovals Sorrowful Mysteries Les Garcons Bouchers: Paris 1950 (Butchers) On The Topic Of Sadness Genealogy To Discover Reality Basa White ‘08

11 12 13 14 15 17 18 19 20 21 23 25 26 30 32 33 35 37 39 40 42 43 44 46 48 49 50 51 53 54 55 57 59 62

6 Not With A Bang After The Hurricane The Sand Out There As Far As There Are Paths Today The Button Factory Charoset Until The Money Runs Out Fall Again Asked/Answered Things To Do When It’s Too Hot To Go Outside Medea Pleads Her Case To Her Children Cover-Up A Fine Night Four Tankas What We’re Not Lightning The Work Of Dreams All Of My Heart In One Second Of Giving Amenities

63 64 65 66 67 68 70 71 73 74 75 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Section II Eyewitness: Six Poems

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I. II. III. IV. V.

Mill Fire In Oswego, New York 1835 Burning Public Records In Petrograd, 1917 Mother And Child At Hiroshima 1945 Coney Island 1946 The World’s First Hydrogen-Fusion Blast At Eniwetok 1952 VI. An Old Woman In An Indiana Poorhouse 1952

91 92 93 94 95

Acknowledgements Notes

97 98

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Foreword Whether turning her attention to a mother’s precarious night kitchen, the courage in the smoke from English Ovals, Irving Penn’s photograph of Parisian butchers, the 1957 coincidence of Hoffa’s election as Teamsters president and Russia’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite into space, or the hurricane that arrives in the middle of an already weepy day, Martina Newberry makes unexpected music we’re better off for listening to. Early on she writes, “Hear that sound? It’s the world’s heart pounding in your ears . . .” Unfit Ghazal.

Throughout Learning By Rote she asks difficult questions— but she also proffers generous advice: “Let’s sail without maps, without moons, without boats, / pretend we’re sailing without fear . . .” Endearments. Before this bracing book is finished, she’ll have many times demonstrated that “what comes to us, / what we come to, // is never what we expect—” What We’re Not. Newberry’s work is a revitalizing tonic in these days when too often we’re supposed to swallow so many others’ bad medicine. What she sounds out in They Have Moved Off Now holds true for this entire collection: “This is no poem for the weak-minded. / This is written so you will cut your damned engines // and listen . . .” And in our sudden, accommodating silence is gratitude for this poet, this child of the Cold War who reminds us that even now “there’s cause for alarm, we should all learn duck-and-cover, / the store is closing; but you didn’t hear that from me.” The Button Factory.

But luckily, in fact, we did. When it comes to love, war, friendship, and loss, Newberry’s double-edged blade of memory is never less than finely honed. She understands that—somewhere, everywhere, sooner or later—it’s a matter of physical, emotional, or psychic survival. In these poems you’ll find no small share of humane deliverance—one very human life at a time.

—David Clewell, author of Jack Ruby’s America and The Low End of Higher Things, St. Louis 2012

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rote1 (rot) n.[ ME< ?] a fixed, mechanical way of doing something; routine â&#x20AC;&#x201D;by rote by memory alone, without understanding or thought {to answer by rote}

rote2 (rot) n. [prob. via ME dial. <Scand, as in ON rauta, to

roar, akin to OHG roz, a weeping, wailing: for IE base see raucous] the sound of the surf beating on the shore

rote3 (rot) n. [ME < OFr < Frank *hrota (akin to OHG

hrotta) < Celt chrotta > Welsh crwth, crowd2 ] a medieval

stringed instrument, variously supposed to have been a kind

of lyre, lute, or harp

Section I

Spiders This year’s nightmares are next year’s sonnets.

The words exist for people I don’t know, I write them to alleviate the guilt of a population— people I’ve never met, people who never were.

It’s all right, I tell them, to regret your sins and sorrows.

It’s all right to lean into the corners of your couches and beg for forgiveness. It’s normal, I say, to look into the Who’s Who in America and want to see your name. You are right, to envy the names there and to start counting your failures.

