Selected Poems, 2016–2020 Common Place No. 23 |A Special Issue
This provisional manuscript brings together poems written from 2016 to 2020. I keep adding to it, I notice. The front and back cover photos are of Daniel Liebermann's ridge house, which my oldest son is restoring.
Selected Poems, 2016–2020 | A Provisional Manuscript | Spring–Winter 2020
FROM NATURE, THE UNCANNY, OR THE GODS Missing
This other thing
Spring with its paraphernalia, tufted birds competing with the din of mowers.
The road south of Olema wound through dense, encroaching woods, straightening as I approached the lagoon. Bolinas forked west and Stinson lay ahead. Heat brings traffic; it was winter.
In the garden I saw what’s missing: the way laughter forms when you’re amused, and how you laugh despite yourself. Just now, a small bird landed on a branch and sung. It cocked its head and sang again. In theory, much else should come to mind, but what I miss: the simplest thing. In season Minions skating on an icy plane. So many violations, one more fresh gasp at his rasping sting, this thing he grew, falling. Yet how many gasps, really, blood’s there to be licked up. You met your match! Tinder’s real, ain’t it? Bon mots mean less and less. I crave bourgeois life, he thinks: country house, a wife and kids, a dog perhaps and nothing dead save a grouse in season or fish.
I chose the cot on the landing to sleep alone. Waves all night, the sea down the block. Writing was my nominal purpose; to wait my reality. Coming, going: the way it’s said is this, but I doubt it is. Another time: Hood Canal, mountains across an inlet, a deck, a moment of certainty— brief, eclipsed by time, but there. Where life touches this other thing signs appear that we carry along. Waves all night, the moon rose and fell, their sum infinity or zero, full or empty. No shaman now to give them potency, no way stations, side altars, or relics, just the road, its hubcap shrines obscured, articles of faith scattered behind me. Their beauty In Eva’s wonderful poem the god expresses impatience. His father was subtler, though, coming on as a swan or a bull, drifting golden, theatrically lit. Seed wombs, found continents: reason enough for subterfuge. They remembered him fondly, wings, horns, spangly things, and how they cleared a path for him who took their measure in long crescendo, not like those ordinary men, offspring sweet being half of him, their beauty.
Her colors
What was spun
A moonflower triggers memories of being called to step into the dark, see blooming there those white blossoms my mother loved.
Greens. Kitchens are a leitmotif, domestic notes that speak to how passion’s corralled as conception or more simply as a marriage, untrammeled.
(Remember this, I thought. You as mother or as aunt, pointing to something loved so those you love can see it.)
Fruits. Preserves are laid in. What was spun is woven. Questions are raised, complaints made: “Don’t explain to me.”
I was four, that sight with me ever since—the garden, moon, my sister. When I went back at sixty-six, night’s sounds filled in, their blanket rhythm louder than at home. Venus was my mother’s star, so mine, and jewelry caught her colors, blue and ruby red. White bloomed or, hanging upside down, spoke in cockatoo.
Days. Her short, striped dress derails without intent. Happens. Another’s house is another’s. Even one’s own has ghosts.
My whole life
Ground hoed
Facts open out to poetry, as they will. Wave and wave and wave and wave: what terrors, then, in the depths? Feet dangle, a phrase set loose, drifting toward a made-up abyss. A pen thrown sticks into a wall, nib and all, or penetrates the heart. Fifteen feet of grey cartilage, teeth visible in shallow water; grown men postpone their exercise. Don’t surf! (My whole life has been like this.) For years, I dreamt their dark shapes shot sideways in the rolling surf. The air is warm, not like here, black forms evident from above.
Farewell, I think. I would remove my hat. Passing, passing, and then lined up. Who are these potters, I ask? In Tokyo I ate off their plates. Ginza. It closed. Centuries of glassblowers. Lineages. Insert a plague or a war or bad luck. Euphemistically speaking, no more. No less than that. The ground hoed. A rectangular crevice, as they are. My hat in my hand. Almost Easter. Risen, risen. The Queen said it or her photo, a disembodied voice.
Rooms. It’s so small a place the spines’ titles can be read. Love’s recital in my mind: you bend and twist, moan. No issue, no harm done. Only poems get with child.
A kind of sense
Worn lightly
Striations in my parenthetical life visible now and then, up close, unlike say an escarpment or great swathes of time set out publicly, whereas mine were self-contained and then expressed as gestures, elements brought forward in sequence, though varying, improvised, part of the songs I sang.
Pears ripen, the tree thriving that was given up for dead. Javier hacked two branches off without hesitation.
It seems inconsequential now, the songs remembered but unsung. Tracing the ribbon of the scars, the blind may find a kind of sense. One could grieve, one could spit. Time briefly blinds us, then we walk out into day. Where we were is so much salt behind us now or lye. Acid in the face, a crevice dried up, these are time’s insults, some of them. We are parodies, I suppose. It’s out in the garden where we weed. There all along, our dissembling unnecessary, as naked we come, bristling at the touch. Fecund once. Her hair is chestnut still, as Stendhal observed. Bent slow, she regains youth as anecdotes take form. England’s not her native place, but then who claims to know where she belongs? Time has left her hair alone, an exception, a talisman like a Rhino’s horn, a lock for mortality’s key. A rise. Profusion Late afternoon, two birds are not crows. Earlier the heat, floral profusion, bees made for it. Night is crickets’ rhythmic din not silent as they claim.
