With only this one dream

Understand, I'll slip
quietly away from the noisy
crowd when I see 
the pale stars rising, blooming over
the oaks. I'll pursue solitary
pathways through the pale
twilit meadows with only this
one dream: you come too.

Absence

My love,
we have found each other
thirsty and we have
drunk up all the water and the blood,
we found each other
hungry
and we bit each other
as fire bites,
leaving wounds in us.

But wait for me,
keep for me your sweetness.
I will give you too
a rose.

Grates and Bridges

Before I knew people could die of cancer
not just overdoses, but that adult diseases
loomed like humid clouds over every city
waiting for any random person to walk beneath them—

I was twenty-three years old and just moved
to New York with two hundred dollars and a puppy.
The first day I took the subway on my own
from Brooklyn to a temp job in Manhattan
I was so proud, arriving, the doors opening
and me forging through a mist of people.

I wanted to throw my arms over my head victoriously
and smile at every exhausted commuter
but no one was in the mood—I was in New York, after all.

This was long before 9/11—New York was falling apart
in a different way, newscasters would get in small motorboats
and go with engineers to the underbelly of the Brooklyn Bridge
on exposés where their vessels rocked precariously in the waves
and they reached out and tore off giant chunks of concrete
from the base of the bridge like Sunday bread—
then held them up to the video camera in disgust.

I walked blocks to my temp job, quickly down the sidewalk,
with a coffee in my hand—the coffee was so sweet
going down my throat.  It was January.  Can you imagine?
Me in my too-big thrift store Navy band shoes I bought
to look professional and my dollar pants slipping down my thin waist.
When I think of New York, I think of being hungry,
with my whole hungry life in front of me.

I walked block after block across grates in the sidewalk
there were two kind of grates: one, a manhole with latticed bars,
a giant pie top, steaming in the street.

The Letter

I’m not feeling strong yet, but I am taking
good care of myself. The weather is perfect.
I read and walk all day and then walk to the sea.
I expect to swim soon. For now I am content.
I am not sure what I hope for. I feel I am
doing my best. It reminds me of when I was
sixteen dreaming of Lorca, the gentle trees outside
and the creek. Perhaps poetry replaces something
in me that others receive more naturally.
Perhaps my happiness proves a weakness in my life.
Even my failures in poetry please me.
Time is very different here. It is very good
to be away from public ambition.
I sweep and wash, cook and shop.
Sometimes I go into town in the evening
and have pastry with custard. Sometimes I sit
at a table by the harbor and drink half a beer.

The Truth the Dead Know

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in the stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Depression in Winter

There comes a little space between the south
side of a boulder
and the snow that fills the woods around it.
Sun heats the stone, reveals
a crescent of bare ground: brown ferns,
and tufts of needles like red hair,
acorns, a patch of moss, bright green....

I sank with every step up to my knees,
throwing myself forward with a violence
of effort, greedy for unhappiness--
until by accident I found the stone,
with its secret porch of heat and light,
where something small could luxuriate, then
turned back down my path, chastened and calm.

Abschieds Symphony

Someone I love is dying, which is why,
when I turn the key in the ignition
and back the car out of the parking space
in the underground garage, and the radio
comes on, sudden and loud, something
by Haydn, a diminishing fugue, and maneuver
the car through the dimly lit tunnels
with their low ceilings, following the yellow arrows
stenciled at intervals on the gray cement walls,
I think of him, moving slowly through the last
hard days of his life and I can't stop crying.
When I arrive at the toll gate I have to make myself
stop thinking as I dig in my pockets for the last
of my coins, turn to the attendant, indifferent
in his blue smock, his white hair curling like smoke
around his weathered neck, and say Thank you,
like an idiot, and drive into the blinding midday light.
Everything is hideously symbolic,
and everything reminds me of cancer:
the Chevron truck, its rounded underbelly
spattered with road grit and the sweat
of last night's rain, the dumpster
behind the flower shop, its sprung lid
pressing down on dead wedding bouquets--
even the smell of something simple, coffee drifting
from the open door of a cafe and my eyes
glaze over, ache in their sockets.
For months now all I've wanted is the blessing
of inattention, to move carefully from room to room
in my small house, numb with forgetfulness.
To eat a bowl of cereal and not imagine him,
scrubbed thin and pale, unable to swallow.

You and Sarajevo

Hearing the sound of your breathing as you sleep,
with the dog at your feet, his head resting
on a shoe, and the clock's ticking
like water dripping in a sink
-- I know that, even if reincarnation were a fact,
given the inherent cruelty of the world
where beautiful things and people
are blasted apart all the day long,
I would never want to come back, knowing
I could never be this lucky twice...