I know how it is: not receiving prizes reeks of sweaty palms and botched attempts. Go ahead, think these things through. Our lives are fragrant with death, with the intrusion of aging, the reckoning of death’s influence on our desires and dreams, the desperate tenderness in the face of certain oblivion.

Still, each poem tries to right last year’s wrongs. I must have been born to make something of my days . . .

After all, how many missing husbands does it take to show the Black Widow what she really is?

There are consolations: we vibrate with remembered lust (there is eroticism in every breath), we arrange chaos to avoid boredom, and what we leave behind disappears with rare tact.

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Unfit Ghazal Stroke the arm, the hand, the fingers opening like silk, fingers lost in hair, arms flexing, unflexing like silk.

How young this makes us, how warm, pretty, smooth.

Only age understands this change, this stirring of silk.

We love the morning, the openness of ourselves to begin.

There is strength in the sun, strength cool and holy as silk.

The mirror touts me as younger than I am, maybe . . . my lover says I open to him as does a robe of blue silk.

The stranger on the bus stared and my throat ached for a drink, a whisky and soda, smooth as silk.

I challenge you to live this life, as full on as you can, without shame, without fear, put on an armor of silk.

Hear that sound? Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s heart, pounding in your ears praying for your attention, praying for food, offering silk.

Along this dirt path, where glass and lizards glow, A new berry bush is trying to prosper. Its leaves are silk.

Guerilla Whining This poem is pounding on the door of your perceptions, groveling at the knees of your conscience.

I offer you the precarious kiss of reality: the work of the homeless—to survive one more night, the limiting nature of nuclear incident, the criminality of our prejudices, the arrogance of our wealth.

The monsters of commerce call to us and we respond, choking on $12.95 wine and caraway crackers.

The whites of the world’s eyes are blushing with exhaustion.

Good people have calloused lips from sucking the blame out of the tall, frosted glasses held by congressmen and princes.

We want to be dauntless in an era that begs us to forget, to ignore Iraq, Abu Grahib, New Orleans.

The fragile white palm of a politician’s hand, forever urging the bloody adventures onward, waving as the world’s warring stride off to meet, is the palm no one touches. We only imagine it and still it pushes, directs, encourages and waves “goodbye.”

Larry Levis says, “terror is a complete state of understanding.”

I get that. I agree with that.

Politics is a meaningless famine; it gives us the necessary vocabulary to discuss our new myths.

It is compensatory collateral that makes of us sheep children, floating in nameless liquid, in clear glass jars on the shelves of fucking oblivion.

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Stoplight Standing at a stoplight I watch the old woman piss in a doorway.

Her hair is dirty.

Her clothes are dirty.

Her feet are cracked.

Someone passes, drops a dollar bill at the hem of her skirt and moves on, whistling, headphones firmly anchored on his ears.

A block away, the banner on the front of the Methodist Church announces, ALL ARE WELCOME HERE. It sports the rainbow symbol.

The air is heavy and smells of gasoline.

I am standing at a stoplight On Hollywood Boulevard.

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ve never known such happiness.

Voodoo See your life as allegory, as discourse.

Though you are not right in your mind, the innocence of your childhood is evident.

The rosy redness of the atom bomb was not your fault. Pull your coat close around you to keep out the chill of reason.

Keep gloves on at all times to resist sanity’s frostbite. There is no earthly place to receive you now. All that you fear will come true. Marie LaVeau predicted it.

She stood at the edge of Bayou St. John, sang, “As the nails of the dead continue to grow, so will whatever love you leave behind you.” Keep yourself clear of sophistication. Keep clear of cool.

That shit will envelope your life— your life as allegory, as discourse.

Do you know that anything easily discerned can be easily destroyed? It’s true.

Walk your milk-white body down to the end of the driveway.

Stare into the cloudless sunset and you’ll soon greet the Four Horsemen, come for the Rapture: Data (palomino), Fast Food (dark bay), Global Warming (chestnut), And Cacophony (pinto).

