Abandoned Poems Page 6

  still I am grateful

  as long as I am a part of speech.

  I love the word that keeps changing

  like everything, you and me.

  TODAVÍA

  I can tear a page out of my notebook

  or write about the Sunday newspapers,

  Quaker Oats I had for breakfast,

  inconsequential dental floss, bottled tears.

  I could write about the Pantheon, Christopher Wren,

  the meanings of good names, Patience, Prudence, and Mercy,

  I never called a dog or donkey Violet or Rose,

  but I named a donkey Daisy, and I loved my one-eyed dog

  Montauk Daisy. A name’s a good beginning,

  some have original sin washed off in blessèd water,

  some prefer antiseptic mouthwash.

  I’m derailed, but I’m not a locomotive

  running on chestnut trees and coal.

  I’m simply trying to find out about a loco motive,

  the motive that’s under and over: love,

  useless revenge and undoings. Heaven help me,

  I’m my own bellhop and chambermaids.

  In the Grand Hotel of the heart, I’m the concierge,

  accept no tips.

  I’m reluctant to end a sentence with a full stop.

  I’m back to the locomotive, sleeping cars and delights.

  You have the right to get off at the next station.

  I’m loco about the difference between heart-shaped leaves

  of the Bodhi Tree and Absalom’s oak,

  the flight to Egypt and Buddha’s ways.

  Principessa Lampedusa smiled,

  “What a difference Christ’s crucifixion

  from Buddha dying after eating mushrooms.”

  I still play on my grandmother’s piano.

  A child, I composed a little on the piano

  without notation. I write this because

  I still need to play that musical instrument.

  Sometimes I know the music, but not the words.

  A word’s a name with a public and secret motive

  like names that are proud colors,

  Mr. Brown changed his name to Komunyakaa.

  Lovers may call summer, winter,

  autumn, spring—like rolling over in bed.

  I hear you, I’m coming over. I almost forgot

  there are names not writ in water,

  consequential, mapped mountain ranges

  with and without names, I walk through the valleys,

  I fear no evil in the Laurentians, Catskills, and Adirondacks.

  Genghis Khan said his father was a mountain.

  There are other languages

  especially good for what they’re good for.

  The Spanish word for still and yet, todavía,

  is much more beautiful

  than the plain English yet and still.

  Waters may be still,

  yet has no waters.

  Still is a time word,

  yet is wet with rhymes,

  todavía, more Andalusian than Castilian.

  Still, today is Buddha’s birthday,

  reason to celebrate the Buddha, yet, still,

  encore, todavía, toujours.

  I’ve leg-wrestled the Rockies, and fellow sailors,

  translated Rilke’s epitaph, told his story

  “Rose, oh pure contradiction. . . ”

  to white rabbits and snow owls in the Alps.

  Beautiful African, Buddhist, and Hindu names,

  holy as they are, to me are something like pretty girls.

  I put on my hat for Abraham, Joseph, and David.

  Soon there will be more names of those alive

  than all the dead of history.

  I’m gargling.

  BY MY FAITH

  I know now more people I love are dead

  than alive. It’s time to say goodbye to the usual.

  I rock back and forward. I never fit in my crib or bed—

  nine months old I was two years tall,

  I refused to enter my baby carriage.

  Time passed, page after page,

  I rejoiced and grieved with friends as if I were older,

  a little ahead of myself,

  I tripped over new leaf after new leaf.

  I was learning death is something.

  In another part of the forest, as a boy

  with a bow and arrow I shot Iroquois.

  I put my finger on the scale of the living.

  I planted radishes, tomatoes, and geraniums.

  I shook off sadness like a dog

  shakes off water after a swim. Good grief, good dog,

  I compiled my commonplace book of the dead.

  I discovered a friend was alive I thought dead.

  For the first time in my life I cried for joy.

  * * *

  I was befriended by wilderness.

  I knew the kindness of evergreens

  and conifers, the deep and shallow rooted.

  I was protected from human angers

  by the pawed, the clawed, the two and four-footed,

  packs, flocks, schools. I watched them run,

  swim, fly away from mortality.

  Sometimes I kissed the nodders who could not say

  yes or no, they were protected by the forest—

  wildflowers were proof of summer, God, or both.

  I loved my brothers and sisters who lived

  on sun and water, grass and hanging grapes.

  I saw the need to enter or be entered everywhere.

  I was more luna moth than butterfly.

  I shall, I will, you shall, you will.

  I did not thank God, I thanked my lucky stars.

  It’s late, not still, still. I steal time, I do not borrow.

  For the time being, I’m driven because

  self-driving cars are confused by a kangaroo.

  I sing, “Take your partners. Whack. Huroo.”

  What if I fought snakes in my carriage?

  What if I had this or that marriage?

  I say, “I want to get together,”

  Jane hears, “I want to go to Ithaca.”

