Abandoned Poems Page 10

  a tune with Irish propinquity.

  The Irish can’t speak a word that is not musical.

  Unhappiness has a certain authenticity.

  The moon and sun are family,

  darkness belongs to you and me,

  the day belongs to no one, the night is ours.

  I am frightened sometimes, family history:

  I’ll be hit by an armchair or bamboo.

  I wake up in the morning with nothing to do

  feed animals, write, water the flowers.

  Now is the glorious spring of my content,

  I will settle for sorrow and contentment.

  Felicity, how now pretty lady. Happiness

  is a Goddess in China, good news in Ghent,

  I steal happiness, impossible flying elephant.

  THOU

  I love you, you understood,

  and you in the plural, always

  you, second person singular.

  Often I wear street clothes,

  green corduroy fig leaf.

  Alone, I am without conversation,

  I've thoughts that are parsed verbs.

  At first sight, you were delighted,

  I was your second person singular

  possessive pronoun, with an S—yours.

  My I's run wild trying to see the world.

  I peek into your keyhole,

  I see you swimming naked. Lucky water.

  Your music necessary as breathing. I can’t

  help it. The past is the pool you're swimming in,

  the orchestra string section is playing in your bed.

  It’s time for me to make a U-turn

  back to you in the present, second person singular,

  I will be ungrammatical all over you.

  Neither of us is, we are.

  COAT

  My early days I spent under a blanket in a crib.

  I don’t remember my first baby coat.

  I recall a coat of arms, no weapons

  mother, grandmother, father’s arms,

  two crossed soup spoons, a jar of horseradish.

  Soon I had a warm overcoat,

  I was proud I could button and unbutton

  before I knew about King Lear’s button,

  Gogol’s Overcoat.

  I had a brown wool coat with a hood,

  green and black trees along the bottom.

  I was proud walking to school in Kew Gardens,

  I was a bear, the forests around me kept me warm.

  I saw children without feathers or overcoats,

  I remember flocks of lapels, pockets, sleeves,

  coats flew in winter skies, while I,

  like a coat in the closet, grieved to be worn.

  * * *

  I wanted to know.

  What if I named a boat Overcoat?

  I would never name a boat Handkerchief.

  A big blow might blow blow me down.

  I wandered through bookstores,

  I came to Rimbaud’s manteau and Lorca’s abrigo.

  I had my first encounter with the moment and eternity.

  I played baseball, wore a catcher’s mask,

  I wanted to look like Puchinello.

  From my notebook’s discarded pages

  I made myself a Commedia dell’arte overcoat,

  sestina collar. My Italian always sounds,

  I’m told, as if I’m delivering

  Lorenzo Da Ponte’s recitative.

  I could play a tragic, comic, sadistic clown,

  throw out runners trying to steal second base.

  I wrote a love poem only my lover could understand.

  I could write a single word that I repeat

  over and over until it becomes a poem “The Overcoat.”

  A free man, I wanted to farm verse, learn how to praise.

  I pushed, pulled the plow, let donkeys

  and horses play, I dressed for dinner,

  I wore an overcoat of feathers, fish scales,

  mouse and grisly bear fur, a white tie.

  I never stood naked in the snow in a death camp,

  my overcoat on its way to Berlin.

  Like clubfooted Byron, I would refuse to walk

  over the overcoat that pudgy Stendhal threw

  on street ice in front of the Scala.

  I will not discuss the earth’s overcoat, top soil.

  My final overcoat will not be a shawl.

  I’ll end with sleepwalker’s talk,

  “Côte d’Azur, dovecotes, coterie.”

  I reach out toward living ladies and gentlemen

  having love affairs with their dead lovers.

  ALL THE WORLD’S A PAGE

  The English language is a play with a cast of thousands,

  every word an actor. Tonight the play stars Loving Kindness,

  the actor Love upstages Affection and Lust.

  How different the actor Silence at the Old Vic

  from Tartuffe’s Tranquille at the Odéon.

  Dame Maybe mouths the actor Perhaps behind the scrim.

  In the play Watchman, he or she waits 7 years

  for the return of a Greek or Latin word,

  still useful in 5th Act English death scenes.

  I weep when a friend and my dogs die,

  not at the death of Hamlet.

  The word History is a ham.

  English performs Forever slapstick that leads

  to Saxon and Norman morality plays

  staged on a wagon pulled by oxen—

  the faithful in brick and blue stone churches

  listen to choirs, Georgian chants and madrigals.

  I salute Guido D’Arezzo,

  who invented musical notation

  because singers failed to remember Gregorian chants,

  a new technique for teaching ut-re-me-fa-so-la,

  a mnemonic. May Apollo bless Guido D’Arezzo

  who gave humanity a universal language.