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16 There will be revelations. There will be distortions of revelations. But youâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; you must continue to gather the splinters of yourself and see the end product: a life, your life, as allegory, as discourse.

Endearments The world, after all, is just a quote from your mouth to Lucifer’s ear.

Just a voice, mouthing lust, learning by rote.

Let’s sail without maps, without moons, without boats, pretend we’re sailing without fear inside the world, (after all, is just a quote).

Not courage, not love, nor promissory note anchors memory to mirrors, scale to note.

Just a voice, mouthing lust, learning by rote those endearments that catch in our bruised throats, the endearments that drown in fear and mock the world, (after all, is just a quote).

How to make this work, a promissory note when transient seas make direction unclear and there’s only a voice, mouthing lust, learning by rote.

We reread the old texts, scan the coast, dance our dances for the puppeteer.

The world, after all is just a quote Just a voice, mouthing lust, learning by rote.

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The World is Not Ending Let me get my bearings. These are spaces I will never own. I feel such regret, especially now that the world is on fire.

The air is eaten by flame all around.

Monks with their skirts billowing, jump from the Mountaintops, chant poverty, chastity, indifference. Keep laughing in the face of this molten planet—laugh your ass off.

It’s what you’ll have left in the end. You think this is an hallucination? A joke?

A fantasy? Perhaps you’re bewildered— the world is not ending, you’ve only backed one last war, one last steaming holocaust.

You’ve only stayed silent while continents starved and died, whittled down to rock and bleached bone. Is your own part in this unlikely or misunderstood?

Mine, unfortunately, is not.

I’ve participated and want to move on. Just give me a moment, please, just let me get my bearings.

Night Fever for Meg I got fire in my mind, I got higher in my walkin’ and I’m glowin’ in the dark —Bee Gees Lyrics The dark tongues of night’s dogs lick at our ankles. We crave wine, endless talk, irony followed by uncertain laughter.

We find our place at the bar, ask for Bloody Marys and fish tacos.

You flash white teeth in response to the blonde woman who stares at you as if your breasts were cupcakes.

How I love these times . . .

They are what has become of my shy silences.

I know what grief your eyes have seen.

You’ve eaten dahlias and carried old loves in the small purse at your side.

Years of light and dark shiver behind us. We both wear silver, mind our manners. You are my heart’s friend, the ringing of a bell in this peculiar temple.

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Welcome Mat The light rain of your own name is strange to youâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;a foreign documentation of your self disappearing into a house that was never really there.

And will you leave that house and leave your name at its doorstep as a warning to God to let you be?

Will you go down into the cellar where jars of peaches and pickled eggs sit in stasis waiting for you to claim your history?

And will you run from that cellar into the syllables of another life, someone elseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life bigger than your own?

Will you listen all night to the strong wind pummeling the trees, pounding out sentences that you want to remember but wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t?

You see, your name will take them from you and, sure as the delicate bones of a bird grace the treetops, you will die to live again.

Eve’s Journal I watch the Spring go by and wonder if I shall ever go home.

Tu Fu 713-770 In this town, there aren’t supposed to be tears.

We run, neighbor to neighbor, calling out “What a beautiful day!

What a lovely day!”

There is not a hint of dirt or ash in the air.

Everything is clear and focused. The sidewalks are as clean as new tiles, even the sand, when the wind blows, is clean and bright, dyed by the sun.

There is no crying in this town.

There are a few homeless with matted beards and crusted feet, no hint of lives gone terribly wrong or loves lost forever in old motels and untrimmed parks.

There are no sad stories in this town; no desperate street vendors selling their mother’s tamales or somewhat-fresh fruit on a skewer, or sticky ices in a paper cone.

In this town, abandoned buildings and empty storefronts grin like idiots

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22 at the passing busses.

The busses donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t expel dark smoke and pungent smells.

No tears in this town.

This is paradise.

I wake each morning wondering where and when Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll meet the merciful rattlesnake who will offer me an apple which I will devour and, then, wait for divine banishment

Litany Who are they, these blurred figures Longing for a digital fix?

