Someone Digging in the Ground.

My father once broke a man’s hand
Over the exhaust pipe of a John Deere tractor. The man, 
Ruben Vasquez, wanted to kill his own father
With a sharpened fruit knife, and he held
The curved tip of it, lightly, between his first
Two fingers, so it could slash
Horizontally, & with surprising grace, 
Across a throat. It was like a glinting beak in a hand, 
And, for a moment, the light held still 
On those vines. When it was over, 
My father simply went in & ate lunch, & then, as always, 
Lay alone in the dark, listening to music.
He never mentioned it.

I never understood how anyone could risk his life, 
Then listen to Vivaldi.

Sometimes, I go out into this yard at night, 
And stare through the wet branches of an oak 
In winter, & realize I am looking at the stars
Again. A thin haze of them, shining 
And persisting.

It used to make me feel lighter, looking up at them. 
In California, that light was closer. 
In a California no one will ever see again, 
My father is beginning to die. Something 
Inside him is slowly taking back 
Every word it ever gave him. 
Now, if we try to talk, I watch my father 
Search for a lost syllable as if it might 
Solve everything, & though he can’t remember, now, 
The word for it, he is ashamed…
If you can think of the mind as a place continually 
Visited, a whole city placed behind 
The eyes, & shining, I can imagine, now, its end—
As when the lights go off, one by one, 
In a hotel at night, until at last 
All of the travelers will be asleep, or until 
Even the thin glow from the lobby is a kind
Of sleep; & while the woman behind the desk 
Is applying more lacquer to her nails, 
You can almost believe that elevator, 
As it ascends, must open upon starlight.

I stand out on the street, & do not go in. 
That was our agreement, at my birth.

And for years I believed 
That what went unsaid between us became empty, 
And pure, like starlight, & that it persisted.

I got it all wrong. 
I wound up believing in words the way a scientist 
Believes in carbon, after death.

Tonight, I’m talking to you, father, although
It is quiet here in the Midwest, where a small wind, 
The size of a wrist, wakes the cold again— 
Which may be all that’s left of you & me.

When I left home at seventeen, I left for good.

That pale haze of stars goes on & on, 
Like laughter that has found a final, silent shape 
On a black sky. It means everything 
It cannot say. Look, it’s empty out there, & cold. 
Cold enough to reconcile 
Even a father, even a son.

Larry Levis

38. For no one really knows what color is, where it is, even whether it is. (Can it die? Does it have a heart?) Think of a honeybee, for instance, flying into the folds of a poppy: it sees a gaping violet mouth, where we see an orange flower and assume that it’s orange, that we’re normal.

193. I will admit, however, upon considering the matter further, that writing does do something to one’s memory—that at times it can have the effect of an album of childhood photographs, in which each image replaces the memory it aimed to preserve. Perhaps this is why I am avoiding writing about too many specific blue things—I don’t want to displace my memories of them, nor embalm them, nor exalt them. In fact, I think I would like it best if my writing could empty me further of them, so that I might become a better vessel for new blue things.

Maggie Nelson

50.

I have brushed my teeth.
This day and I are even.

-Vera Pavlova

The death toll continues to rise. My friends displaced. Trees destroyed part of Kerry’s house but everyone is safe. I’d like to get a dog as long as it would never die. Today: the clouds like a tattoo. Wanda believed she was going to get better. For weeks after her death packages arrived in the mail—all things she’d ordered before she was on hospice: a vegetable steamer, a juicer, a new healthy life.

#

Weddings & funerals in the span of a week. Each year, the family grows & shrinks. I search the classifieds for a new job, a new place to live, a change. This happens every two to three years, but I imagine three years from now I’ll be too old to keep this up. I should settle down, start a family, do all those things that people once expected from me. Basically, give up.

#

Listening to a radio program called “Living with the Blues.” If I could survive here, with these simple wants, I’d be happy. I just want to listen to music, read books, eat food, drink beer & occasionally whiskey, dance, and travel, see my friends & spend my time with you. It sounds like I’m fifteen, believing this could actually be possible. The Idiot’s Guide to Living.

#

Last day of April. Early morning sun, open windows & birdsong. Saturday quiet as the city sleeps in. Momentary stillness. A cup of coffee & a book equals peace. At least right now. The temporariness of it all doesn’t matter. True spring on the horizon. The mistake of placing hope in seasons, to look forward to the days to come & expect things to be better.

Gina Myers

I’ve pressed so
far away from
my desire that

if you asked
me what I
want I would,

accepting the harmonious
completion of the
drift, say annihilation,

probably.

A.R. Ammons.

I

Everyone knows what the cross means, or will
          before long


It is the body

It resembles the first stick-figure depictions
         of it found in caves (some
         with the heads of birds)

Depictions reproduced to this day by young children
         just learning to draw


Its aerodynamic properties ought to be obvious I suppose

to us,
the wingless


How many years we have been carrying it
And before too much longer it will reveal itself
the source of a forsakenness and agony
nobody would have dared foresee
I saw it
over twenty years ago

Every day  as  the darkness came down on New York
I went up to my father and saw

(More and more I meet him
in the mirror, it is his blood I have
to clean up if I shave—…)
And I was born just as I found him there
a little bald
toothless man
screaming,
not for long though
(I  refer to Mother Morphine’s left  tit)


II

Now  I’ll tell you something  you don’t know, you hurt
by the past, just like me, crushed
by the future and blind
to the present,
blind
to the moment—
But there is nothing you don’t know
I got up every morning here
a long way from home
and cried for ten minutes
then showered and dressed
and got back down to work
assisted, on occasion, by one or two magical mystery
            pills


III

I can tell you this
Who dwarfs my pain I cling  to
the genuinely broken
and poor
And I cling to the Before
The spirit face
behind the face
yearning for light
the water and the light
And I am flowing back to the Before, the infinite
years which transpired while I was not
here, and did not know
I was not

here…
          I  came just like you
from inconceivableness, the eternal
before-we-arrived, flowing
from God’s mouth, and come here to say
“this world” and
                     “God,” as if
they needed
names
         And what lies beyond is no doubt the beginning
I wouldn’t know but I’m going
to find out
The what lies beyond
this loneliness and panic
I call  dying, time, remorse, this cold
and purifying
fire, which hurts so much, which burns
away the world and all I was
who walked and breathed and spoke
how  real it all seemed
for a few years,  but I was always
immortal and will be
once more, when I return
to the infinite time
which elapsed before I was conceived;
when the heavenward face is burned away
and its scared eyes
and its tears
and its euphoria, which no one can imagine
(wrong:  someone in love can imagine!)
And I have heard God’s silence like the sun
now I long to return to it
no matter my infantile clinging
to this gorgeous material of such early wisteria and
         lilacs, the wind
in the redbud and light-giving  new  heart-shaped leaves
music visible if completely unheard, I’ll return
The angel’s going to raise his arms and sing that time is
         no more
nor tears: that numbered
sea of them is gone—
now there is a new sea, a new  earth, a new sky—
and I will know what to say at the end: What end?
And I can add I found this world sufficiently miraculous
           for me, before I’m changed.

Franz Wright

Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.

T.S.E.