Category: Uncategorized

A Confessional Poem

I’ve never been bored.
For instance I climbed trees in my youth
Though I was blind

I found an owl’s nest
My idiorhythmic heart was stormy green

What if you tell yourself you’re wiser than you are?
The badger in her moist layer stays in her skin
Under your house forgotten wars go on
Two catbirds call in rain
So much pressure
On the written word
Like a child’s game—
You know
The one where walking
Your footfalls must be perfect
Or someone dies

He found it difficult to tell the story of grass and the aspen
And the names inside him.
His boyhood
Held still in the green unspoken

If the grass was democratic
It was owing to loneliness.
He lay low and still
The times were plain

He knew the names—
The White Throated Sparrow
Known as the Peabody Bird
Whose song could break your heart

This was in the final days before television
When children played dead
And listened to unseen birds

Uncle History agrees that Marx
Was not deterministic
He agrees the first frost
Has little to do with God
He has an ache in his pleural cavity
Sometimes he has the urge
To count spoons
“Its a crazy world” he says
But corrects himself
For he’s known
Millions of mad people
“The world is ugly
And the people are sad”
He always loved Wallace Stevens
Of suffering he knows
It has no antecedent

Now, unknowingly, the king
Eats his own horse
Uncle History remembers…
Times past stay
Like flavors
Memory, a kind of mouth
When eating Majesticus
There’s a hint of pepper
And wormwood
How hungry he is!
Bitter chewing
Unaware
He’s devouring
A creature he loves
And his ride home…

I wish I could tell you
About being me
Says Auntie History
But I’m still waiting
For the language—
The blood soaked
Moist-ugly nouns
Have yet to come
She sees young women
Writing books
And cheers them on
She comes down the mountain
And its spring withal
No one remains
In the old village
The women have vanished
She finds thistles
In a basket
She stands in haze
In a rough meadow
Her heart racing…

They know
Aria is a blue word
In the singing
It may rise into red
But it returns to blue
You know
They’ve been to every performance
On earth—Chaliapin
Their favorite
The way he tore at his beard
Under that clock—
And the castrati
They remember
How, in the beginning
They sang only sacred music
Oh how they love
Beautiful torture!
Over the years
They’ve come to see
The best singers
Always have
Such tiny feet…

Because he was sad
Uncle History talked to the linden
Just as any orphan would
It was more of a song really…
“See these hands,” he sang
“They are not mine…”
Afterwards he switched the radio
On and off
Like a spy
Sending signals
To the next room
Then he tapped his toe
In the present tense pond
Voila! He’s not unhappy
Sorrow can be monetized
Its a whole new day

When Uncle History sleeps
He doesn’t dream
But half awake
He sees things—
Edgar Poe
On laughing gas—
Anyway, he’s waking up
But he’s not quite back
And he sees feathers
White, lovely feathers
So perfect
Not sinister at all
Not hopeful
No Emily Dickinson
Just feathers
Floating
A sweet fascination
Before words come
And for a moment
No matter what Derrida says
There are only feathers
And no words for feathers
Over coffee
He won’t remember this
Not fully
Something about a single swan
It’s open ended
What happens
He’s strangely sad

Being history differs from thinking about it
Every morning Uncle and Auntie History
Tend to their goats
(They’re no different
Than Polyphemus
But they don’t live in a cave)
Because they personify the past
You will find them
Wherever books are sold
And they’re in the world’s Braille—
One can read them
On the weathered doors of Venice
Their goats are loyal
In the manner of goats
Which, if you’re thinking
Means our History clan
Resembles them
The bleats of some goats
Sound like human screams…