Snow and Dirty Rain

Close your eyes. A lover is standing too close
to focus on. Leave me blurry and fall toward me
with your entire body. Lie under the covers, pretending
to sleep, while I’m in the other room. Imagine
my legs crossed, my hair combed, the shine of my boots
in the slatted light. I’m thinking My plant, his chair,
the ashtray that we bought together. I’m thinking This is where
we live. When we were little we made houses out of
cardboard boxes. We can do anything. It’s not because
our hearts are large, they’re not, it’s what we
struggle with. The attempt to say Come over. Bring
your friends. It’s a potluck, I’m making pork chops, I’m making
those long noodles you love so much. My dragonfly,
my black-eyed fire, the knives in the kitchen are singing
for blood, but we are the crossroads, my little outlaw,
and this is the map of my heart, the landscape
after cruelty which is, of course, a garden, which is
a tenderness, which is a room, a lover saying Hold me
tight, it’s getting cold. We have not touched the stars,

What the Living Do

Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss--we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you. 

The Happiest Day

It was early May, I think
a moment of lilac or dogwood
when so many promises are made
it hardly matters if a few are broken.
My mother and father still hovered
in the background, part of the scenery
like the houses I had grown up in,
and if they would be torn down later
that was something I knew
but didn't believe. Our children were asleep
or playing, the youngest as new
as the new smell of the lilacs,
and how could I have guessed
their roots were shallow
and would be easily transplanted.
I didn't even guess that I was happy.
The small irritations that are like salt
on melon were what I dwelt on,
though in truth they simply
made the fruit taste sweeter.

Radiance

I keep a note a friend left in a book of photos:

lavender light over the snow flats –

and I wonder if he used it in a poem,
or if seeing, if the pleasure, was enough?

Now that you and I aren't lovers,

I notice how the light at times
will race up your obedient body,

and reveal the flame I looked for –

the life I said I saw,
and hoped would be enough.

Sometimes

Sometimes things don't go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail.
Sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war,
elect an honest man, decide they care
enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best intentions do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen; may it happen for you.

Blues

Image credit here

midnight...

the silence turns

a deeper blue

Gratitude

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war
grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,
or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of
for twenty or thirty miserable years—
And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man
with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times
have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines
through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves
as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree
that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:
cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,
and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,
so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,
Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world
sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s
sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock—
And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,
the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,
finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,
know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing
on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,
flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or thought.
And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands
in gratitude, bend to the sky.

Happiness

Because yesterday morning from the steamy window

we saw a pair of red foxes across the creek

eating the last windfall apples in the rain --

they looked up at us with their green eyes

long enough to symbolize the wakefulness of living things

and then went back to eating --

and because this morning

when she went into the gazebo with her black pen and yellow pad

to coax an inquisitive soul

from what she thinks of as the reluctance of matter,

I drove into town to drink tea in the cafe

and write notes in a journal -- mist rose from the bay

like the luminous and indefinite aspect of intention,

and a small flock of tundra swans

for the second winter in a row was feeding on new grass

in the soaked fields; they symbolize mystery, I suppose,

they are also called whistling swans, are very white,

and their eyes are black --

and because the tea steamed in front of me,

and the notebook, turned to a new page,

was blank except for a faint blue idea of order,

I wrote: happiness! it is December, very cold,

we woke early this morning,

and lay in bed kissing,

our eyes squinched up like bats.

The Perfect Tear

My father stands in the kitchen
His fingertips dusted with creosote stains - 
The council hasn't done the fence
So he has taken on the task himself
And, oh, how I love that smell
That intoxicating aroma of cut grass and wood protector.

He and my mother have argued about money, 
I heard them.
Hush-hush rasps of comfortable disdain
Seeping through the heating vent
They would be horrified if they knew.

His father fought for this country you know, 
His mother worked instead of mothering
And he, utterly unaware of his role as my Superman
Believes he is Failing.
This is his kryptonite.

He is the Scottish Working Class Male, 
Hands calloused from providing, 
Maybe not cars and holidays and designer clothes
But, 
Enough.

His arms are full of embraces
He is not sure how to give
(Later, I will learn to ask and will be rewarded every time
With a sarcastic comment, to mask the schmaltz
And then, the only hug that kills the Bogeyman.) 

You know, I think more and more often

You know, I think more and more often
that I should go back.
Maybe I'll meet you. And happiness?
Happiness is being sad together.

So I look through the moonlit window
and listen.
Nothing. A breeze stirs somewhere.
Alone among the leaves - the moon.

Like a golden wheel it rolls
above the windblown leaves.
Such moons, only paler,
shone over the Wisla.

Even the Big Dipper on its course
stops in a tree at midnight,
just like at home. But why here?
Truly, I don't know.