Summer keeps doors from closing. I’ve stayed upstairs, here alone. A man stopped by with a book, his head bald: stem cell transplant, he told me, this worn lightly— the thing itself went unnamed. Salt too Carrots for her hares, gifts in turn for wide-winged hawks. A place for offerings: salt too for her chalk-white deer. I’m not here to hunt, but woods are woods. I too am an offering for her carcass-hungry crows. Mostly local Coming is their signature. In the archive of memory, a gallery’s set aside for it, shelves for motion, drawers for sound, hooks to hang categories of grasps, splays. Like Thoreau, mostly local, 'though room for hotels, the road. There to the right, just past the bowls of sheen, salt, sweet. How the sound of it is like a dog the way it cuts through all else. Only the sound, not the scent, the way beds are like boats, pitching in their waving rooms, the windowsill a jetty’s edge.
Puts it down
The warp
In the end, a terrace, drink placed on a glass-topped table, the sun at an angle, green close and distant, the ocean intuited, a long walk through a terrain of white deer and their predators—not yet, he thinks, drink in hand, turning his head vaguely north, squinting, puts it down to find his hat.
Your birch trees are not mine. Mine were river aspens. Fishing brought me there, I tell myself. Your wood lapboards are also another kind. Mine were painted, noticed as I walked to the rocks where I once swam.
Alone, no one left to love or one to love no longer here, although he thinks of her. She resisted description, he heard over coffee. She declined objectivity as pinned down, a specimen. Although he’d foresworn the rites, spring’s fecund air caught him out. Possession’s dance zero sums, transient, a comet. No doubt never figured in her thoughts, benign, a null. But then, null was where it always started. Ex nihilo, as they said. He’d made a go with that, long the game, chancing, playing odds, and no one odder than him. Took her measure: a season insufficient proof of love, as he conceived it, what we intimate between us, close as one flesh, exchanging genes. All this flashed by, the terrace platform to his reverie.
Your small meal is not the one I ate alone: an oat scone, dark coffee with steamed milk. It was here we met, the eve of our sabbatical year, tentative and then dreams I have sometimes about you. Life may turn up empty yet you appear in dreams. At night, there are phantoms, two of them to be precise. If one takes possession of my wife, I hear a curse of sorts, half of one, a fourth. Both figure in the poems I wrote for them, not the ones where I'm alone. Who would notice? Birch and aspen are similar in the moonlight. Night joins and conjoins us-all are repossessed by sleep. Time divides and unites us. Our letters never sync. Space proves random, barely speak unless you’re ready. I wait. Across time I’m immortal, so never rushed. Beds are where the warp is felt, or one place.
Glinting
Distant
Novalis maintained that art reflected an idea. Does its necessity include a desire to impress? Men of the Heian Court wrote post-coital poems, an art sidestepping criticism.
Oh Pioneer, your red tie, your Lenin badge, your brother— children of future-makers, heroes of non-fictional science, the circling space dog, cosmonauts taking flowers from golden-haired girls with bangs, the everyday gravity of Utopian ice cream and soda in shared glasses! In my bourgeois plot, spring holds Dystopia at bay. How distant we are from homes with their beautiful mothers, from promises made to us.
The aim of which, Benjamin wrote early on, is to free the future from the present’s deformations. It must be perfect. Somewhere up ahead orgasms are unsurpassed in every possible sense. I am the necessary man, many a noble thought, gathering up his garments while his lover tidied up. But an idea eludes me just now. Perhaps a nap. Then I’ll write something apt. Inspiration will come to me as from Heaven or if not, I’ll find a Chinese model, something about a phoenix or a flashing carp, glinting brightly as it leaves the depths. A banner In red, I think of her, red or some other solid hue. She glances from man to man in search of bona fides. Who will bring her a future to justify the effort? Red like a flag, a banner, a parade of one, waiting for a car, a text, a sign.
Like him His Irish head, Kentucky bred, speaks anecdotally— it could be a film, I think. The waitress is slow with drinks. Mussels, drenched in aioli, concede to my restrictions sort of. (I eat around it.) Like him, I become a wraith, thinning out the girth of age. Terrains Bay trees leaning close to oaks: contagion spreads, is handed around. Blame comes in the mail, descends, heavy and opaque. Mice scamper. Wool’s spun. And cries edge close to coming, pass through terrains of hope, abandon. A long trek, the path fainter, no word, even dreams vacant.
Close observation
Two birds
Close observation stirs up resonance, they say. A bird hunts for food across a deck. Myriad droplets of rain cover west-facing windows. Walking yesterday, the ferns drew her notice. Woods cut back bring them forward, she told me. The hills from here were outlines, dark against a lighter gray. Two corners away, more rain, though it had stopped when I left. With sport coat, no umbrella, a man crossed my path ahead as I neared the left turn home.
Drove angularly west. The bridge, grey hues, and later into shade, redwoods briefly alight above us. Ascended in low gear, Tomales glanced, narrow where it starts. Descended, more trail than road, found the house, earnest talk: winter’s rain and fall’s smoke, the weight of all that fell on us. Left early, then a bird spoke up. “Smells like Norway.” Damp, close to the sea, the scent. A different bird, his, a crow. Ours warbled territorially, not so much woken as aware.
(Accepted for West Marin Review 10.)
Could ask
Walked or tramped
Warmer days, insects, a bee briefly between blinds and glass, released, the latches set so it wouldn’t raise. I didn’t set them thus. Another’s fears, I guess: intruders, ladders. Of what am I now afraid? I could ask, what will kill me? but spring has other questions.
