Dream fluently, still brothers, who when young Took with your mother's milk the mother tongue,
In which pure matrix, joining world and mind, You strove to leave some line of verse behind
Like still fresh tracks across a field of snow, Not reckoning that all could melt and go.
I carried it to the edge of the cement walk. It deserved me, I thought,
for how tirelessly I’d chased, for the way I cared about its inner light. A last look through the keyhole
of my cupped palms and I set it down, then stomped flat, smearing long with my toe
so the neon green spatter and jagged streak glowed, brighter than before, as though a spirit glad to have finally escaped its body.
With a stick, I drew a crooked star. A diamond. And like a sickly dusk, its ink faded, slow at first, then all at once. I went giddy, innocent as a god. Night’s oncoming chill
collected along my collar. I had no idea yet, bounding back out across the sighing, blue lawn for another, no idea the suffering it would really take in a dark world to shine.
I love you but I don’t know you —Mennonite Woman
When I was seven, I walked home with Dereck DeLarge, my arm
slung over his skinny shoulders, after-school sun buffing our lunch boxes.
So easy, that gesture, so light— the kind of love that lands like a leaf.
It was 1963. We were two black boys
whose snaggle-toothed grins held a thousand giggles.
Remember? Remember wanting to play
every minute, as if that was why we were born?
Those hands that bring us shouting into this life
must open like a fanfare of big band horns.
Though this world is nothing
like where we’d been, we come anyway, astonished
as if to Mardi Gras in full swing. There must be a time
when a child’s heart builds a chocolate sunflower
while katydids burnish the day with their busy wings.
This itching fury that holds me now—this knowing
the early welcome that once lived inside me
was somehow sent away: how I talk myself back
into all the regular disguises but still walk these streets
believing in the weather of the unruined heart.
My friends, with crow’s feet edging their eyes,
keep looking for a kinder city, though they don’t
want to seem naïve. When was the last time
you wrapped your arm around someone’s shoulder
and walked him home?
after Arthur Rimbaud and Wyatt Mason
O for a few more of those pre-trauma days, when life was as dazzling as a piece of raw peridot and all my hours were grass stains and beach glass and sycamore leaves glinting and shifting and iris spears shooting up, up, up! And lime cordial, molten peridot, thick and gloopy as time in the bottom of a glass—sliding, coating. And a fresh bruise when a bruise was just a bruise and could fade. And the gloaming when even the gloaming was green—pear-green and freckled sky, mustachioed wisps. But he is here too—fission-green flaw deep within the facet—giving off his own glow, blinding, disorientating. A crystal kind of man, polymorph, because he still has something to teach me and I don’t know if I will ever truly learn it. Protective stone, keeper-away of evil spirits, where were you when I needed you? His touch was mantle-hot and ruinous; intrusive, extrusive. I am always looking for a new frequency—hoping to recover some peridot shard of myself in this lapidary of broken things—but I can only translate what is already here and not transform. Hats off to the crystallographer who is watching chartreuse ions precipitate into livid rocks, I am toxic—petrified ectoplasm—luminously bonded to my past.
The child alone a poet is: Spring and Fairyland are his. Truth and Reason show but dim, And all's poetry with him. Rhyme and music flow in plenty For the lad of one-and-twenty, But Spring for him is no more now Than daisies to a munching cow; Just a cheery pleasant season, Daisy buds to live at ease on. He's forgotten how he smiled And shrieked at snowdrops when a child, Or wept one evening secretly For April's glorious misery. Wisdom made him old and wary Banishing the Lords of Faery. Wisdom made a breach and battered Babylon to bits: she scattered To the hedges and ditches All our nursery gnomes and witches. Lob and Puck, poor frantic elves, Drag their treasures from the shelves. Jack the Giant-killer's gone, Mother Goose and Oberon, Bluebeard and King Solomon. Robin, and Red Riding Hood Take together to the wood, And Sir Galahad lies hid In a cave with Captain Kidd. None of all the magic hosts, None remain but a few ghosts Of timorous heart, to linger on Weeping for lost Babylon.
Primo Levi
Once more he sees his companions' faces
Livid in the first faint light,
Gray with cement dust,
Nebulous in the mist,
Tinged with death in their uneasy sleep.
At night, under the heavy burden
Of their dreams, their jaws move,
Chewing a non-existant turnip.
'Stand back, leave me alone, submerged people,
Go away. I haven't dispossessed anyone,
Haven't usurped anyone's bread.
No one died in my place. No one.
Go back into your mist.
It's not my fault if I live and breathe,
Eat, drink, sleep and put on clothes.'
Once when our eyes were clean as noon, our rooms Filled with the joys of Cana’s feast; For Jesus came, and His disciples, and His Mother, And after them the singers And some men with violins.
Once when our minds were Galilees, And clean as skies our faces, Our simple rooms were charmed with sun.
Our thoughts went in and out in whiter coats than God’s disciples’, In Cana’s crowded rooms, at Cana’s tables.
Nor did we seem to fear the wine would fail: For ready, in a row, to fill with water and a miracle, We saw our earthen vessels, waiting empty. What wine those humble waterjars foretell!
