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AND SO, FEEDING AND CLEANING
Which of the one hundred, one thousand million, well uncountable poems called Heartburnings did I write with that title? Why of my lives did I lead the one that brought me here? If you talk about fire it gets hotter. The trees are black, no windbreak for my thoughts which pass out into an abyss of uninhabited country. I continue to act as if I must live – feeding and cleaning my body though they tell me the sun is not infinite and the earth may try to outlast it. This is the earth we carry within us – more like a world than simply dirt, rocks and waterfall. It contains the sights of the town and also a carnival, an indescribable distinction that is for the hours we sleep. Let’s imagine it! In time left over from what is necessary. My eyes carry the little suns from looking at the sun. Crows carry pieces of the night broken from a night that never breaks. The trees are white, with no leaves. They have survived beyond a time beyond fires. By dying and remaining standing. They outlast themselves as we desire to but even names, those diamonds, those servants, of remembrance become separated from any who know them, to be taken up by all things. If you talk about fire, it gets hotter. Heat is in the voice. Only rarely does it pass into what is written.
HEARTBURNINGS
In every instant: how misled I was in that just passed. Collected poems mean nothing to me – someone with a dustpan and brush. Purple and orange are pretty special, even alone. A switched off fan seems to watch as sleeping children send you tumbling backwards oh relief oh longing. Parents, from a certain (old) age lose their sympathy for you, saving it all for their own death – focus on clippings (photograph or vegetation). Also consolidate any unfairness practised hereforeto. A completely different set of difficulties with friends. Depending on how honest you are with yourself you may only know what you truly think of them by examining your dreams. Hatred like fields of corn. Hatred like I can’t tell you who I really am. Ditto, possibly lovers. And you know, because you’ve slept with me, how shy I am. Ego like the lion that’s afraid of a mouse(trap). The old stories keep resurfacing. Still love good, honey-special honey where the time’s been taken not to interfere. My heart burns when you keep being sweet. Just sweet though I’m stirring up the embers for a bit of warmth and then throwing cold water all over it.
THE BIRD THAT BEAT ITSELF TO DEATH AGAINST THE WINDOW
This bird is like my heart when confronted with all that is necessary for you. Made up of two classes: what I deem necessary and what you decide you need. What you need neither of us knows. The bird has ideas different to everyone inside who can hardly bear watching which means they can’t stop. Voyeurs are never in love. Those in love are those with their eyes averted or crying so much they cannot see. The ones really gone aren’t even in the room but away on holidays fucking. (Wherever they are fucking is on holidays.) And this bird getting the soft head hasn’t been seen around here before. Perhaps is from a destination. Although it seems clear to us that it is mistaken. It has tiny leaves for feathers and a beak full of things which could not be offered without provoking a fear of death in the chosen recipient. This has to do with intention: I won’t kill you but this love might. And that’s how the end happens. With the feeling over. It is rare the glass breaks. My explanation is that secrets must be held together for there to be a tomorrow. The window is a secret the bird doesn’t know. And the window doesn’t know itself.
‘AND IN THAT HEART THE STOLEN ROSE’
Vasko Popa
TOUCH
Italicized as leaning towards you. I will not forget the feel of you but that is not touch. But memory. Looking more not like the longer I hold onto it and call it back. What if we were the two halves of sense: living and dead? But then in fact not dead, you, but one of Heidegger’s stones. Do you remember our first house with the white bathroom and the lizard with the name, Little Shy One, who lived in the crack where the tiles met the boards but didn’t quite meet. It was the chemicals and after we opened all the doors I saw him there with his curly toes, no longer able to feel the floor, feet not touching and legs spinning and two hours from the toilet to the tub though he had once done it in two and half seconds. Squashing seemed kind but you were sure he’d shake it off. I gave him a wash but the savage molecules were already through the skin to lizard-bone. It shrunk like hair on fire. So you’re a stone. Sometimes warm and a marvellous support. Quiet though, unless I fling you round and yet you don’t seem to realize when I do and when I don’t have my hand on you. As Heidegger said: The stone is without world.
(ANOTHER) IMPRESARIO
How quick was I to see that clouds were rain, that my proximity to a woman would extend the world along more than a line. What they missed ‘in between’ I traversed without lifting my thought from the page of the mind. Where they let things harden between the two selves and the other, I convinced what seemed solid to admit me. I laid eggs. Pocket-size. Dainty. Diminutive. Eggs the size of marathons. Of equations and heroisms beyond culture. My threads grew rapidly – what other way was there out of the belly, out of the guilt of being? Eventually, seeing through my life to the plotting it did about me, I was able to occupy many versions very similar and as many so different that I was hardly the same, hardly a man. I signed many names to my creations. I spoke and it was unspoken. In validation of an immense fluidity I went an eternity without being seen. They thought I never rested but motion is filled with rest and rest with motion. The noun in the verb, the verb in the noun, do not untangle for observer or participant.
LAMB
after
Alistair Stewart after me after Leonardo da Vinci and
after the fact after René Char (How like things other
things are!) Your heart was a lamb. Bleating. Always sad. Always happy. In Spring you followed the lamb along the butterfly’s path and by Summer your shoulders were too wide for your mother’s tomb. Standing, sidelined, by the field, you watched growing there the many hearts planted by time. Funny how life buries us deep in the earth and then grows from every seed a different heart. And so you, a lamb, me, a thumb. You know nothing of the thumb. I know nothing of the lamb. But we both ‘know how the heart always tries to escape its life as a seed.’ How its stories are born from the pain of totality.
EXPLOITATION BY GOD
for Jeanette
Cronin
What first caused the person. ~o~ How many niches did they need to satisfy their disappointments? ~o~ Did she excavate? ~o~ Did he ever throw anything over a fence? ~o~ The amount of rain that fell in their lifetime. ~o~ What proportion of that rain fell in contradiction of the forecast. ~o~ Details. ~o~ Details of any kind, for example, a big hum and a little hum, his own hum, but smaller. ~o~ Descriptions as long as they are not self-contained. ~o~ Eyes leafy eyes. ~o~ A mouth that fitted its season. ~o~ Discard the historical; discard significance to others; discard localities and interests. ~o~ Sky-marks: did they leave any? ~o~ Did he ever say ‘No two football matches are ever the same’? ~o~ Was she beautiful with the baby? ~o~ Perhaps items. ~o~ Presume motivation for the sake of a conversational tone. ~o~ (But only if addressing the living.) ~o~ Accept the vortices into which all this will fall. ~o~ Everybody else slept through the life of the deceased. ~o~ At points of stress dreams bled into the actions of the body awake. ~o~ They always take their clock with them so don’t waste time trying to determine if their leavetaking was premature. ~o~ All offspring and offspring of offspring may as well have been hobbies. ~o~ What about the freckles that never came into being? ~o~ Essentially, no more need for preferences. ~o~ No longer strange. ~o~ The time for the eulogy will be determined from that moment when he or she, the subject, is abandoned to photographs. ~o~ Especially forgotten, what was.
THE SUNSET WAY
See them
there, gawking. As if beauty had to be stored and then
loaded en masse onto their eyes. |