Memory is matter and spirit, alive in our heads, Bergson said. Finches mating seasonally, their differences, revived an old narrative: all things unfolding from a source. Finches retold Darwin this story. Surfacing as sensed, nature seemed to be given them and then unfathomably stretched out. Minds took it in, hearts quickened, hands set it down reflexively, hoping for enlightenment. Walked or tramped, then wrote while others dug or sketched to coax it into consciousness. Innocent No need for color, blank wings like shrouds later, folded up. Summer’s gift, working the garden, sun theirs while they have it, innocent of any ending.
Writing this out A sketchbook view, taking in a grey streak or the way age sets in around her eyes, how her daughter is taller, a tot when I last saw her, chasing Robert’s dog. I’m older too in the same degree, lighter than I was, dressed in blue, a sweater against the cold despite the harbor’s glare. No mystery, I think, writing this out. Just my friend as she was this morning, here.
Marked on the skin
Until we can’t
Winter counts, time marked on the skin, in dreams, times awake at four to the strikes a hammer makes, a spring of sorts that sings distantly. Winter counts, the streaks of chalk white passion leaves, human sounds, ends after starts, beds made and torn, rented to use, one flesh again then separate and gone. Winter counts, stirring, ordinary time slowing minutely. A beach wet and foamy, then bleak, littered, windswept. Winter counts, ripples the day left shadowed.
Everyone we carry, every bird alight, regarding us: what we call borders, headspace, eyes in our skulls, how we breathe in, how we’re taken or take, sex too a border passed, why we couple, make others who then take their leave, issue who were once us. Vast expanses, east, west, tracks laid, rivers bridged, dammed, dreamt, nature held under, subjugated, then back in heat, Kali to our demons. Borders then like paper shacks. Carry on until we can’t. Birds and grass aflame, how we breathe unclear.
Melbourne poem A layer of white, crimson amid galleries your arms make. Eyes curved, gesture for the wings like Kabuki, a lip’s point, provocation. At the restaurant the maitre d’s tattoos overflowed formality; yours float, drift. A walk loosens the grip of things. Buildings tell time as we pass. The new ones will, you’ll find, future provisional, their stories your own, but my small chapter.
In disarray How like rain it is. Green shades toward sleep. Autumn drifts toward winter. Dark waxes and light wanes. Thickets where gates were. Brittle forests. And yet birds sustain themselves. Crows loud when I fetched the undelivered newspaper fleshy with Christmas. And so holidays are declared, beds left in disarray. They liked it then, being fucked, the way it conjured up something else.
East, not southeast
End of the road
A lack of fauna. Birds and bees heard but not seen. Deer or dog skat. A beetle crossing at its own pace. Over Point Reyes, my son said. East not southwest. A large white hillside house built without permits. Pioneer pines along a ridge waiting to fall. Nitrogen to feed the oaks, a generation after the Vision Fire. Shallow roots, spawned by exploding pinecones. Shoot up and stop. High winds bring them down. Parts of the forest littered with them, dry, rotting. A hawk along a line of trees. A woman jogging. Sun out, fog burned off, sweater shed. I’m cold usually so glad for heat. The bay Caribbean blue coming back. “Never seen it like this.” Here it is.
“End of the road,” Laurie said. It had that look. Although he drove three days before expiring, negotiating the road’s twists, the state of the place spoke to the negligence with which the departing treat material life. Properly speaking, it’s a sham that mortality brings to light: how we, the quick, shade off into this forest of stunted pines.
Sang again She is said to be singing. Who writes it down? Once an eon it’s heard and sung on. Erato’s traces on a balcony, among a garden’s vases. He wants to hear her between other sounds. He wants no others. Alone, alone, alone. She is said to be distant, said to be close. Once an eon she’s tangible, her verses so many lines setting out a form, page after page of procession, flower girls with their baskets, their pleated skirts. They are said to be striking, a beauty needing its songs, its dancing steps. Sang and sang again, and then died. Who sees her now? Silence, empty yet pregnant, the sound of breath taken in behind a curtain. Erato takes her sweet time. Her entry. Only briefly How blood flows when it can’t be stanched. I swear, it wasn’t me who was violent. The kings, the princes, their attractive women—no harm was meant. A man’s home is his castle, we felt, and trade beckons. Many a lad’s fortune made in some distant place, the company he kept— but I digress. It wasn’t violence I desired, just reward for enterprise, effects from causes. A revolution, but only briefly, just enough. I never thought of shooting them, winsome as they were in their pinafores and smocks.
They taunt us, these firesticks, half alive, spawn of past catastrophes. “A wood stove,” my oldest son projected, but pine is a mass of sparks. “We’ll clear it away,” he offered at another point, an all-purpose summary of the scene, its wrecked boats, trailers, cars, and yurt. Yet there’s a spirit here that draws you to it. More than a sketch, the house begs to be carried out, more than a shell, but not yet shelter. Among men Laughing on the street, passersby amused too by it, how she waves a bit, among men, the dance work lunch imposes if not alone with her thoughts, eyes fixed inwardly, reptile of a machine for sidewalk striding—they fall back, daren’t catch her gaze, its rays. But now it’s turned off, with the boys, out.
Two life-of-Jesus poems
Myths on the side
Like a breeze? Or nothing, air still, his finger raised, I thought, silent despite rippled silk, its color hard to place, eyes averted in the moment. After, I was ravenous, and later swollen and sick.
The world ordered in chaos, foreseen in dreams and omens, spoken as oracles, swayed almost incidentally, a god’s affection captured without intending, a truth perceived without one’s knowing.
He has these dreams, he tells me. In one, travelers gather around us, their words portents; another, a calming hand extends, points west, insistent. He stores things. We leave at night. A moon. The baby’s quiet.
