American Poetry Read online

  Against objects, lost habits,

  Knowledge grows

  But it has to be connected to things.

  And that connection is usually best achieved

  So they say

  Through perceiving similarities. No way!

  Winds blow in a giant circle and set up resistance to anyone going the other way.

  Still it came about that the ban was lifted

  Suddenly one fall

  And I went to sea after all

  And shaped a course away from the trees that framed the seascape

  Beyond my mother’s house, incandescent birches and fiery maples as well as forbidding clouds of hemlock and pine,

  A forest that was like a terrestrial sky

  But is much less so now in memory. I don’t remember why

  It was said that a woman’s presence on a ship at sea would bring disaster down on everyone aboard, the gods of mythology seem to have liked us well enough

  Or maybe they liked us too well, chasing us in animal form

  With violent winds.

  But mythology gave

  Way to history

  And now history is going

  The way of bedtime stories. A path, bricks, innocents—they are additions, but odd

  Additions to oddity.

  Gullibility is an expression of enthusiasm

  So great it makes decisions. But I am throwing off faith, bound to regard the sea

  As a prison holding people whom their childhood friends cannot believe capable of crime.

  It is midsummer and the sun is lost in the sun, visibility is accomplished. Can credibility

  Be far behind?

  But I won’t pretend

  To be an historian, how could I, when I have no idea of today’s date

  And though I know we embarked one morning early in May

  I have no idea how long ago that was

  And I don’t care. I breathe, I twist my hair.

  I watch the sea. At times it resembles an eye but it isn’t watching me.

  Some days ago a “native kayak” appeared and then disappeared, winding through a lead in the ice.

  The first mate kept close watch for several hours after the kayak, following a shimmering band of water west, disappeared

  Or, as the first mate put it, “withdrew”—the mate insisting that the occupant might be a pirate

  Or some other type with hostile intent

  Emboldened by the ice

  Approaching

  In broad daylight. A strange expression. Soon there will be no more than a band of pink against the darkness,

  Narrow daylight

  As at the beginning or end

  Of a day in the habitable latitudes,

  Where breadth is what is assumed of days

  As it is of the sea even when mist closes in around the ship. She is called the Distance.

  We go where she goes

  And arrive willy-nilly at times and places of whose existence we’d known nothing before

  And which therefore, though we come upon them inevitably (there being always somewhere and always in or at it something—whether material or musical—that establishes its “somewhereness”), we reach involuntarily,

  It’s to these that we hope to go and from these that we hope to return.

  But beset by such hopefulness (cold,

  Ominous, and calm) we’re getting nowhere

  And tempers are short.

  I’ve grown hard of hearing, the first mate said this morning in a tone dripping with sarcasm.

  Did you ask for a hard-boiled egg?

  Jean-Pierre is no longer included in the games the other children are playing, soon he’ll be an adolescent, already he’s hovering over the figurehead,

  A woman holding a telescope to her left eye.

  For the most part it is trained on the horizon.

  She is establishing herself.

  According to the Greeks metamorphoses have to be complete

  And are impossible. Things may change

  But nothing can become the opposite

  Of what it is. The sea cannot

  Be not the sea. Yet

  I can see it

  Both ways.

  Then yet again I hardly remember who it was I was instead of this back when I longed to go to sea and couldn’t.

  I gazed up through branches tossing in the wind at the blue planes of the sky and felt rooted, even at an early age,

  Perhaps to gods but if so my deities were streaming

  Or grinding like a boat being hauled out of the waves over stony

  ground. The sound

  Gives me pleasure still though it is fugitive. Pleasures are synonymous with power (and with powers

  Though these are very different things),

  And lest they become dangerous they must be fugitive.

  How strangely our course approaches forks, how variously we decide which tack to take. We ourselves are fugitives,

  The world is strange. It appears to last and appears so as to last,

  In the dark of night or of storms, into which it disappears to last as well. We have come in the dark

  Upon landforms, shores, islands without knowing what to expect. On some

  One may enter into friendship, on others into endless complaint.

  But there must be more to friendship than a placid acceptance of misunderstandings.

  And interruptions, though these have the effect of inevitabilities

  We encounter constantly.

  Someone remarks “there’s something over there” or, more urgently, “there’s something ahead!”

  The boat tacks—I say that though the engines are running.

  We have no destination. One can’t foretell

  What may or may not be pointless.

  The boat arches, bends, turns—it is shaping itself. Sometimes I climb into a lifeboat to think

  And there I dream confusedly that we’ve “varied” and come to an island

  Which can be approached only through one of forty doors,

  At each one of which sits a perched bird that can disclose the mysteries of logic to me in an ancient language which I will understand.