What's here? Longing and sleepless nights,
unknown streets and somebody's verse.
I live here as a nobody:
a Displaced Person.

I think of you. I know I must leave.
Perhaps we can return to our past,
but I know neither what youth will be like
nor where you are.

But I'm yours or no one's
forever. Listen,
listen, read this poem
if somewhere you are alive.

----------
Some additional things I found about this poet, not sure if they are true: Borowski is a Dachau and Auschwitz survivor. This poem was written for his (not yet) wife, Maria, who went missing while at the camp. They did find each other but Borowski was already too far gone. He gassed himself at the age of 28. 

To levitate

My mother swears she saw
my baby brother rise from his cot
one stormy night when
we were living upstate.

She was awake, checking the shutters,
when she saw him levitate,
a foot or more, covers rising
with him the way they do

in carnival shows, so you don’t see
the wires. But, he lay soft and pliant,
a floater, weightless as
a shadow on the wall.

“Something in the air,” Mother said,
because she believed in such things,
and reminded us often that most
children know how to fly.

And I do remember running down a hillside,
breathless, the ground rising to meet me,
my heart lifting my blood
so effortlessly

I knew that if I stepped out onto the air
that it would hold me.
I may even have done it
without realizing

how easy it is, before doubt takes hold
and weds you to the ground.
Odd that we should forget
such things.

Odd, too, when I tell the story
how no one believes exactly,
but the room gets quiet
and everyone listens.

I have this to say

One day, long after this
when we meet again.
Oh perhaps it will never happen
but if it should
kiss me
and don't stop until  my body
melts like sugar in your mouth
or until you see
my soul flowing in the water beneath our feet.

A Pity. We Were Such a Good Invention

They amputated
Your thighs off my hips.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all surgeons. All of them.

They dismantled us
Each from the other.
As far as I'm concerned
They are all engineers. All of them.

A pity. We were such a good
And loving invention.
An aeroplane made from a man and wife.
Wings and everything.
We hovered a little above the earth.

We even flew a little.

One day

One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.

~Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods

I've Dreamed of You So Much

I've dreamed of you so much that you're losing your reality.
Is it already too late for me to embrace your literal, living and breathing
physical body
and to kiss that mouth which is the birthplace of that voice which is so dear
to me?
I've dreamed of you so much that my arms--which have become accustomed to
lying crossed upon my own chest after attempting to encircle your
shadow--might not be able to unfold again to embrace the contours of your
literal form, perhaps
So that coming face-to-face with the actual incarnation of what has haunted me
and ruled me and dominated my life for so many days and years
Might very well turn me into a shadow.
Oh equilibriums of the emotional scales!
I've dreamed of you so much that it might be too late for me to ever wake up
again.
I sleep on my feet, body confronting all the usual phenomena of life and love
and yet
when it comes to you--you, the only being on the planet who matters to me
now--
I can no more touch your face and lips than I can those of the next random
passerby.
I've dreamed of you so much, have walked and talked and slept so much with
your
phantom presence that perhaps the only thing left for me to do now
Is to become a phantom among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadowy
than that shifting shape which moves and which will go on moving,
stepping lightly and happily across the sundial of your life.

The Old Poets of China

Wherever I am, the world comes after me.
It offers me its busyness. It does not believe
that I do not want it. Now I understand
why the old poets of China went so far and high
into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

What Remains

Years ago, one night when I was sad, I asked for a sign;
I've forgotten why.
All I remember now
is that two deer stepped onto the beach below:
their hooves clinked when they crossed the shale,
and when they walked up the beach,
their hoof prints filled with seawater.
Each pool held a moon.
I sat on that rock and tried to understand what it meant.
The stink of kelp floated closer;
coarse fronds washed back and forth
while the sea breathed below me.
Now I know it wasn't a sign.
It was just thirty or forty holes, shining.

Lamentation chant

South Mountain's peopled with such grief.
Ghost-rain keeps sprinkling empty grasses,

and autumn fills Ch'ang-an past midnight:
how many are turning old in all its wind?

Yellow-twilight paths blurred deep away,
streets of black-azure oak twist and sway,

trees standing in shadow beneath a moon.
Pellucid dawn will cover whole mountains.

Lacquer candles welcome new arrivals to
dark tombs. Confusions of fireflies flicker.

~translated from Li Ho by David Hinton

The Two Times I Loved You the Most In a Car

It was your idea

to park and watch the elephants

swaying among the trees

like royalty

at that make-believe safari

near Laguna.

I didn’t know anything that big

could be so quiet.

And once, you stopped

on a dark desert road

to show me the stars

climbing over each other

riotously

like insects

like an orchestra

thrashing its way

through time itself

I never saw light that way

again.