We set the myths on the side and leave the gods’ altars bare. We treat their world as ours, dismal stewards throwing crumbs. Days we take for granted pass unrecognized, fruit rotting in baskets, friendships squandered.
She seems not to notice. Or if noticing, not caring. Enters rustling, glides over tile or dirt, never speaks. Thoughts take root anyway. We must flee, I tell her. He won’t also must be said.
Hermes appears nonetheless. Charon’s ferry plies the Styx. Near Hades’ gate, gathered shades gossip as they wait, looking for what they thought they had, death leaving little trace. Life’s short, the Muses sing. Art is long.
^ Jesus appeared, it’s said, spade in hand, to the questioning Magdalene. “Don’t touch me,” He warned her, being halfway there, fresh from harrowing and still toxic or otherworldly. “Just a pinch?” she asked. He held out the spade. “In heaven, a bed, a garden, windows, children.” He looked at her. “A woman will write that man’s desire alone permits his knowing if she knows it to be true.” When they found her, spade in hand, the grave empty, her account omitted the second part. So much else left out. To France, some say, with their son; Daughter of the Church, some claim, a spade mistaken for the true cross.
(In Little River 8, Katherine Osborne, editor.) Barely felt The past in a photo, a friend as she was at 40, dressed in summer wear for this cliffside place, the architect’s pack of cigarettes on the table, two white coffee cups, standard issue modernity. the house now sought after: read, fuck, walk, eat. Board-and-batten, weather-beaten as an aging face. “The city of the dead,” my wife called it. A bad visit, probably. I never made it, but have heard reports. the house a scene of a thousand rendezvous, but no one chalked the walls as prisoners are said to do. Possessions stuffed into weekend bags, a watch around his wrist, their car cooling from the drive. They bring along their expectations. A visit sparks an argument and a child, carried back barely felt, all that they possess a bit heavier, tipped ahead.
Skimming To go where poetry occurs. (I paraphrase. Conducive to it, he meant.) There’s a muse on the sofa behind me, one leg crossed or reading a book or looking at my friends’ artwork or at nothing at all, thinking how the gods come through, how far she is from the mountain where they gather. We have Mount Tam, and I think she wandered in from there, skimming the bay with her toes as sailboats passed, captained by whoever’s out these days—it used to be lawyers, teeth set to win the race. Tech moguls supplanted them. No poetry there, she thinks. I’ll keep on a line to that window that looks out at Tam, to the one who’s always thinking about me. A muse likes that in a man, to be watching for her where a hillside rises, look in wonder. Half in, half out Reading Pessoa in August, tomatoes ripening as the vines dry out, the race against the goddess's return to ground. It leaves her half in, half out, not like Europa, astride her bull, a continent to name and populate, Neanderthals' claims notwithstanding. To Pessoa this striding, this tragic displacement, were only a tram's metallic screams, rain on Lisbon streets, each morning memorably like the last. For Europa never graced his bed. Zeus too had fled.
.
FROM EXPERIENCE OR REGRET (OR BOTH) Footage
Malleable
The deep throb of ships, cats asleep, the easel standing, how I slipped in and out of it, how it disappeared, how it’s folded now into memory.
Peel away the clothes: how malleable the form our bodies take, taking, taken.
This is my version. Yours, his, those of others may differ, but I was there filming it in my head. Just now, Descartes was mentioned, the split: I or he, you or she, the ships in their channel, the line we made together visible, arguably a stain, then crossing yet again that momentary bridge nature grants our species. This is my version. The curtains billowed when the wind came up. I’m fairly sure that happened. At MoVida’s bar Women touch their hair as they get ready to be loved. They laugh as the men excite them with their muscular arms. Their mouths open and their eyes widen. Later they will narrow. Here at MoVida’s bar she rehearses love’s sixteen steps, starting with her hair, her hands, mouth open, eyes widened, closer, closer, leaning over, hand in her hair.
Disregard the flesh: how malleable the mind that rides on top or is ridden. Ignore the genders: how malleable the sex, like the mind’s root or one of them. Take care of the self: how malleable the heart. “Nothing is lost,” the I Ching said. From Paris or Berlin A while ago, you sent a photo. The man seemed older. Like a still from a film, light in its bisexual state, those cars floating on the tsunami. (The drowned, even the dogs, sought out the living.) Fathers share a confidence in their daughters, whose natures accrue over time. Why then are their dreams stowed up ahead? You sometimes write. The years pass. Letters are these brief scraps of here.
Their own category
Waiting
I caught a glimpse of him in his workman’s apron, the hallway filled with boxes. She’d come back with her children. “Couldn’t you be happier to see me?” —a question I used to ask her, with no answers.
How women move is a reason to wait. They are in every case distinct, but you are you. To wait is to remember this— not to move on, but recollect.
The last time he wore it, you handed me Montaigne. I may have said I wanted to be loved. When I heard the word, I wondered. Not so much insular as unhindered, possessing as momentary, a gift, but gifts are their own category, to which I’m partly blind. Each has its correspondence, like the rug brought back from Greece or the mountain poem, written out, descriptive of the room itself, solid and precarious, with its view, the bed where we lay once in plain hearing. The sign Your letters go unread, but their phrases recur. Sometimes at night the moon angles and I want to tell you. “Gather all of this and bring it with you.” If I brought up journeys out of turn it was because they weren’t the same alone. Lately, I remembered how it was, the conversations in between. If they could happen in their own world, separate from every other, then the sign would point there.