Wine for the ones who, bended to the dirty earth, Have feared, since lovely Eden, the sun’s fire, Yet hardly mumble, in their dusty mouths, one prayer.
Wine for old Adam, digging in the briars!
AE Housman
On moonlit heath and lonesome bank
The sheep beside me graze;
And yon the gallows used to clank
Fast by the four cross ways.
A careless shepherd once would keep
The flock by moonlight there,
And high amongst the glimmering sheep
The dead man stood on air.
They hang us now in Shrewsbury jail:
The whistles blow forlorn,
And trains all night groan on the rail
To men that die at morn.
There sleeps in Shrewsbury jail to-night,
Or wakes, as may betide,
A better lad, if things went right,
Than most that sleep outside.
And naked to the hangman’s noose
The morning clocks will ring
A neck God made for other use
Than strangling in a string.
And sharp the link of life will snap,
And dead on air will stand
Heels that held up as straight a chap
As treads upon the land.
So here I’ll watch the night and wait
To see the morning shine,
When he will hear the stroke of eight
And not the stroke of nine;
And wish my friend as sound a sleep
As lads’ I did not know,
That shepherded the moonlit sheep
A hundred years ago.
Louise Gluck
On nights like this we used to swim in the quarry,
the boys making up games requiring them to tear off the girls’ clothes
and the girls cooperating, because they had new bodies since last summer
and they wanted to exhibit them, the brave ones
leaping off the high rocks — bodies crowding the water.
The nights were humid, still. The stone was cool and wet,
marble for graveyards, for buildings that we never saw,
buildings in cities far away.
On cloudy nights, you were blind. Those nights the rocks were dangerous,
but in another way it was all dangerous, that was what we were after.
The summer started. Then the boys and girls began to pair off
but always there were a few left at the end — sometimes they’d keep watch,
sometimes they’d pretend to go off with each other like the rest,
but what could they do there, in the woods? No one wanted to be them.
But they’d show up anyway, as though some night their luck would change,
fate would be a different fate.
At the beginning and at the end, though, we were all together.
After the evening chores, after the smaller children were in bed,
then we were free. Nobody said anything, but we knew the nights we’d meet
and the nights we wouldn’t. Once or twice, at the end of summer,
we could see a baby was going to come out of all that kissing.
And for those two, it was terrible, as terrible as being alone.
The game was over. We’d sit on the rocks smoking cigarettes,
worrying about the ones who weren’t there.
And then finally walk home through the fields,
because there was always work the next day.
And the next day, we were kids again, sitting on the front steps in the morning,
eating a peach. Just that, but it seemed an honour to have a mouth.
And then going to work, which meant helping out in the fields.
One boy worked for an old lady, building shelves.
The house was very old, maybe built when the mountain was built.
And then the day faded. We were dreaming, waiting for night.
Standing at the front door at twilight, watching the shadows lengthen.
And a voice in the kitchen was always complaining about the heat,
wanting the heat to break.
Then the heat broke, the night was clear.
And you thought of the boy or girl you’d be meeting later.
And you thought of walking into the woods and lying down,
practicing all those things you were learning in the water.
And though sometimes you couldn’t see the person you were with,
there was no substitute for that person.
The summer night glowed; in the field, fireflies were glinting.
And for those who understood such things, the stars were sending messages:
You will leave the village where you were born
and in another country you’ll become very rich, very powerful,
but always you will mourn something you left behind, even though
you can’t say what it was,
and eventually you will return to seek it.
On our hike between Thira and Oia, the gods sit at our backs and cover our bare shoulders in light. Married only weeks, we reached
for each other’s hands to cross the sharpest, most treacherous rocks, the sea waving soft a dead drop down.
Married only weeks, I let you climb the caldera anyway: new wives never lose their husbands while these gods
keep watch, even if gravity or curiosity wishes to claim them, even if the man craves
the upward climb. You scrabble up the volcano’s teeth, pointing in the distance
to a tiny box church, all white against the island’s rock and ash, the aquamarine sea. Today, I drive alone
down Pittsburgh’s busiest avenues, its stone church steeples thrusting high, walls ringed with smog and grit.
The gods must be in Thira still, giving flight to the newest in love, letting them summit those black-stoned jaws
without consequence or history, all lightness, their mouths wet, still drinking from the lie.
I have neither native sod, nor a father, mother, god, cradle gone, the shroud I miss, lack a lover, lack a kiss.
Three days’ hunger, not a bite: nothing heavy, nothing light. Just on twenty, strong and well, twenty years I’ll try to sell.
If a buyer can’t be got, let the devil take the lot. Pure at heart, I surely will break and enter, even kill.
They will catch me, I’ll be hung, blessed earth on me be flung, deadly grasses will then start growing on my splendid heart.
What dost thou here, thou shining, sinless thing, With many colored hues and shapely wing? Why quit the open field and summer air To flutter here? Thou hast no need of prayer. ’Tis meet that we, who this great structure built, Should come to be redeemed and washed from guilt, For we this gilded edifice within Are come, with erring hearts and stains of sin. But thou art free from guilt as God on high; Go, seek the blooming waste and open sky, And leave us here our secret woes to bear, Confessionals and agonies of prayer.
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