They’ve given up peace to play at passion, they claw at a God who keeps spiritual secrets.

(God has always kept secrets. It is we who tell every thing we know to every one we know.)

They are us, I fear.

When does mercy kick in?

Whitman waited for mercy to kick in and, if fame and book sales are any measure, compassion showed itself eventually.

Whitman whispered “Why not me” into the dark brown night of the city and the city handed him black-eyed boys with Spanish tongues as warm and malleable as communion wafers.

There has to be a ripening along the way.

The dim, disturbing trail of news items can’t be all there is to trouble our hearts.

Dante Alighieri admonished us to “Remember tonight for it is the beginning of always,” but we don’t remember.

Death all around us folds and unfolds like a fan. We are losing things

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24 that were so much more negligible than we’d ever believed.

Our skillful flippancies reek of a bad track record and we use ideograms for the words we can no longer say (Mother, Father, Family).

We are orphaned in this land of Barney the Dinosaur and Beefcake calendars.

Those blurred figures— they have regret etched into their bodies.

It’s not a good look.

Jazz bands accompany the gluttony for power we’ve managed to encourage and we believe every word we’ve ever told ourselves. So, then, where is mercy or the exegesis of mercy?

Somewhere, someone is cutting hair, dancing to the music of a twelve-string, baking cinnamon buns, creating ideograms.

Somewhere, someone is staring up at the enormous sky of a fallen city and counting transgressions instead of stars.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Teaâ&#x20AC;? #2 after a painting by Henri Matisse The gallery finally opened. She waited all morning, fingering the change in her pocket, looking at her watch, pretending to be fascinated by her fingernails. The gallery finally opened.

North wall, light focused perfectly: two women talking intimately over teacups. Matisse dreamed and his dream shimmers on the North wall of the gallery Sound of steps on path greenery stirs, flash of sunlight Summer suspended.

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The Strobe that is Television I want to write a petition, make a prayer, get somebody punished, rewarded —David Posner I Dark Fabric The strobe that is the television flashes Iraq, then Afghanistan.

Car bombs—nothing left but the car alarms—those things must be made of fucking kryptonite writes a young Marine.

They just keep crying even from the ashes—magic circuitry, I guess.

Bolt after bolt of dark fabric, draping the sighs of women, sacrificing comfort for confidentiality. The paved roads of Kabul are in bad shape, there are fewer and fewer children to play near them—the skyline has become acetelyn and burnt out the stars. Nothing lights Kabul now.

Ghazni no longer dances to its best musicians, no longer hosts its best poets, no longer pauses at the paintings and minarets.

Science, that bastard child, is orphaned. Ghazni is a shadow, a ghost draped in bolt after bolt of dark cloth.

The music from the cafes of Peshawer have no echoes—the crack of gunfire does. Which to choose…? We have chosen. Bolt after bolt of dark fabric, draped and folded up to the brimming eyes of women who have faced their punishments and live only to greet more of them.

The camel caravans of nomads, animals decorated in woven finery, mock the gunfire. The poetry of Pashto, shit-smeared and detested,

27 cries out over the sand. Asks, “How could we . . . ? Why do we . . . ?

The helicopters over Mazar-i-Sharif answer “Because we can.”

Blood on the landscape, blood in the racing clouds, blood steaming from the ruins of the Bamiyan Buddhas. Red clay, once the paint of the agonized shrines is dust and blood, brushed across the markets and mercantile stalls where the women still buy bolt after bolt of dark cloth.

II Children’s Games Over the land, the Old Tired Ideas play Tug O War with us.

We are anxious to know the winners, though we know who they are.

We hoped we were the winners, though we know we are not.

The old ideas pad their team with rich heavy hitters.

The air is thick with their messages.

Father Gold and Mother Earth pull back and forth until they pull us down, scrambling and twisted up in each other.

In the holy basements and unholy bars, we speak of our losses.

The dark rain of our defeat wets us to the bone

28 and we are humiliated in the faces of our peers.