  STERN STUFF

  It seems fair to say I’ve made my stuff,

  my own kind coming from the kinds of others—

  a dressing made from heart, liver, sage,

  family laurel. Celebrating I stuff

  duck, turkey, words, and wild goose—

  pope’s nose and neck, my cavity.

  I prefer the food of love to food for thought.

  I sing unaccompanied, I try to play a ukulele.

  I’m better on gongs, dipthongs.

  I’ve visited the goddess of fertility,

  women who represent the goddess

  in their temples, those whores,

  consecrated women who represent the goddess

  so commoners like me can have communion

  with the divine—especially holy the bacchanal

  at the festival of the New Year.

  Elsewhere, tallest guy around,

  I was afraid I would be spotted in a crowd,

  shot like a twelve-point stag killed in the forest,

  so I did not cross the Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama,

  I watched my kind. I nursed the wounded a little.

  It is good to laugh but it is better

  to speak, lend my voice to any borrower

  who wants it. My long-term interest rates are love.

  Reader’s interest is not usury.

  I’ll bring wine and a book to your marriage bed,

  Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

  LAUGHTER

  There are those who laugh half an hour

  because they cannot cry.

  Laughter is as ancient as the bloody sun.

  I would like to write a history of laughter.

  In the Stone Age, the first men laughed with women,

  women w
ith women, men with men, some were

  thrown out of their caves after all that grunting

  and humping because they wanted romance.

  There must have been laughter

  before marriage vows and last rites.

  “We are the only mammals that laugh” is not true,

  every living thing sometimes laughs.

  Flowers laugh so hard their petals fall.

  Gardens are like theatres with comic

  and tragic hydrangeas, some roses have thorns,

  hollyhocks thrive on beer.

  I hear laughing rain after a hot summer day,

  laughing crows, doves, nightingales.

  If you don’t think maples, oaks, evergreens laugh,

  smile and walk in another part of the forest,

  come sit with me under a greenwood tree.

  I laugh with raccoons who know me.

  No one believes there are ghosts who laugh.

  Beautiful to think we have God’s word

  according to Matthew, according to Mark,

  according to John, according to Luke.

  I'll play the accordion and sing:

  Come and kiss me sweet and sixty,

  seventy, eighty, ninety.

  I sing a song of my devotion,

  I'm a little drunk, be my ocean,

  take me on a cruise

  around the world. Be my muse,

  show me poetry is not complaining,

  the truest poetry is the most feigning.

  Ocean, come over my bow, let's sail

  into the fog up ahead, the future.

  Kind winds prevail,

  there is no end, there is departure.

  On a clear night I sound a foghorn,

  I am reborn.

  I'm beginning to know who I am,

  I give a damn.

  Darling ocean, sweet adventure,

  I was a gardener, a rake, manure.

  Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

  There was laughter about the time there was light,

  laughter and light were good

  when God created the heavens and earth.

  These days to cross the oceans by ship is out of fashion,

  like a little Latin and less Greek at school.

  After a four day sail Naples to Palermo, Goethe wrote,

  “No one who has never seen himself surrounded

  by nothing but the sea can have a true perception

  of the world and his own relation to it. . ."

  Wordsworth beheld “the sea lay laughing at a distance.”

  If water equals time, providing beauty with its double,

  let it be. There are water clocks.

  Greek and medieval candle clocks

  sometimes make a laughing clock:

  ha, haha, hahaha, up to twelve.

  I wish I could make this verse a laughing clock,

  I hear the speechless sun

  in a ripple of laughter on water.

  * * *

  I heard in a confession booth a sinner

  laughed so piously he was given absolution.

  He did not hail Mary, he laughed with her.

  A newborn sinless babe does not laugh.

  Far from Bible Proverbs,

  the Japanese have a saying, “Letting off a fart

  doesn’t make you laugh when you are alone.”

  Idle reader, I never heard a snake break wind.

  A rattlesnake danced the Twist in my house,

  went off without enchantment in search of a charmer.

  Here is my fairy tale, The Birthday Cake :

  you take six eggs, beat the yolks and whites,

  a little flour, ten minutes in the oven,

  laughter makes the batter rise,

  strawberries and cream for shortcake.

  In her house a mother hen missed her eggs,

  she jumped on top of the cake, sat on her beaten eggs,

  wept on the pretty cake in the center of the table.

  Outside in the yard a rooster mounted

  a New Hampshire Red. The guests laughed.

  * * *

  Far from Greenwich Village, I remember

  I was in Rome, a Bernini fountain, in Piazza Navona,

  water laughing I drank out of the mouth of a satyr.

  The satyr kissed me.

  It was Epiphany, when shepherds come to Rome

  from the campagna playing their goatskin bagpipes.

  I laughed, “When they kill me, I prefer to keep my skin.