  The gist of what occurs according to the birds is unlikeliness.

  We are all so busy it seems sometimes that the only time we can appreciate being

  Is when we are at sea

  Subject to capriciousness

  Though we sleep slung in binding hammocks

  Like spiders or netted fish

  Or like trapeze artists bouncing to ground level at the end of their act. Tonight the sea

  Has twisted in turbulence. Observing the effects I’ve grown vertiginously

  Calm. How odd it is to be out.

  At best one can know only the knowledge of this time. When one reaches the limit of that

  One must make way for those who know in and for the time next

  To this.

  In and for I say hospitably.

  Between ourselves we speak the language of these parts.

  The communications are never concise.

  Whatever we say is best understood if contextualized, so contexts are what we say, and they too are best understood if contextualized

  And so it goes, sometimes inward and sometimes outward bound

  Not round and round but as if over the bridge

  From top to toe

  Or pegbox to tailpiece

  Of a vast violin—strung—

  What we speak is strung

  And we cling to it as to a shroud.

  The wind sweeps across the sea but cannot enter it. Both are variable. It is always safe to predict

  Variability. Great cumulous clouds hang overhead one moment

  And terns another. The sun on my face is cold

  And yet I often feel heat. Perhaps we are all small suns.

  The sunflower in its pot on deck doesn’t think so. It turns

  Frantically

  But not to us
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  As the Distance rides the sea and sends the sun sliding violently into all the compass corners.

  Am I compassionate? Or is it merely out of enthusiasm

  That I give a thumbs up

  As the Distance slows so as to pass gently through a flock of floating seabirds?

  Their kind must be persistent

  And have been here long before the first human flutterings

  Whose own persistence brought us here

  To no end

  Unless what and when we turn can be termed an end.

  If one undertakes when outward bound to sail to the ends of the earth, one must hope also ultimately to come inward bound

  From them again.

  How hospitable circumstances can be!

  The earth seems young—raucous, ravenous, quick. The earth exists

  With gusto. Things fall to it and stick, things are rooted in it

  And rise. This cannot be said of the sea. It’s impossible to clear the way and come within sight of my subject.

  Obscure emotions cling to it—obscuring emotions, I mean. The analytical imagination

  Naturally undertakes analysis of the imagination

  While the emotional imagination does what, emote? I’ve tried to give emotions

  The slip

  By attributing them to other people—

  An iffy strategy at best. Not everyone’s motives are my own.

  Emotions stem from belief,

  And motives are meant to establish what’s believed.

  William is afraid of ghosts

  Which he says live in and on the ice

  More and more of which we’ve been seeing

  Day and night passing us as we pass

  If indeed we are passing. At times it seems as if we are simply riding a gentle swell

  Washing the edges of the habitable world. A glance into the distance

  Raises these doubts and I take them as signs of aesthetic wellness.

  One thing I’ve discovered is that nothing that’s experienced is allegorical—

  There is no moral. Nothing is contained. Sure one can say that the woman who sets sail

  Will cross reefs

  Or that science is the practice of unknowing

  Or that given enough time every circumstance will betray what it promised

  To guarantee

  But these are, as I see it, unbound, uninhibited, nonsuccinct

  Observations—things that take time and space to develop

  Into whatever truth or truths they offer. All in all

  There is very little containment in the universe

  Except what’s temporarily contained in the bodies of things as presence or in animate bodies as life.

  The sea though not silent subjects one to silence—that’s the only name I know for the distance

  Though it has noisy spans.

  They cascade and splash. I know these words

  But my thoughts of things go on without them.

  NIGHTS

  Ooooh, oooooh, ooooh, says the voice of a girl:

  “I’ve been attacked by owls,

  by owls with towels,

  I’ve been attacked

  by snakes with rakes.

  It is just this kind of ridiculous language, banal but lacking even banality’s pretense at relevance and sense, that I hear in my sleep; I wake, feeling irritable and depressed.

  *

  The sadness! the injustice!

  It’s true I want to know, I want to look

  But what is it?

  *

  The fingers leave their owls in a calm

  Sleep figures the features

  Sleep speaks for the bird, the animal

  For the round and the residual

  Sleep soaks from experience

  But why and what?

  *

  Suddenly I remember having rescued a spider from the bathtub in the morning. I imagined that I had established rapport with my environment. I observed the spider eerily. I was in harmony with life and my times. Not only will things go on but this going on will repeat.

  After all, I can vow kindness in relation to something I cannot know.

  The spider, when it appears within “a range of alternatives,” will be rescued—dished out of the nicked and polished porcelain tub and knocked onto the shrubbery just outside the open window.