Our committees have wilted and nodded off to the music of MINE EYES HAVE SEEN THE GLORY. The afternoon is dark. The sky is wild with palm fronds and pollen, and we know better than to call on Christ whom we had ignored.

After the game, the agonies…

The great men and women are gone.

A nation of insects swarms over their remains.

The stars are compressing, the seas are distended, the desert sands are fused into glass by the heat.

Up and down the streets of suburbia, soldiers’ faces look out of the windows. They want to set their own houses on fire.

This is how bad it is.

The Old Tired Ideas have become the seats of the nation’s soul.

We were true to our own audaciousness.

We have taken a million steps toward the light only to find that it is just reflection—not real light at all.

III Broken You don’t have to speak Iraqi Arabic to say “murdered child,” or “murdered aunt of nearly dead child,” or “murdered grandfather of critically wounded child.”

29 It’s the same in any language whether you love or hate the speaker.

In the villages where women hide their expectations under their burquas, All men are interrogators.

The women live in a no-women’s land frozen in sand, bullet-riddled walls where sweet Sanaa and funny Raheem mull over childhoods that won’t end in death.

We’ve broken their backs, America.

We are Pharaohs over a paraplegic population.

What more could we ask for?

Still, we ask for more.

We are our own pasts, America.

We are destroyers of what others cherish.

S O U L is a country we burned to ash longer ago than there is memory.

How can we survive when our journey begins with a funeral procession?

How can we dare to live a present that teeters on the edge of a history without remorse?

The average American is lonelier than the average jellyfish and rightfully so— urine doesn’t calm our country’s sting.

I wish this was an abstraction, an allegory, but it’s not.

These words spell reality, they spell lamentation, they spell oceans’ endless accusation, they spell the-whole-planet-can-explodeand-we-will-stay-at-war.

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Doing Crazy Time at Napa State Hospital Waking from a nap… the shades were pulled to keep out the sun. Now they keep out the sad, last light—a gleaming bowling ball going down between the trees.

You are not here and still your voice contacts me.

Your words flip around in my head like dis oriented fish.

Evening is on me.

You are missed. My neck misses your tongue, my wrists miss your lips. I heard you both times you spoke: you are unwilling to release your love to a blurred phantom who doesn’t love you.

You are unwilling to throw off the bonds of your jailer whom you love, but who no longer loves you. I can’t summon up all you’ve said. Oh, I can learn to chew and spit—remorseless, yes?

31 But I canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t contain it all at once. I step into the silvertipped water of the swimming pool. My heart is rising up and out of me and soon it will be blown to the porchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hanging fern. It will go no where from there. Nowhere.

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Espresso This afternoon, my thoughts fall all over each other trying to get to the Sabor y Cultura Café.

My little eye winks and my nose runs and my thoughts trip over their own feet.

We’ll have espresso curled in our cups like some black metal waiting to become gold. Jefe is outside nursing the morning’s large coffee. He sells almost anything: Homegrown, Marching Dust, Ready Rock, Blue Mollies.

His pockets flare with small sheets of foil, cheap lighters, alligator clips, and papers frail as aging skin.

There is a pigeon at Jefe’s feet. It stays with him most of the day, wanting a crumb of croissant or cupcake.

The shadows are not long at Sabor y Cultura. It is either day or night there. None of this aluminum twilight shit.

Sabor knows there are only two times in a day, so I got here with my sharpened pencils and my nagging cough.

My thoughts are fragile brushstrokes on Hollywood Boulevard’s dirty stretched canvas.

The day’s leaves fall without a sound the way strong winds fall and see themselves out, the way a stem cringes when you set a match to it, the way Jefe takes his leave of us: here today, gone today.

Three Haibun for my Friend I. You gave me the small statue of a fairy. I gave you a polished stone. You gave me a brotherly kiss near my mouth.

I gave you a new pen—the kind you liked best—and an antique inkwell. I gave you the fear beneath my collar bone.