I put her apron on, pretend to be a woman. If I wait long enough, I’ll come as one. I’m devoted as a mare, the I Ching says, but my mind is like a dressing room in the Kabuki Theater. I dreamt a kind of purifying dream. More often, I’m failing to catch a flight— my suitcase half empty, my clothes in disarray. Always the same city, yet it makes no sense. My parents appear, although they’re dead. Being dead, they never reach their destination. I vowed to stay here to the very end, waiting games, the last of it, like slabs first, then we decay. Will you attend? The odds aren’t good. How it was Monsters have their topics, how it was out on the plains. They roll their cigarettes and measure ankles in their heads, the distance covered, the sounds evoked. A table’s more a surface than a divide, and the pull of physicality is so odd: you swear it off and there it is again. Time (1) Walking across the city in the afternoon: there’s no distance suddenly and then there is, time a concertina, too, when we grab it at both ends.
Only the sense
Observed
That human sense of want, the splay or curl, the shock of the part, the plunge, the gift when it’s a gift, possession as it happens.
More like a fan to gaze over or fold. In the summer, there is no barrier. The cries of women mating, bearing, mix with offspring.
The room is strewn and then each item is retrieved so that only the sense of you lingers. Bits and pieces of flesh cohere in service of this gathering in. Yes, I thought, I dream of this. I woke thinking how acts condemn us. How we are what they say we are, even in dreams. And yet remorse follows us there. Everything is laden. If I were free, if I were unafraid, we would cohere, we would part, burning our letters behind us or maybe not. I have no theory on this point, only practice with its dreadful weight. So much work In the afterlife, the two reenact how one waded in to save the other. This while their wives look on, marvel at the drama. So much work spent on love. One procreates or not, lives on detached, paints. The colors traipse in thin clouds, penciled lines a leitmotif, quotations as subtitles whispered as if to an ear just a tongue or two away. I listened, she says. Your seed propagated noisily.
Her brother sweeps by in his finery, I pause to note his bearing. Men wield their heft like rote. They long I think for rawer stuff, spitting, leaving marks. I know her roots. How hard and long my empress comes in that brief season after mating. We hide our wounds, bind the hands that did the work. Silent to spare our ragged tongues, we barely walk. Falling in And she married her old man. At the concert, came to mind, sun lighting a house, steep hill rising behind it, birds sang as he played Liszt, his left hand crossing the right one, upper notes plinking, a Yamaha lacking resonance, a prompt for accompaniment, birds and a bobbing dowager falling in, the sun lower, slicing the audience. I put on my dark glasses. I never remarried, the sin Paris fell into, choosing.
Leave taking
Calendar
Never was the word you used, that chasm drawn with chalk.
1 January: atoning and planning; a death 15 January: the Reverend King’s birthday 22, 24, and 25 January: loved ones’ birthdays, the middle one gone 4 February: appeared 7 February: birthday of dead-by-her-own-hand Jane 13 February: a day of coincidence 14 February: a saint’s day 3 April: day my mother died; an artist’s birthday 7 May: remembered 8 May: a loved one’s birthday 10 May: birthday of one grandfather 15 May: a sign, and then? 17 May: Norway’s national day 18 May: remembered 6 June: D-Day 8 June: a loved one's birthday 12 June: remembered 14 June: birthday of the other grandfather 4 July: Independence Day 14 Juillet: Bastille Day 28 July: a loved one's birthday 1 August: a loved one’s birthday 10 August: one parent’s birthday 14 August: their anniversary, in between 19 August: another parent’s birthday 30 August: anniversary 2 September: a loved one’s birthday 6 September: a loved one’s birthday 10 September: a loved one’s birthday 13 September: a loved one’s birthday
Small birds sang along the walk, their haven green and dense. Not far away, you struck something like a longer chord, not purely sound. The women two doors down kept talking. Not far away as I measure time, and never, she said that, too. Dharma is like headlights as the cars turn, the chalk faint on the walk, the trees green and kempt, barely shelter. Not far away. Leave taking, melancholia: death alone registers at odd moments. In some seasons I can’t go in. Will it satisfy you that I’m really gone? Chalk X below its skull, Y for where desire lived, circle for my empty head. Not far away as I measure lives. For Simone “I am the King of Bread,” said while waving a baguette, draws an appreciative chortle from young Simone, forgetting how her brother thumped her, cries rising from the next room, not one to suffer in silence, Simone. I predict great things.
30 September: remembered 5 October: remembered 28 October: a loved one’s birthday 9 November: remembered 20 November: regretted 7 December: Pearl Harbor Day birthday 23 December: a loved one’s birthday 24 December: Christmas Eve/shopping 25 December: Christmas/presents 31 December: New Year’s Eve
The question vexes
Gravity
A terrace opera. Love is like Chekhov’s gun: act three or five, a shot is heard. Bang! The dog is briefly deafened. He barks. The chorus sings. ‘Oh!’ from one wall, but no answer. (There is no answer, one notes.)
Panoply of forms—she shifts, another writes in Polish. Shifts, one thin, one thick, a race, a truce with love, a truce with them, student days coming to an end. Hope seeps into texts. Desire mixes with contempt. Men.
Yet the question vexes. Love's illusive, its quantum form evades scrutiny. The dog runs in circles, chasing it. Look, it has it in its teeth! But no, the scene has changed: one damn thing after another. Between the sexes, a scrim. What you thought you saw, wasn’t. It was some other thing. Wrong is how it boils down; what you felt, love’s facsimile. A scrim, a crime, a good time. There is no truth, only sound mixed with movement, only heat and rivulets. Love was there like Chekhov’s gun: ‘Oh! Oh! Oh!’ One forgets, another dwells. The dog is briefly blinded. He cries, the chorus silent. Persistent Like saint's days to a bride of Christ. Marriage banns were not read twice. A distance traveled and then this. Mark how life takes down desire, persistent in its nostalgic form, bliss a memory of skin rubbed raw, bathed in warm agony afterward, a payment for afternoons on borrowed sheets. Stations as the Church has it, where those small deaths took you. Distance an unbroken silence except for dreams, moon's trace reminiscent across the floor.