Residue

I give myself five days to forget you.
On the first day I rust.
On the second I wilt.
On the third day I sit with friends but I think about your tongue.
I clean my room on the fourth day. I clean my body on the fourth day.
I try to replace your scent on the fourth day.
The fifth day, I adorn myself like the mouth of an inmate.
A wedding singer dressed in borrowed gold.
The midas of cheap metal.
Tinsel in the middle of summer.
Crevice glitter, two days after the party.
I glow the way unwanted things do,
a neon sign that reads:
Come, I still taste like someone else’s mouth.

"December 21st, 2002"

It’s said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.

To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will

have touched.

"What the Heart Cannot Forget"

Everything remembers something. The rock, its fiery bed,
cooling and fissuring into cracked pieces, the rub
of watery fingers along its edge.

The cloud remembers being elephant, camel, giraffe,
remembers being a veil over the face of the sun,
gathering itself together for the fall.

The turtle remembers the sea, sliding over and under
its belly, remembers legs like wings, escaping down
the sand under the beaks of savage birds.

The tree remembers the story of each ring, the years
of drought, the floods, the way things came
walking slowly towards it long ago.

And the skin remembers its scars, and the bone aches
where it was broken. The feet remember the dance,
and the arms remember lifting up the child.

The heart remembers everything it loved and gave away,
everything it lost and found again, and everyone
it loved, the heart cannot forget.

In Recompense

Now for the long years when I could not love you,
I bring in recompense this gift of yearning–
A luminous vase uplifted to the sun,
Blue with the shadows of near-twilight.
Here in its full round symmetry of darkness,
Burning with swift curved flashes bright as tears,
I lift it to the lonely lips that knew
Its slow creation, and the wheel of sorrow turning.
Take it with hands like faded petals,
White as the moonlight of our garden;
And for the long years when I could not love you
Drink from its amber-colored night.

I'll be a poet and you'll be poetry

je serai
poete/
et toi
poesie...

From the Greek Anthology

A man (they say)
whom a mad dog
has bitten, sees,
stooping to drink,
that dog's image
upon the water.

Did Love, rabid,
fasten his teeth 
within my flesh?
Your eyes glance
and smile in
the sea, the stream's 
slow eddies,
the wine-cup.

~Paulos (a Greek poet of the early Byzantine period); translated by Andrew Miller.

Love Poem from First Indian on the Moon

We have learned/
that love is never civilized.

Meanings

The rain could mean a lot of things. It might
mean that we've caught a cold front, or that this
is the End. Any number of possibilities.
At the moment, there’s water leaking
into my train car through a tiny gap
near the floor. Even though we’re moving,
the rain—that clever creature—is finding
a way into our hearts, or at the very least
our shoes. I know that the storm is nothing
in comparison to what it is south, but
there is something awful and damply true
in the tiny leak that I am watching
here in my corner of the train. It means
the thoughts I've been having about endings
will wet my heart and my shoes no matter
how fast I think that I’m moving.

A Hedge of Rubber Trees

The West Village by then was changing; before long
the rundown brownstones at its farthest edge
would have slipped into trendier hands. She lived,
impervious to trends, behind a potted hedge of
rubber trees, with three cats, a canary—refuse 
from whose cage kept sifting down and then 
germinating, a yearning seedling choir, around
the saucers on the windowsill—and an inexorable
cohort of roaches she was too nearsighted to deal
with, though she knew they were there, and would
speak of them, ruefully, as of an affliction that
     might once, long ago, have been prevented.

Unclassifiable castoffs, misfits, marginal cases:
when you're one yourself, or close to it, there's
a reassurance in proving you haven't quite gone
under by taking up with somebody odder than you are.
Or trying to. "They're my friends," she'd say of
her cats—Mollie, Mitzi and Caroline, their names were,
and she was forever taking one or another in a cab
to the vet—as though she had no others. The roommate
who'd become a nun, the one who was Jewish, the couple
she'd met on a foliage tour, one fall, were all people
she no longer saw. She worked for a law firm, said all
     the judges were alcoholic, had never voted.

But would sometimes have me to dinner—breaded veal,
white wine, strawberry Bavarian—and sometimes, from 
what she didn't know she was saying, I'd snatch a shred
or two of her threadbare history. Baltic cold. Being 
sent home in a troika when her feet went numb. In
summer, carriage rides. A swarm of gypsy children 
driven off with whips. An octogenarian father, bishop
of a dying schismatic sect. A very young mother
who didn't want her. A half-brother she met just once.
Cousins in Wisconsin, one of whom phoned her from a candy 
store, out of the blue, while she was living in Chicago.
     What had brought her there, or when, remained unclear.