You gave me the dark house of your anger. I gave you red wine. You gave me a song to ease my throat. I gave you the furrows in the vineyards near my home. You gave me an orchard of whole breaths and a small purse to hold my grief.

You gave me the blessed curve of rain. I gave you the train of thunder pulling it. You gave me your restless, inappropriate passion and the time for giving gifts came to an end.

The summer rainstorm brings us back to ourselves hummingbirds stop, sip II. Insolence, like winter, entered my body and stayed— unwelcome, uninvited. What I want to tell you now is about winter and how I heard it enter me, sting my mouth, harden my silences. When the sun rose, I lay in bed, bargaining with my personal gods. As always, they won.

God as a palm tree Jazz dances in the wind winter is over III. The years cured you of arrogance. You wax peaceful now and your poems smell of rising water and the hair of women gone mad in abandonment. You gave up smoking, as did I, but not drinking, which has held our feet on the ground.

I promised not to be a stranger, but failed in that promise. I regret that. Your frantic eyes have followed me, seeing my devices and my delirium. I could never forget you, though.

You must credit me for trying. We’ve both stopped praising work that is fake and full of bullet holes. We are living out our lives secure in nothing but maybe love, maybe hunger.

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34 I think of you now Lying still, volleying words Your life, a card game

Learning by Rote God! It’s dark and the stars are treacherous: silver knives slashing through night’s armor so that emptiness leaks out over the trees and the town and the houses.

This place is alive with sexual incompatibilities.

(They sound like the moans of dying doves.)

Please No When?

I don’t know Not now?

No Please No Enter a moon.

It has learned its lessons by rote.

Resurrected, hollow-it has been through this before, knows the routine: rise, shrink, die rise, shrink, die while the town stays the way it is.

This moon sweats, smells of jealousy,

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36 is tired of change, tired of straining, weeping.

It ponders the steaming junkyards (the leavings of commerce, yes?) bobs up and down on the spongy clouds, closes its dungeon eyes, waves goodbye and sinks.

In the Night Kitchen I’m not the milk and the milk’s not me!

—Maurice Sendak Tonight I recall Mother with her thin fragile mouth and her hands so quiet they were comatose unless she was sewing or painting.

I thought she must hate us, my father and me.

Her midnight wanderings through the house were loud and dangerous to this fearful child.

It’s hard to recall her features, made vague by Miltown and Librium. But I recall the sound her slippers made on the tile floors of the bathroom— like brooms sweeping through our home. I loved her, that mad woman who wailed “No one will help me!” to the single bulb in the den.

In those days, I knew so few things: my own near-blindness, the terror of my peers, Father’s jokes.

I was not on my mother’s agenda though I wanted to be.

My adolescent desires were non-issues in the face of Mother’s madness, and still, I stuttered them out to her, hoping to matter.

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38 She is clearer to me now than she was then.

I could not love what appeared to be weak and foolish.

She could not love an untalented child.

So, coldly, strictly, we blocked each other from our lives.

I wish she was back now.

I have learned to like her and would have wanted her to come all this way with me.

Life has been every bit as serious as she thought it would be.

But, through our mutual drug-induced sanity we might hold hands, compare notes, and leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Pursuit We live on what we take from each other.

Loneliness, the way we die, successes and failures don’t come one at a time.

Believe what God would have you believe— that it all comes down at once, a deluge of happenstance— the same stuff that got us here will take us out and we will continue to try to make “family” out of strangers.

It is perpetual the way we wait out the night, venturing out into its dark eye, holding the belt of the poor sucker in front of us.

Somebody must know where we’re going, so we follow along and pray that the way will come clear when we need it to do so. If we could hear properly, the voice of the lamb would guide us, each to his own cell, each to her own boudoir, where we would embrace and rejoice in the icy silence.

We are so much longer ago than we ever thought and our pursuits grow more frantic with each dawn, with each dark. It’s all ahead of us: exhaustible love, conditional forgiveness, despairing bumper stickers MY KID IS NOT AN HONOR STUDENT, SHE’S A DRUG ADDICT I’m talking here about immortality—how it disguises itself and how we run after it, following its trail in the earth Watching it escape all the way to the ocean.