What Polish words describe how women are in bed? Who is this, before a wall, floor held despite their gaze? One wafts, I think; the other’s gravity turns off and on. My hand, each finger blurs, balled up and taken in, a metronome, a coming tune: too much, too much. Form foregone, only rode it out. Horses roll. The Polish rider unruffled sits, some distance from authority, wanting (well, not him). Saddle sore come Monday, one confides. Heft rolled her close to death. The Polish rider looks away. Whose gravity, then? We must rewrite things to account, theorize when there’s no proof, touch the root, the spot, roof or seat, fount, spout. These are not romantic words. Forms follow function as nights betray the day.
Souvenirs derived
Comes at the end
Falling in with regret or falling out of love, regretting this. (Love fares badly under siege.) Regret falls silently, reproach for all reproachable things we bring along, souvenirs out of love, derived from it or carried as memories. Time we swam in once or waded through, soaked to excess and caught out, tapped. Life closes in, opens out. Regrets aren’t even texts, there being no recipients. Ruled out. Numbers only come to mind, of phone, year of birth, of day and month. Names drift and somewhere pianos go untuned or, if tuned, evoke the memory of tuning.
Sometimes invited, endings and caught out every time, drawers spilling contents in loose order. A mind gone to its poles, his family wrote, that was gentle, even feckless when I knew it. Talking once in a car, and then his reply crossed my path last night, one poet quoting another. The sense revolutions make comes at the end, if right, the tiger’s stripes visible and the leopard’s spots magnificent, and my friend cartwheeling through time, land here at my feet, a cat’s smile, not smug but kind.
Deep blue A layered life, women loved in sequence and in parallel, families vying unknowing for primacy as marriages are ventured, ended, continued, restarted, and revived. All this across two decades. I wrap it up in golden tissue, red ribbon such as she might choose, layers meant to obscure the marks such living leaves, deep blue in places, like the stripes of fish caught after a struggle, their radiance muted.
Time (2) Time noticeably slows down. Conversation opens out like a film. An afternoon could pass. It takes that long. “Children are the end result,” I heard the therapist point out. In films, there’s denouement of some sort. We come back to it. “I didn’t catch that part.” “Nowhere to go,” the therapist said. It had no meaning, yet it did. You said it was the thing you liked.
Three variants on a yellow sofa
A borrowed staircase
Traffic all night, I remember. “Marry me” had its symmetry. Nothing that can’t be justified by brain chemistry. Wears off. No and no, and so, no and no. A Chanel outfit in a photo. Congress, they used to call it.
Oh marriage! What is real and what isn’t? What lies between those poles, honesty and deception? Overrated, the one; and the other’s misconstrued that was mere awkwardness, the way ghosts emerge from walls and the dog is put away, yet lingers, scents, sounds too prevalent to ignore.
Congress is one word for it, desire needing a room, horizontality. Children float at the edge, as potential. Welcome them, the Church teaches. Lever in a way, forcing the issue, hounding bliss, if that word can be used, the fog of hours we spend in bed, myopia. It would be better if time kept crawling or even stopped like Rockefeller’s heart. (Better for him but not better for her.) Who will clear a path? No one, I conclude. A yellow sofa surfaced and traffic, especially the buses. Not the ocean of another room. Distance is relative with another body. She liked kings but there we were, there it was. Under the bathroom light, a hole. The universe is rent and warped, the odds coming to mind, weighed. How to square these two things? In Aix Blooms incongruous, thoughts arising the way bliss appears. I used to want it, wrote it down among early January’s desires. In Aix when I felt it everywhere, despite loneliness. Words draw. It was May, fifteen years, some months away from now. The way bliss too disappears, cold descends in life. We build our huts. Wrapped in furs like old people, shamans, traders, amber in our pockets, bits of it floating in a kind of glass, once so viscous two fingers slid in, angling.
A borrowed staircase, anecdotes mingled with my own. How far we went on a fruitless errand, despite ample though belated coverage, a romp, pilfered wine. I gloss rather than copy prose, those phrases hitched together as a preface. Long runways end in wrecked and burning planes. A borrowed heaven, afterlives doubtful and we daren’t write. Names are dropped, fathers scorned. No issue. An ending. The path seems evident. Trudge another day amid stolid trees, winter coming, alone but for letters, visits, the spells broken then restored, the breaks, chasms, basins, geologic time inserted just because. Seemed evident. Solidity is life despite sleep, is sun. Barely a flicker, this thing haunting us then pausing. Sensed sometimes, cutting through in its peculiar way and taking over and over.
Times we failed
Occasional talk
Simple language, much emotion: it reached me here, an ocean and two land masses distant. To write is all that behooves her, she reports, a point consistent with prose that makes no claim.
I stood not far from you. A glance, I think it was a glance, the way particles dissipate when chance spares them collision, a rebirth— the sort that warrants us to pray. Of prayers there was a dearth; just mirth of a funereal sort. A few preened, gossiped, until grief broke in.
