Is best, wrist bone and mystery of it,
Returning now to bio-mechanical frame
After a night of dark herding.
I wish I could tell you
What mind-body means
Like an honest neighbor.
My wife’s horse is just here
Lowering his mouth to grass
Which is cold and wet
A promissory winter
In each grab.
My ribs have a story—
Green as a horse’s jaws,
You’ll not be paid
For saying so—
Ribs outlast most poems.
I’ve been turning in the gloom for years
Making vows, Lord, hoping apples,
Skies late winter will turn to spring,
Just enough Rachmaninoff,
Maybe we can really go back home…
I sat in the Cafe Strindberg
December frost on a window
Coffee steaming
Pencils before me—
What might poems be for?
Even then I was half milk
Half iodine, optimistic
And very sad,
The songs on high
Were so cold
Each silent word
Like a spoon in snow.
I learned my work like everyone,
I haven’t been followed by a government agent lately, Jim, but I know it will soon happen. I’ll be walking around a campfire with my dictionary and a G-man of small stature will pop out of the underbrush. I’m not sure about the rest, how sad he may or may not be. You never know with those guys. I knew a CIA agent who loved his kids but ditched his family for a shack in the woods. Before he vanished he was quite charming. Then poof! He was gone. I think that’s the way of it after years spent following people, you just snap. Kind of like a cheap banjo. I’d like to write more to you about the suspicious person I think is coming but I’m sure you remember being tired. Sensible paranoia is exhausting. Doctors don’t understand it. If a thing comes true they say it’s a coincidence.
I had a dream last night about old Bill Yeats
Who lived for the heart in an age of knives,
Whose loves came apart like moth wings
Whose nation was cruel
When not boastful, then both, then dark,
So I was swept along by a shade
Who’d suffered much, who even so
Had found my sleeping head
And bending close
He opened his shirt—
Where his heart should have been
There was a hole—
“Believe this” he said,
“In remembrance of me.”
“Each of us is alone at the center of the earth” the poet says—
But we’re alone when a peacock opens his tail,
When merely walking in bright light
Maybe going nowhere
The way people do…I recall
Leaving the hospital…a misdiagnosis…
Doctors thought I was wasting
From digestive illness
But it was teen suicide I wanted
As I was blind, my parents
Were drunks, no true friends anyway…
You can be by yourself
In the heart of a sunbeam
On an ordinary street
Misnamed
Opening and closing your eyes.
Autumn, or, Rain and a Lingering Soft Light of Sleep
I brew coffee while steam pipes talk
And my smallness in the scheme of things
Circles cat-like, though I have no cat.
**
Bride’s dress, goat’s wool, side by side in attic.
**
Here we walk now
My dead brother with me—
He’s the one (sensibly) wearing
White rubber boots.
**
Pawnshop in Athens
Not for from Syntagma Sq.
Saw I’d remain half crazy
For one more day…
**
The trick:
There are lots of blind people my age
Who don’t much like themselves
Zig-zag lines of darkness
Make you (on the inside) drift like a leaf
**
Just a bone in a larger collection of bones,
What I am…call it the body if you like,
I know better. Soon now,
Rocks will roll straight through….
**
Mahler’s Fifth.
Never got over it.
Seven years old.
Gramophone. Winter.
You give it your all, you and your dog,
Alone, late Fall, together
In joyful agony
For both of you are old,
Both seek a lonesome
And artless fullness.
It’s empty the day ahead
The meaninglessness of sun
Following—or is it
The other way around,
Daylight beckoning,
Maybe the old Labrador
Will know, his black face
White muzzle
Probing among roots.
Aging is often without guile,
Straight, entire,
Written between lines.
He’s found black currants
Keen friend, picks one
With his teeth,
Drops it in your hand.
You never swim out into the same water
But I woke this morning, blind,
A flock of school children passing,
One child drawing a stick along the fence,
The music of people
Who have more than they can carry,
And I thought, I’m no longer
So fond of travel…
Not old but inside
I’m pushed now
Farther to a corner,
The birds of my flesh lifting
Coursing over my house.
Like many poets I wake thinking of delicate things, some apparent, others abstract. I think of Wallace Stevens “planet on a table”—the world we must make each day, and then I smell the sweet ripening apples outside my bedroom window. I rise, feed my dogs, brew coffee, check the news hoping for breakthroughs in international understanding, put on my rough shoes and walk into the still morning. I’ll make something of this. Put on my little “peace hat” and pepper the aborning hour with words—names—Isaac Bashevis Singer, entelechy, sea cucumber, yellow mittens, mother-world. No one is about in my neighborhood. No one’s awake. The houses are all buttoned, windows dark. My feet love the wet road. I think I need to pardon my youth. I hear the Phoebe bird. The age I live in has a dark taste. I’m seldom prone to this but I do sometimes wish I was a bird.
I did the proper thing, read poems
While its wings were growing—
Just another shattered cup now
**
When young
Living in cheap apartment
I heard the eyelids next door
**
You get used to it
Able bodied people
Thinking you’re a creep
**
I had a dream
About Jack Kerouac
Somewhere somewhere
**
Back then, 1959, he couldn’t distinguish between dreams and daylight.
Even in sleep there were shadows or the footprints of shadows,
Twin brother in heaven?
**
The gardener cherishes a black flower–
Sad napkin:
A Lepidopterist’s poem
**
I am in love with blindness,
Do you understand?
Even old horses delight in walking.
Planet of the Blind 