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They Have Moved Off Now They have moved off now Those women whose eyes once saw and said everything Women who said prayers at the stove at the laundromat, at the PTA meetings and the book clubs They moved off somewhere went to countries where “absentminded,” and “distracted,” were not synonyms for female All their lives, they stood in hopeful hallways and believed they would be noticed They were wives to their husbands and whores for their lovers They slept with history teachers so their sons would graduate high school and with grocery store managers to avoid being called out for shoplifting They battled wasps and mice on garage shelves and searched for milk money in the couch cushions When there was no longer a need for milk money or flyswatters or bug spray or love affairs they bought pens and notebooks on sale at Costco and wrote their lives, their songs, their woes on the lined paper, then hid them under the bed in the spare room This is no poem for the weak-minded This is written so you will cut your damned engines

41 and listen to the wind sweep those women’s words off the paper and into the corners of this bruised planet, over the last curve of the last moon, into the final tide of the dwindling sea, into the tattooed, weedy earth we call “Mother”

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Totems We carve myths the way our ancestors carved totems: with legacies behind us and a sense of offering something better than we are We build our anecdotes with shards of faith, dye them with liquor and spit the warm juices only lovers know.

We place them in the tunnels of our dreams And, when they are complete, we lie down at their feet, close our eyes, whisper â&#x20AC;&#x153;I believe.â&#x20AC;?

Not to Fear the Dark I’ve learned that night sounds are the ones that carry the signs and portents.

The voices of the future come dancing out of the dark like bits of ice from the sky.

The voices speak softly, remind us of our regrets, hold out our wishes the way Eve did the apple, pleading “Be brave with me, taste.” Night opens the ears, sings songs of our fathers and mothers walking behind us, steering us to the confusion and risks and pleasures of this life.

This is why we mustn’t fear the dark— not as children, not at the last moment of our lives.

It is in the night that our indecencies fall away and our prayers come up out of us without tangle or torment. I write this to you now so you’ll know not to fear—not ever to fear—the rippling cloth of night.

It belongs to you. It always has.

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The Fall of Icarus New York, 2011—Hana Lin, 26, fell from the balcony of apartment 2640 at 101 Warren St. and landed on an elevated, park-like common area on the fifth-floor roof of a Barnes & Noble, police said. No foul play is suspected. Investigators haven't ruled out suicide I gained weight on the way down, maybe a thousand pounds.

They say you gain weight when you fall from a high place.

I, who was careful about my figure most of the time cartwheeled past the 15th floor, mourning my days without chocolates or ice cream.

Oh, I made toasts with the best of them, but it was with Lite Beer.

A slim figure counts for something, don’t you think?

The air was cool from the open window, the view spectacular— TriBeCa stretching out and around, lit only for me.

Why should I not want to own those lights and reach out to stuff them into my eyes and mouth (as if they were champagne truffles) as I tipped over and over in the dark?

Like a one-ton piece of chalk,

45 I tumbled, watched as windows passed, and wondered if I was in a dream, would wake on the couch when I came to the bottom.

But it was a bookstore roof that stopped me, not a couch or a friend shaking my shoulder, laughing at my beer-y breath.

I heard the rustling of pages as my smudged mascara and Exces de Rouge lipstick found the 5th floor, told myself maybe someone is writing about this.

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Learning to Dream Lying in bed with issues of Rolling Stone magazine and nostalgic thoughts of prior madness (euphoria without illumination) festival of the disembodied nightmares dancing in dreams.

This is a dream in which I can see the unconscious of total strangers in their FaceBook posts.

Their musings are monsters of paradise.

I see, but do not feel you, brothers and sisters.

I dream in illustrations, in graphic design.

Is this where America ends seeing how many drinks we can hold down in one day’s drinking(?)

Bar games, bar talk “Cruel Pong” one of the favorites.

Is this where America ends in this sad desert with bronzed boys and girls vying for notice playing sand games for the benefit of spectators(?)