As the I Ching says, “No blame.” We live without foreknowledge, which may prompt writing out those times we failed to tarry. A big, familiar city is a redoubt compared to exile in a village. The vows made when we marry place us on an unseen ledge. Like a diary, the everyday. Like alleyways we stumble in that end blindly. Feel our way, hoping not to sense alarm. Looking back, the time it took; how it came anyway, the harm. Different hue Rational life has doors, gates in hedges, shadows behind columns, other rooms. Irrational wraps her hair up, then slips. Time and space alter on both sides. Back’s another place, the child minutely older, one touch different from another, lips and much else ache with memory. Later the ink’s a slightly different hue, words and lines colored, darkened, lightened. There’s no way to know. Each side’s a mystery to the other, but she bleeds in both, bears signs of crossing. Bears perhaps, another minutely sparked.
We can speak of it or something new, the measure of what we’ll miss. Musil pointing the crowd ahead, Berlin ambling toward an abyss, toward a nil, yet cracking jokes in the middle. We edge away from it, often unnerved if life proves too brittle. He had his work, future, promise. Saw him just weeks before, so thin, hopeful. Is it the work we’ll miss? Or is it up to us to write it? In my case, occasional talk, cigarettes and spare words, his wit, his surprising affection, like a dog or guide on a walk that turns and looks for attention. An element Remembering walks taken, sometimes accompanied, the sight of dried thistles in the dead of summer, field of horses, the lower gate ending temple grounds, a barrier for novices. We were novices once too. There’s an element of this that makes it possible. It drops away and the walks cease, gate breached or car gone, love gone or fleeing. I took refuge in a friend or two, no novice now, a kind of sage only, old enough to know the knowing’s past, this mystery I left unresolved, left remembered and remembered. You scoffed at this, but it comes to mind.
Domesticity
Driving east
The fact of the house, the rooms, curtains gusting out of frames, books, boots, cats, coats, an easel, lives present and lives absent, a tinge never quite dispelled, domesticity bespoke hour by hour: was this a narrative or a list?
Sometime in March, driving east, we stopped at Little America, four a.m., heard a waitress tell a truck driver she was pregnant with his child. And later, somewhere in Wyoming, a woman wouldn’t sell me cokes because “Indians in your car.” No, they’re Chinese. “Oh, in that case.” And before that, in Salt Lake City, the boys pumping gas did their work then, finished, rolled tires at us, godless hippies in their estimation. Later, we lived off Telegraph, Dwight near the corner store. I dropped acid. This was summer, nineteen seventy.
Recounting (1) Had she been, then nine, sixteen, nineteen, twenty-one, the mother dead.
Marriage Recounting (2) It must be that we fell (out of love?) (photographs, naked men having sex). It must be that I could (one act is like others: this is a fallacy). It must be that I left (twice, as if in a trance the first time, a reverse). It must be how it ends (again, again, again, but then there is no link). It must be that I fail (again and then again the thread leads back to me). It must be. It must be (out of love, singular amid the talk, laughter).
Across a counter, that connection, instances of which run life to life, find their line. How smitten I was, how doubtful such a one could be courted. Yes, her sister said, write. Offspring were desired, so marriage loomed into view. I wrote the letter, projective prose, one could say. Sent, it garnered no firm commitment, but she returned in May and we married in late August, wanderers in the east. August found us living on the hillside above the stadium, a brief vestibule to marriage that gave us a first son, wanderer with his parents, imbiber of our wedding day champagne, who made his presence felt on the train near Edmonton. “I’m pregnant,” said with the certainty of an oldest sister.
Heard of a river
This contingency
In place you could be in Shanghai again, but in time you’re proximate. Others are so distant that I’d need a clock set to ebb to uncover islands, find fields once fertile with possibilities.
Sometimes you come back to me. Not just because one of your signs appeared, a fuller image with its connotations. Long time, I thought, and all these things accumulate, not in drawers or shelves, not put away like clothes are sometimes when we can’t bear to cast them out. There’s no room, no house, no field, nothing that contains you, only possibility where you were, like what a vase enveloped once, a space for the stems of flowers, or a jar or other vessel whose contents are to be laid away against tomorrow. It’s elusive, this contingency. I wait and see, befriend and correspond, the same number always. At home.
I heard of a river, saw the photos, but these fields were ours, a cabin or a tower marking them, a bed. Shanghai can be lonely, empty, narrow and hard, warmth gone. One can live there exiled, driven not to long too much. A film took this up, theater of regret. In life, we write or speak. Walls and doors have messages in ink. Others are nowhere, vanished; fields are tilled by children now. I watch, write, dream at night, complicated, inverted visions that play with every distance. Not ceasing Before birth and long after, expression takes form, makes sense of light and dark, the pitch and pace of life enveloping us. Nothing escapes us, if we listen. Love’s ceasing is not love’s ceasing. Intimacy persists. Mute is as good as whispered and blows are struck just as before. Not ceasing but unfolding, life proves fluid, layers shifting as rhythms change. Words find new places, the voice yours who spoke, may speak or decline to speak. Such emptiness is a garden, intimate speech, silent as roses, the color of persimmons preserved and dried, lavender tied and kept, a faint smell of the giver.
For Sarah Gray Immortal yes, so I can see destiny given form and space. Too soon gone, so I imagine it, oh cradled one, asleep now to rest a mind life overflows. Suitors will call you in time, their allure, beguiling tone, mortal fires, sometimes raked, the fires others stoke, the rivers women bring, their mystery. Carried along, those months of arising that courting sparks. If I'm present, you'll hear me in the blessings on their lips, lights flickering on the water when the lanterns float by.
