English Poems

In the dark we disappear, pure being.
Our mirror images, impure being.

Being and becoming (Heidegger), being and
nothingness (Sartre) — which is purer being?

Being alone is no way to be: thus
loneliness is the test of pure being.

Nights in love I fell too far or not quite
far enough — one pure, one impure being.

Clouds, snow, mist, the dragon's breath on water,
smoke from fire — a metaphor's pure being.

Stillness and more stillness and the light locked
deep inside — both pure and impure being.

A man reaches close
and lifts a quarter
from inside a girl’ s ear,
from her hands takes a dove
she didn’ t know was there.
Which amazes more,
you may wonder:
the quarter’ s serrated murmur
against the thumb
or the dove’ s knuckled silence?
That he found them,
or that she never had,
or that in Portugal,
this same half-stopped moment,
it’ s almost dawn,
and a woman in a wheelchair
is singing a fado
that puts every life in the room
on one pan of a scale,
itself on the other,

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets — the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map —
they follow stairs down music ears can’ t follow,

Seawater stiffens cloth long after it’ s dried.
As pain after it’ s ended stays in the body:
A woman moves her hands oddly
because her grandfather passed through
a place he never spoke of. Making
instead the old jokes with angled fingers.
Call one thing another’ s name long enough,
it will answer. Call pain seawater, tree, it will answer.
Call it a tree whose shape of   branches happened.
Call what branching happened a man
whose job it was to break fingers or lose his own.

A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

* * *

Blinded by light or black cloth —
so many ways
not to see others suffer.

* * *

Too much longing:

it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.

* * *

From very far or very close —
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.

November. One pear
sways on the tree past leaves, past reason.
In the nursing home, my friend has fallen.
Chased, he said, from the freckled woods
by angry Thoreau, Coleridge, and Beaumarchais.
Delusion too, it seems, can be well read.
He is courteous, well-spoken even in dread.
The old fineness in him hangs on
for dear life. “My mind now?
A small ship under the wake of a large.
They force you to walk on your heels here,

You change a life
as eating an artichoke changes the taste
of whatever is eaten after.
Yet you are not an artichoke, not a piano or cat —
not objectively present at all —
and what of you a cat possesses is essential but narrow:
to know if the distance between two things can be leapt.
The piano, that good servant,
has none of you in her at all, she lends herself
to what asks; this has been my ambition as well.
Yet a person who has you is like an iron spigot
whose water comes from far-off mountain springs.

The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed,
joking among themselves, but only moments before
they hadn’ t been laughing. It had taken all three
to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement,
they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back:
for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him,
one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head,
at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into
the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn.

I’ m here, one fat cherry
blossom blooming like a clod,

one sad groat glazing, a needle puling thread,
so what, so sue me. These days what else to do but leer

at any boy with just the right hairline. Hey! I say,
That’ s one tasty piece of nature. Tart Darkling,

if I could I’ d gin, I’ d bargain, I’ d take a little troll
this moolit night, let you radish me awhile,

one comes to language from afar, the ear
fears for its sound-barriers —

but one “comes”; the language “comes” for
The Beckoning Fair One

plant you now, dig you
later, the plaint stirs winter
earth…

air in a hornet’ s nest
over the water makes a
solid, six-sided music…

a few utterly quiet scenes, things
are very far away — “form
is emptiness”

comely, comely, love trembles

and the sweet-shrub