We can only text so much meaning into each other.

Nothing says “I love you” like digital letters on a trendy Iphone.

Nothing says, “I’m lonely” like a computer screen.

The sky holds fragments of what should have been stars, the sand holds atoms of “Fool’s Gold.”

The moon holds nothing out of self-preservation.

Now and then we hold velvet bags of diamonds, we sleep with them under our pillows and memorize them so that we might speak the language of gems when it’s called for.

Is this the way America ends, in the lyrics of “Under My Thumb,” in the sweating dreams

47 of terrified friends and lovers(?)

I dream of America and choose to dream through its flaws.

The sounds I hear are those of a never-ending trespass.

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Pantoum of Woman in Coffee Shop Window The woman in the window folds her hands.

Her eyes are poised for tenderness or fire.

Her blue cup is a fountain of strange life.

Her silence braids poppies to chiseled blades.

Her eyes are poised for tenderness or fire Her insolent mouth celebrates secrets Her silence braids poppies to chiseled blades.

She sits in the shadow of her conversion Her insolent mouth celebrates secrets Sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been given the edge of the world Though she sits in the shadow of conversion Her disbelief trembles like ripened lust.

Above Us on the Hill I have heard what the talkers were talking, the talk of the beginning and the end, But I do not talk of the beginning or the end.

—Walt Whitman When the moment no longer supported me, I let go, let the water engulf me and the riptides pull at me. When strangers listened to me, their ears against the door, I became mute so that the pulsing of my blood was all they could hear. I abandoned myself to the grim small towns of nightmares and the heavy calm of love’s hiding places. It was only then that I learned about time—how its gingery sweetness deludes and mocks us. We don’t grow in Time. We unroll ourselves like children hiding in rolled carpet, then prodded down a hill, our Selves unrolling by inches and standing in vertigo-ridden wonder at the foot of that hill. The oppression of the carpet lies a few feet above us. It accuses us as harshly as the pointed fingers of our dead loved ones. We are guests who overstay our welcome. The carpet is no longer our toy.

It’s Time, friends: the gift of a god who withholds pity, withholds proof of existence, withholds peace. All we are granted is faith’s stagnant pool, and Time’s carpet—flattened and useless—a few feet above us on Persephone’s hill.

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Keening Being unhappy means allowing the waterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s edge to become your edge, allowing the crazy light of knowing to sparkle in your hair.

Being unhappy means that you financed a birdâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s-eye view of blackened trees and garlands of thorns around the neck of statues.

Being unhappy means never being afraid of dying or deserting.

Being unhappy means reclaiming your birthright of ashes and wine.

It means kneeling down to touch the poisonous waters of war and the inextricable binding of procession and penitence.

Being unhappy means sleeping the deepest sleep of all which is offered only to freedom fighters and bat-shit-crazy women.

Being unhappy means learning the differences between Belladonna and Bella Vita.

Being unhappy is a sky that changes colors and bitter tea in cracked cups.

There is no code here, no secret to discover.

There is only your back and the wall and the traffic skidding sideways on the rainy street below.

Remembering English Ovals The year I learned to make love, it felt like that first salt wave on your first summer visit to the beach.

You know: the sea smell, the slap of the water on your calves, the newness of the sand.

(Don’t shut down this image, it will come in handy later) In those days I smoked cigarettes and when I encountered fears, I blew smoke at them.

Other times, I took showers and cried.

You know how it is: the hot needles of water tweaking the tears off your face, the rumbling rain sound snuffing out your sobs.

Without a doubt, when my fears and I met up, they were governing the meetings.

I knew ghosts then too and prayed to them. I knew violet bruises and a wish for an early demise.

Ah, my dear, my darling, you won’t know this unless I tell you: You were my come-to-Jesus moment.

My fears were between us and you brushed them off the bed as you might do to sand—that sand that sticks to you after a day at the beach (I told you the image would come in handy).

It’s hard to say how long it took for your body to speak to mine.

I don’t remember exactly.

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