  Shankar’s sitar understands English and French horns,

  Louis Armstrong trumpets and sings: every note

  is full of suffering and joy, Black and Blue.

  The actor Dream, embraces the actresses

  Past, Moment, and Future. In the pit, standees

  see Dream and his ladies as synonyms.

  The actresses Dame Pardon and Cough kiss and dream in tongues.

  Dream, in an aside, says, “The cast of words swallows

  rhyme and meter, little fish swallow big fish.

  Nothing has come to Something,

  you remember Nothing will come of Nothing.”

  * * *

  English will live when the universe is a galaxy

  of dead volcanoes and black holes.

  The last words spoken

  trippingly on the tongue by a player,

  will most likely have to do with trade,

  like Socrates’ “We owe a cock to Asclepius.”

  I owe the Gods everything.

  What did the wise illiterate do?

  He drew pictures in warm sand, he noticed poets

  were bricklayers who built a castle in Santes Creus,

  signed each brick. Time flies like a hummingbird,

  stands still as a mountain.

  397 BC, the city-state of Athens

  lost 1/3 of its beauty loving male citizens

  at the Battle of Syracuse on land and sea—

  those not spiked were drowned, enslaved.

  Athenians, all with geometry and philosophy,

  were chained together to work in marble quarries,

  often they were dragged into the theater

  to stand in the chorus without rehearsal,

  it was given they would know by heart

  the plays of Euripides to the end.

  The Chinese still brush metaphors:

  a giant turtle holds on its back the revolving world.

  Turtles and the phoenix command:

  Change your metaphor!

  An ap
ple orchard is an epic theater,

  a play against war and bargaining too much,

  too long for the life of your son,

  while The Cherry Orchard, far from Moscow,

  tells the story of a rural society changing.

  Before the last curtain, the audience hears

  malcontented peasants cutting down trees.

  Chekov presents the problem without solution,

  he notes in his diaries: “My plays are comedies.”

  I cheer for English—comedy, tragedy, pastoral,

  spoken by puppets or fingering shadows on walls

  around the world. A beautiful woman says,

  “Meet me backstage in my dressing room.

  But if you see the play only on your cell phone,

  throw that smart phone into the Thames.”

  A change of scene: Sir River Mud and Lady Gwendomere

  perform The Drowned Book.

  Then a surrealist Nativity: after a cold coming,

  the Magi bring the Christ child a two-volume OED,

  a miracle before there was English.

  In the stable, a donkey, a Jew, eats words,

  the cow of Christianity moos the Beatitudes,

  the Book of Psalms holds up the sagging walls,

  the leaking roof. Life is not a dream, it’s a play.

  Long Abandoned Poems and Apocrypha

  Poems in this section were not included in early 2018 galleys, others previously published have been given more attention. There are also a few never published early poems.

  —S.M.

  RANDOM

  The General, who wanted to drop 30 atom bombs

  on China, addressed both Houses of Congress,

  concluded with,

  “Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.”

  He did not say, “The matrix of the everlasting

  remains a triangle. I’ll give you what for

  usually means a beating.” I want to understand

  random matrices and their applications.

  What do I overstand? Of course I grandstand

  take my stand, I play a panpipe on a bandstand.

  In London, I walk along the Strand toward theaters,

  stepping carefully over the homeless

  sleeping on metro grills.

  I bone myself, my grilled sole at the Savoy.

  A random triangle of numbers,

  equilateral numbers not likely. History weeps

  like a baby in the ruins of Nanking in 1937,

  an unknown number of years after Big Bang.

  Is it a fact nothing is random, meaningless?

  I search for a meaningless word—

  stupid, no word is meaningless.

  I look for a meaningless full stop past the stars

  in the night sky, I sometimes make out Venus.

  Without words, punctuation becomes pop art,

  red question marks, black commas.

  Take the sexual commingling of all living things,

  note the triangles in full light and darkness,

  the angles, the mob, the overpopulation.

  Still Trafalgar Square is almost a hexagon.

  I do not count the steps of the winding stair

  that leads to the National Gallery—

  given the overpopulation, I have no doubt

  someone fell down those steps to his or her death.

  I attend services at Saint Martin in the Fields,

  I drop into a pub for a beer and pie,

  I drink till closing time. With a clay pipe,

  I blow soap bubbles, X X X.

  I blow Churchillian cigar smoke at the universe,

  my contribution to the arts and sciences.

  Thou shalt not go from concentration camp to a slumlord.

  Still it is a given for most they should,

  “Do unto others as you would have others do.”

  In every bed a triangle, the family romance, odd numbers.

  I was told as a child to keep my hands under the table.

  Today I have my left swollen foot on the table,

  proof, if you want proof, of the everlasting.

  “. . .Words without thoughts never to heaven go.”

  —2018

  WISHING

  1

  I am prey and predator,

  all the world is food for thought.