Not ceasing (variant) Little escapes us if we listen. Love's ceasing is not love's ceasing. Nothing's lost. Mute's as good as whispered, blows are struck as before, words find their places, the voice still hers who spoke, may speak, may decline to speak. An emptiness is a garden; is intimate speech, silent as roses the color of persimmon jam; is lavender dried and bundled, faintly carrying the giver's scent. What the day will bring Deaf and blind share things, fail to note or overlook how she wants or desires, and he wonders what clothes will suit. The days grow shorter, a clichÊ given seasonally and remarked on. Darkness is something she puts on, but still sees, the paradox desire needs. All in time— time wobbles in its axial frame. He sinks into sleep at two or three. She's bothered most at other hours, craves the things she craves. Siesta Hotel opens out onto brothels, their sofas rhythmic with her hungers, sating though days tighten imperceptibly, the gaps of longing growing longer. She wonders what the day will bring. He puts his clothes on in an order, wavers inside those trappings, keys in pockets—doors and cars, a case once filled with things she wants. "Put away long ago," another said, but no, they live on in her head.
LUNES (PACE ROBERT KELLY) Striated
Pasiphaë 1
Late July midday repeating the month’s trope: fog, sun. Then at night a long line of cold, striated, light almost too bright, solar flare, the planet rolling.
Midas got a bull. It was white. Wasn't offered back. Poseidon cursed the sun's daughter, fixed her lust: must have the white bull: architects practice these black arts. Got her wish. Fucked the bull and had his offspring. The story grows complicated. Betrayals. The moral: white bulls are bad luck and yet a good fuck. Poseidon no doubt foresaw it.
Flesh Break in bloody nights: they withdrew. Linked women, naked one of them, scared the horses. Flesh, womanly, is meaning-laden. Some object, but these things evolve. In memoriam WB His suitcase disappeared. The grave, a stone rolled or a name reversed, gave away nothing. In my mind its contents close in, an end point converging as a particle not a wave.
Pasiphaë 2 A god may take umbrage, a slight: a white bull is typical. Gods won't leave it alone. Architects haunt these marble halls, and give their dreams form. How like a cow, then, was her bed. Estrus a perfume, registers across species, but sometimes it's genes crossing: bull's head, man's torso. Waiting. Cows take time. Sweet time. Sweet. All said and done, she savored it despite the damage.
PANDEMICALLY INDUCED POEMS Into the street Dreams are travel now, I thought. In one, blocks with colored segments demonstrate an argument Isaiah Berlin may have made, how democracy forms because, as Aldo van Eyck noted, each house is a tiny city. Those who crowd in it stood at first at the corners, wary, but slowly relaxed, a small bubble forming molecules with others was the practice, though theory lagged. Empiricism turned the city inside-out in search of answers. We’re all evidence now, old men thought. Ambulances took seven hours. Travel is a dream that we put off as long as possible, like flagging down a hearse to ride in cars we used to hail by app. We walk, masks ragged from overuse, hair like some garden's neglected topiaries. Cars are scarce; there are vans, young men with masks, packages bought, takeout fetched, women with dogs, women with kids, we step out onto the street, gallant as they eye us over masks of colored, patterned cloth, kids uncovered, and we who should have been in Naples are out with them taking the air that is admittedly clearer than it’s been for ages, houses on distant hills visible again. We wave on getting up, blush to remove our bedclothes without the smog, wonder how it will be when Mammon’s switch flips, the birdsong plundered by the rushing train, trucks, motorbikes, sirens, society and its calendar, a corner table, beauty close and sotto voce. The road
Notes arrive
Attached and detached and attached, this cycle without destination, memoir’s impulse to drag it out onto paper and look at each, one at a time, conflated and separated. They shake their heads but he’s unmoved. Shake and move they did, remembered, reasons to resume the chase, scramble for a taste of that good thing, a banquet and then the bill, the reckoning, blind he was and then saw and heard clearly. The road, stepping out and stepping in, the Fates with their contagion, the mind snapped open by the shock of nothing, blasted into consciousness, the road to here, finally, attached again. This cycle without sequel: he sets it down.
Return mail arrives—a note and a postcard. The note asks after the dead; the postcard is formal. A widow’s note also arrives. A postscript follows. I burn my paranoia again in a dish set aside for this. It has an acrid smell but leaves only bits of ash. Patiently walk down shorter piers to stare at the dark river of floating ties, unholy currents. Turn back, wait. Eventually the mailboat docks. Island emptied out. Last helicopter left at one. Postal people exchange boxes. Masks protect them. I am the lone recipient, gathering the city’s mail. Notes arrive. I call out the names, those who wrote, as their replies are so sorely wanted. Though absent, beachward or ridge-dwelling, longing is universal. Call out names as ash drifts down like snow, so striking against the black water, sand, dark pines, porches where they smoke and pace, then hear.
AFTERWORD
In a review I read recently, the reviewer compared poems to tiny planets orbiting the vast sun of prose, suggesting that they arise from arcana, not the everyday. Experience sparks what I write, although its roots are highly varied. I take life in and then make something of it, and this "something" is necessarily provisional. I learnt from Horst Rittel in graduate school that what matters in life is open-ended and indefinite, which is why regrets so often trail after us. They reflect the impulse to resolve these matters in a better way, despite the frequent impossibility of this. When I collect poems at the end of the year, I first set them out in the order that I wrote them. A given theme can be episodic or unfolding, and specific poems, benefiting from its accrual, may capture it better than others. This is true of my prose pieces, also—there are themes to which I return. My writing is in some sense always a coda.
John J. Parman lives and writes in Berkeley. He posts most poems initially on Tumblr (j2parman.tumblr.com).
Common Place No. 23 | Š 2020 by John J. Parman | complace.j2parman.com