For my daughter
If the body is primal, if the body is performed,
if the body is a city made of matches,
something the self burns as it retreats,
if death is a victory, if death is a cascade,
if death is the moment when the pianist rises
from the piano and the piano plays on,
if you are a theater, if you are the wandering
troupe, if you have checked, lost traveler,
into the softest of hotels, if you already existed,
The scent of pig is faint tonight
as the lime trees hang their heads against gradations of blue,
looking at the lone suitcase in the middle of the farmyard
with a sense of solidarity. Also forgotten.
Its owner never once looked up at them and exclaimed
I was still soft-fingered when I planted you.
In the plane, her gaze rests on a flock of cloud-birds,
pinkish purple with elongated necks, rests
on the plane’ s wing-tip colored pink by the sun.
Her head is heavy with this childhood cargo,
1.
Pity the bathtub that belongs to the queen its feet
Are bronze casts of the former queen’ s feet its sheen
A sign of fretting is that an inferior stone shows through
Where the marble is worn away with industrious
Polishing the tub does not take long it is tiny some say
Because the queen does not want room for splashing
The maid thinks otherwise she knows the king
Does not grip the queen nightly in his arms there are
Others the queen does not have lovers she obeys
What is desire
But the hardwire argument given
To the mind’ s unstoppable mouth.
Inside the braincase, it’ s I
Want that fills every blank. And then the hand
Reaches for the pleasure
The plastic snake offers. Someone says, Yes,
It will all be fine in some future soon.
Definitely. I’ ve conjured a body
In the chair before me. Be yourself, I tell it.
Here memory makes you
Unchangeable: that shirt, those summer pants.
That beautiful face.
That tragic beautiful mind.
That mind’ s ravenous mouth
A personal lens: glass bending rays
That gave one that day’ s news
Saying each and every day,
Just remember you are standing
On a planet that’ s evolving.
How beautiful, she thought, what distance does
For water, the view from above or afar.
In last night’ s dream, they were back again
At the beginning. She was a child
And he was a child.
A plane lit down and left her there.
Cold whitening the white sky whiter.
Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.
Lately, too much disturbed, you stay trailing in me
and I believe you. How could I not feel
you were misspent, there by books stacked clean on glass,
or outside the snow arriving as I am still arriving.
If the explanations amount to something, I will tell you.
It is enough, you say, that surfaces grow so distant.
Maybe you darken, already too much changed,
maybe in your house you would be content where
no incident emerges, but for smoke or glass or air,
such things held simply to be voiceless.
And if all those who meet or even
hear of you become witness to what you are —
a white country of blight beneath the last snows of
spring. Could we remain quiet on earth
and bear it, the war we make inside
what is — it’ s a long time to be here, to be still,
to feel the rot inside now — bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars
at the edge of a field where we are once again
taken from ourselves. Could we remain here,
witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply,
Would you hear of an old-time sea-fight?
Would you learn who won by the light of the moon and stars?
List to the yarn, as my grandmother’ s father the sailor told it to me.
Our foe was no skulk in his ship I tell you, (said he,)
His was the surly English pluck, and there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be;
Along the lower’ d eve he came horribly raking us.
We closed with him, the yards entangled, the cannon touch’ d,
My captain lash’ d fast with his own hands.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’ d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’ d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’ d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
Beat! beat! drums! — blow! bugles! blow!
Through the windows — through doors — burst like a ruthless force,
Into the solemn church, and scatter the congregation,
Into the school where the scholar is studying,
Leave not the bridegroom quiet — no happiness must he have now with his bride,
Nor the peaceful farmer any peace, ploughing his field or gathering his grain,
So fierce you whirr and pound you drums — so shrill you bugles blow.
