¿ are you
on the other side
waiting
for alarms
in a desert
of sleepless
evaporations?
¿ are you
beside yourself
in the aisles
that distance
makes shorter
than light waves
in the daylight
that pounds
a lead slab
in the soup
that the winter
dissolves?
i make signs everywhere, with sticks, stones and leaves
for those in the clouds from below the line to arrive
i don’ t have a language to speak to you with, my tongues are all fish
i know that a one is a circle, and that nothing is round,
except every corner i saw by the hearts
lined up on the spine
i know that the winter will finally be here again, and that the summer
will die and be born with its ice
Vulnerable therein & perfectly
relinquished by statis,
object always of my
natal, crepuscular desire,
into the translucent specter,
body’ s blue fossil
of ice, never autochthonous,
still embarked upon
the imperative passage to get
there, to secure a geography
that will beg description,
narrative map, adopted
tentatively; if only to write
the ritual book of what was possible,
but never bound to occur.
When I stop to consider my calling, remark
the places a wayward temper impelled me
I’ ve found in light of where I wandered lost
the most appalling evils could have befallen;
but when I disregard the journey it’ s hard to
even fathom I endured so much affliction;
what’ s more, my days being spent, I feel I’ ve
seen my wariness go with them. I’ ll come to
my end, for I surrendered artless to someone
with the science to dispel and destroy me if
so inclined, else the know-how to want to;
I’ m not interested in sadness,
just a yard as elder earth,
a library of sunflowers
battered by the night’ s rain.
When sliced wide, halved at dawn,
I can see how you exist,
O satellite town, your bright possibility
born again in drywall
and the diary with the trick lock.
Hardly held, for years I slept
with my window wide open,
wanting screen-cut threads of rain.
Blind suburb, dear untruth,
you who already know what I mean
when I praise every spared copse,
you were my battery, my sad clue,
1.
Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling
Captive to consciousness, he summons light
To all its duties, and assumes the world
Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns
Like history’ s corrosive on his living tree.
But all the monsters of his sleep’ s dark sea
Are tame familiars in the morning sun.
2.
You're dreaming
of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon.
Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl
who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic
of colored paper: her house
with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn,
the sky — outside, the concentration camp.
This is the real gift
I brought back from Prague without telling you.
It was with me on the train the morning
I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart,
or south of there, amid a drone
of people working — they don't know at what
Stumps. Railroad tracks. Early sicknesses,
the blue one, especially.
Your first love rounding a corner,
that snowy minefield.
Whether you step lightly or heavily,
you have to get over to that tree line a hundred yards in the distance
before evening falls,
letting no one see you wend your way,
that wonderful, old-fashioned word, wend,
meaning “to proceed, to journey,
to travel from one place to another,”
as from bed to breakfast, breakfast to imbecile work.
Two women on a train
sit beside me.
I am young and the world
is flying and I am watching.
One of them is frosty.
The other turns like a leaf
to hand me something —
it looked for all the world like a page.
I thought at the time
that it needed me and I was right.
The letters fell into place
and simple flowers grew.
Now it talks unceasingly
in long white verses
as if at a wedding,
something women understand
and gently want and then regift.
I myself agree with Herbert,
I am, as you know, Walter Llywarch,
Born in Wales of approved parents,
Well goitred, round in the bum,
Sure prey of the slow virus
Bred in quarries of grey rain.
Born in autumn at the right time
For hearing stories from the cracked lips
Of old folk dreaming of summer,
I piled them on to the bare hearth
Of my own fancy to make a blaze
To warm myself, but achieved only
The smoke’ s acid that brings the smart
Of false tears into the eyes.