  Take the average number of predators,

  some starving because of overpopulation.

  If life’s a battle, lunch on: Finance and murder

  cause disappearing species,

  no ice age lately. Prey flies, swims, runs away,

  hides under, behind, high in trees, between

  rock crannies. I wish to learn at least how much food

  mostly human populations need to flourish

  or simply survive. I am wary of my verse

  that first takes on household obligations,

  then the Furies. I write,

  “The helpless calendar of lunar years is prey,

  time, the wide winged predator.

  In multicolored wounds, there’s beauty.

  Fuck time heals all wounds.

  Thousands of predators swallow beauty.

  Kafka speaking for his time, wrote one day:

  . . .I can’t finish anything. I am afraid of the truth.”

  Men, women, children have the gift to wish,

  we do not simply want, desire, yearn

  like all the other living things that cannot wish.

  I exercise my right to wish, I say with pen and ink:

  few lives and deaths are beautiful as a lion

  stepping ever so softly,

  then leaping after a gazelle,

  like a novelist reshaping life.

  My idle reader says, There you go again

  talking about yourself as if you were me.

  You who are neither prey nor predator,

  ask the Visigoths, What became of the eggs

  in the nests of Europe, the platypus and echidna?

  They are the only mammals that lay eggs.

  Predator, steal an egg, kidnap a child.

  Camerado, make it on bread, loneliness,

  beans, rice, the staffs of life.

  A contradiction, given overpopulation

  loneliness will be the last to go.

  2

  My closest relative, chimpanzees make it on fruit,

  seeds, termites, devoured monkey meat.

  I am not surprised to learn sometimes animals

  communicate by scratching signals.

  I explore my body like a monkey after fleas,

  just as Lewis and Clark did the northwest—

  I pick out rivers, mountains, the great divide.

  Gorillas can’t swim. There are different populations

  on the north and south side of the wide Congo.

  South side female leaders in disagreement and conflict

  decide by making all kinds of love, not war.

  On the north side, male gorillas have dominion,

  make war, are cruel to their females

  like no other animal but humans.

  (I‘m aware of painfully screwed lady llamas.)

  Nothing lives in the mad water cataracts

  and mountains of the Congo—its gigantic

  waterfall-Furies misnamed by another Stanley

  Livingstone Falls. In the several mile deep

  holy river’s darkest always night waters,

  what does the blind Congo eel find to eat?

  Then there are those fish who dine

  with a mouthful of wine in almost boiling water.

  I deal in the not impossible.

  A worm wants to fly, to make its way through the clouds.

  Among packs and herds, there are those

  that want to crawl into the earth,

  to rid themselves of the predator Day

  and the prey called Night. To wish is lyrical,

  I w
ish to be me, I am wild prey and predator,

  I do not wish to be something like the ruffled grouse,

  prey of a great horned owl.

  Born by accident, I consider I’ll be reborn

  a Baltimore aureole, a flycatcher,

  a warbling vireo (Ted Roethke’s belovèd bird).

  I see I’ve lost the rights of free speech—

  I only speak in parables.

  Hillel said, “The more flesh, the more worms.”

  —2018

  A TOUCH

  There’s too much writing

  that is not about anything.

  I walk in the woods of misunderstanding,

  I see foxes chasing rabbits,

  wild history and habits.

  I find chanterelles and telephone

  lines to the unknown.

  I’m taken by frankness and disguise

  of a woman with beautiful eyes,

  the theatre of the soul.

  They have a leading role

  in a play, before the heart is broken

  or a word spoken.

  Without doubt, the curtain falls—

  there are no curtain calls.

  Today I walk on thin ice,

  the not about anything, I cross out the precise,

  still seeming and feigning

  have precise meaning.

  I write with a touch of the unsaid,

  meaning that is not read.

  I’m thankful and grateful the moon is bright.

  I’m grateful there’s no moon tonight.

  —2018

  FOREST FIRES

  God did not invent candles or electric light bulbs.

  He invented forest fires, the sun, electricity.

  He has affection for certain volcanoes.

  Does He prefer us to smoke?

  Forest fires encourage new growth.

  I note there are dark matter halos,

  that Comets, planets produce no light

  are not luminous. Neutrinos pass through

  you and me, everything that is or has been

  for fifteen billion years... after the flash.

  On earth it’s hard to believe God

  prefers the middle, moderate, temperate zones.

  Hell was made for the Devil and his angels.

  The Lord invented water, its names and habitation.

  He invented the word and argument,

  Auden and fog.

  Blasphemy I insist amuses Him.

  He allows the spirit of the dead to enter

  a living person, take possession thereof.

  Prayers in so many languages help Him sleep.

  Does He dream? You say “He never sleeps.

  how can He sleep, His eye on every sparrow?”