  Make a bagpipe of my belly.”

  I prefer being blown than fingered like a harp or clavier.

  I tell you for a laugh, Kunitz quit

  at ninety-seven, his daughter told me

  it's time to accept his dying, his death.

  He said, without voice, "I'm very tired, need rest."

  She made him oatmeal, then cream of wheat.

  I gave him lobster bisque, massaged his feet.

  He lived another three years and two hundred

  and eighty-eight legendary days:

  Silenus laughed with Dionysus,

  they drank laughing wine in a dazzling goblet.

  A prison guard shouted, “There are laughing murderers,

  what's funnier than a dead body, 160 lbs.

  of cold meat, four buckets of water, a pocket of salt?"

  Chick Webb could do it—I’ve heard a laughing jazz band,

  black laughter instead of drums.

  Louis Armstrong scat laughed—he learned from a Jewish

  cantor neighbor. Laughter is ancient as the sun.

  The Chinese word for laughter is made of two characters:

  the character for sky beneath the character for grass.

  Translated in Chinese a laughing Falstaff

  might give you a dancing Falstaff tripping on a sunset,

  upside down cows and sheep grazing in the sky.

  What is the moon doing rising below my feet?

  Laugh me to scorn.

  “Weeping might endure all night,

  but joy cometh in the morning.”

  HEALING

  The wounded spider and the wounded fly

  have a tendency to make the world

  a better place, as music does.

  There are wounded rivers and oceans.

  For all I know, after a long perilous hike,

  God bathes his swollen feet

  in the oceans that comfort him,

  just as we, in his image, are comforted

  bathing our feet.

  Do no harm: God heals or does not heal.

  I swear by Apollo I’ll do no harm:

  he heals or does not heal.

  Wounded we are curious,

  wounded we usually heal,

  but sometimes the wound remains open,

  it may continue bleeding, scar.

  Everywhere on earth and distant universe,

  there are probably birds with wounded wings,

  the remaining wing, right or left—stronger,

  while they sing, caw, gwak.

  Other casualties just keep to themselves,

  lightning-struck trees,

  half their trunks coal black, under green leaves.

  Because my family was a flock of doctors,

  I named a visiting hummingbird Hippocrates.

  A child in one of my serious games

  I took the Hippocratic Oath.

  A JINGLE

  Death's a jingle.

  It's true, alive I was often buried in a book.

  Sure as I was human, as centuries passed

  what was then an eBook became

  an x, y, zBook. I cannot deny

  I scribbled “the English language is a hive—

  a drone, I bring my honeyed proboscis

  and compound eyes to the queen.”

  Now I’ve something to say to flowers

  outdoors and often indoors,

  my metaphors in pots are not hiccups.

/>   Like a raccoon on all fours, my book

  crawls along, growls, buzzes a liebestod.

  Tears, dew or rain may cause a seed

  on my book to flower into something

  that living things may graze upon.

  I want, I want my book

  like every living thing to be edible.

  FOR JOHN ASHBERY, SEPTEMBER SONG

  The day of your death, the hour hands and minute hands

  on my nineteen dollar watch stopped,

  but the second hand kept moving,

  so it is time to count seconds, not hours that add up––

  the rarest day since you were born.

  In plural subject positions,

  you died after years in diapers—

  not sans, but con everything.

  Music and poetry, the music of everything else

  saved you, beat heaven and hell out of you.

  What were your last words?

  For fun I’ll guess, “The rest is noise.”

  I remember our laughing and crying together.

  Thank God you crashed our wedding.

  We only spoke on the phone once or twice

  after you fell and were “rehabilitated,”

  longitude, latitude, and equator.

  I don’t like to talk about “passing away.”

  You make a pass at a lover—

  You died. You’re dead. Disfortunate.

  Now you are notes, bars, clefs, and rests.

  I try on your old shoes but they don’t fit.

  It would be nice to walk again in bare feet

  on the Watermill beach with Jane Freilicher,

  to stroll through the Louvre and Paris again

  as we did with Pierre Martory.

  You did not disappear in the dead of winter

  but on September 3rd, 78 years after

  World War 2 began.

  It was close to the end of summer, a sad time of the year

  when the Hudson waters are getting colder.

  I still have time for idle chatter: some birds call,

  it’s almost time to fly south. Night crawlers are wide awake.

  Fawns are moving further away from their mothers.

  I look out my window, no moon,

  invisible, John's gifts of sustenance to others.

  I see David Kermani's face in the clouds,

  he's sleeping on John's pillow—

  there's a darling empty bed not for sale.

  I don’t see a single maple leaf changing color.

  It was 50 degrees Fahrenheit last night,

  this morning was a little chilly. I’ve got nothing

  to say today except I wish it was beginning

  summer for you. I who love the four seasons,

  now wish it's always summer. Familiar strangers