  Of course, it will not be the same spider each time but a sequence of spiders.

  *

  The 23rd night was very dark.

  It was cold.

  My eyes were drawn to the window.

  I thought I saw a turtledove nesting on a waffle

  Then I saw it was a rat doing something awful

  But anarchy doesn’t bother me now any more than it used to

  I thought I saw a woman writing verses on a bottle

  Then I saw it was a foot stepping on the throttle

  But naturally freedom can be understood in many different ways

  I thought I saw a fireman hosing down some straw

  Then I saw it was a horse grazing in a draw

  But it’s always the case that in their struggle to survive, animate objects must be aided

  I thought I saw a rhubarb pie sitting on the stove

  Then I saw it was the tide receding from a cove

  But although I have strong emotions when I watch a movie, jealousy is never one of them.

  I thought I saw a bicyclist racing down the road

  Then I saw it was a note, a message still in code

  But sense is always either being raised to or lowered from the sky

  *

  A voice says, The ambered bed flag fills.

  A voice says, This is voltage island.

  A voice says, The wall past which girls wander flicks is built of baffled face bricks.

  *

  I saw a juxtaposition

  It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation

  Pure poetry

  Of course there is a great difference between withering and a napping man

  And flailing in relation to fossils in a stone is different from a set of dominoes

  Still I don’t worry less about the same old worries

  *

  I’m of a mule age, I dare like a log.

  I live where I live, and I’ll bulk graciously

  —to zero.

  *

  But the worst of speaking in the dark is that the sounds we emit are strange and hollow.

  *

  The moon was solemnly full.

  Jim Trotmeyer assertively declared, Emotions can’t be governed by rules.

  Millie Corcoran politely requested, Don’t overwhelm me.

  To this Jim Trotmeyer delightfully responded, But the azures of spring truly rush.

  Millie Corcoran remarked astutely, Azures rush, yes, but composedly.

  Jim Trotmeyer mused pensively, The clouds do indeed puzzle.

  Millie Corcoran said sociably, They appear above the crowd.

  Oswald Proskaniewicz interrupted furiously, You, Jim Trotmeyer, are not the radical you say you are.

  *

  As for me, I want to be Banambitan

  and leave kind ships vitalities by art.

  I am untouchable.

  Siege Document

  Myung Mi Kim

  a graduated effort

  r s

  bandage pulled back is blood gone mud

  p eu hand hewn

  freedom from commerce was a cry

  filterdoubt . locution . string and pelter .

  attached to pillars and saltbeds

  wracked as imperfect lot

  *

  Sleep took the eye muscle and severed it

  In the vernacular ate stirred swept

  At the periphery garbage pigs

  : sandscroll :

  After a long last

  I learn my story

  My mother had restaurant

  she made noodle soup

&
nbsp; It was famous soup

  She suffer so much

  For so much her life

  It burn skin to bone

  Scar tissue on top of nerve ending

  Ugly power of military

  I scream too hot too hot

  Naked where clothes were a second before

  *

  signs and symptoms

  crossing veins of lettuce and a miner’s light

  whose bones therefore appear short or thin relative to dental age

  anemia recorded as porosity of the eye orbits

  some by excess, some by defect

  others by affliction

  others by time for animals to be gathered together, time when water is drawn

  (to) provide for days when hunting is poor or many are sick

  *

  The rest buried him by striking him with fir trees

  When the armament was in

  Having consumed the eight sparrows in the nest

  The wounded were washed in hot waters

  Now the twentieth year since she quitted her native land

  Exposure and desertion

  : Many of the residents who have died of heat exhaustion were

  elderly men and women reluctant to use air

  conditioning because they worried about expensive utility bills

  Houseless heads and unfed sides

  *

  skilter head . lifts up and tells simple mother stories

  everyday to spout

  everyday to alight

  everyday to bring one end to the other, close

  a pick a pack a frightening fund

  *

  that. wants a biscuit

  I am assured that the global buying frenzy

  I am assured that there is a global buying frenzy

  drain in a prophylactic sense

  in plain sight cusp of flesh and action

  that said: the cost

  that said: brittle off the bone and perjure

  Constant Reverential Face

  Please allow that

  Place of feet and water

  Please allow that

  The oil and seeds

  What is the call to call out

  *

  laughter visited us early and left

  moving around a sequence of debts

  there would be the occasion of reaching for a foreign object in the eye

  Speaker: She got shot. She did. I saw her.

  limbs of pines rope around the waist

  neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part of the soil

  upon which they work

  like so many cows and the trees

  the schools had been burned down