American Poetry Read online

who tried to hold on to his extremities, suffers

  in a wheelchair. When she says, “I don’t want

  to become that,” the no smears fingerprints on glass.

  And he sees a man splashed with blood and scales

  stand hip deep in halibut, cleaning them off.

  6.

  Who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?

  They hung tomato plants upside down in the kitchen;

  a dyer poured fermented piss into the dye bath;

  explosion of egg and sperm;

  he remembers a hummingbird nest tucked in some branches

  tucked in his mind;

  she groaned when he yanked her hair back;

  inside the space of a pea,

  beginningless beginning and endless end;

  he diverts water from the acequia, irrigates slender peach trees;

  when he pulled the skeins up,

  they gasped when they turned blue in the air;

  they folded an ultrasound image inside a red envelope with a white crane,

  prayed, set it on fire;

  he wove a blue jaguar;

  plucking ripened tomatoes, she grazed shriveled leaves;

  “All men are mortal”;

  they prayed to the sun, burned the blue jaguar at noon;

  conception: 186,000 miles per second;

  186,000 miles per second;

  who has heard a flute carved from the wing bone of a crane?

  7.

  Crows pick at a dead buffalo along the curve

  of the river, as Raz trots up with a cow hoof

  in his mouth. As: to the same degree or amount;

  for instance; when considered in a specified

  form or relation; in or to the same degree

  in which; as if; in the way or manner that;

  in accordance with what or the way in which;

  while, when; regardless of the degree to which;

  for the reason that; that the result is.

  As in a quipu where colored, knotted strings

  hang off a main cord—or as a series

  of acequias off the Pojoaque River drop water

  into fields—the mind ties knots, and I

  follow a series of short strings to a loose end—

  walking barefoot in white sand, rolling

  down a dune, white flecks on our lips,

  on our eyelids, sitting in a warm dune

  as a gibbous moon lifts against the sky’s pelagic,

  with the shadows of fourwing saltbushes,

  the scent of hoary rosemarymint in the air.

  8.

  I close my eyes—see fishhooks and nylon threads

  against a black background, cuttlefish

  from above against a black background,

  blowfish up close against a black background.

  The seconds are as hushed as the morning

  after steady snowfall when the power is out,

  the rooms cold. At one, a snow-heavy branch

  snapped the power line; the loose end flailed

  clusters of orange sparks. A woman swept

  a walkway, missed a porch step, fell forward,

  bruised her face, broke both elbows; yet

  the mind quickens in the precarious splendor

  that it would not be better if things happened

  to men just as they wish, that—moonglow,

  sunrise—the day—scales of carp in frost on glass—

  scalds and stuns. In 1,369 days, we’ve set

  eagle to eagle feather and formed a nest

  where—fishhook joy—the mind is new each day.

  9.

  We bend to enter a cave at Tsankawi, inadvertently

  stir some tufa dust, notice it catches a beam

  of sunlight. The beam enters a ceiling shaft

  at winter solstice noon and forms, on a plastered wall,

  a slash, then a small circle of intense light

  before it disappears. And when we leave,

  my mind sizzles with the vanished point of light.

  I sizzle when I remember how we first kissed,

  when I ran my hands through your hair, when you

  brushed your hair on my body. And as flying

  geese cast shadows on water, and water reflects

  the light, I feel a joy stretch and stretch

  into the infinite. I recall when we knocked at

  a neighbor’s door to drop off a gift, how

  they didn’t hear us as they were staring out

  at the feeder counting birds—bushtit, sapsucker,

  nuthatch, woodpecker—as we counted the blessing

  of seconds where heat shimmered and vanished into air.

  Six Poems

  Jorie Graham

  PRAYER

  Am I still in the near distance

  where all things are overlooked

  if one just passes by. Do you pass

  by?

  I love the idea of consequence.

  Is that itself consequence—(the idea)?

  I have known you to be cheap

  (as in not willing to pay out the extra

  length of

  blessing, weather, ignorance—all other

  [you name them] forms of exodus).

  What do I (call) you after all the necessary

  ritual and protocol

  is undertaken? Only-diminished?

  Great-and-steady-perishing? Unloosening

  thirst,

  or thirst unloosening ribbony storylines

  with births

  and history’s ever-tightening

  plot

  attached? We’re in too deep the bluebird

  perched on

  the seaweed-colored

  limb (fringed with sky as with ever-lightening echoes of

  those selfsame light-struck weeds, those

  seas)

  seems to be chattering at me. Too deep?

  Someplace that is all speech?

  Someplace everything can be said to be

  about?

  Will we all know if it’s blindness, this

  way of seeing

  when it becomes

  apparent? Is there, in fact [who could

  tell me

  this?] a

  we? Where? The distances have everything in their

  grip of

  in-betweenness.

  For better [she said] or for worse [he said]

  taking their place alongside the thirst

  in line, something vaguely audible about

  the silence

  (a roar

  actually) (your sea at night) but not as

  fretful nor as monstrously tender

  as the sea wind-driven was

  earlier on

  in “creation.” Oh creation!

  What a mood that was. Seeding then dragging-up life and

  death in swatches

  for us to forage in. Needle, story, knot, the

  knot bit off,

  the plunging-in of its silvery proposal,

  stitch stitch still clicks

  the bird still on

  its limb, still in the mood, at the very edge

  of the giddy

  woods

  through which even this sharpest noon must

  bleed, ripped into

  flickering bits.

  It is nothing compared to us

  is it, that drip and strobe of the old-world’s

  gold

  passaging-through,

  nothing bending its forwardness, nothing

  being bent

  by it (though the wind, rattling the whole business,

  would make one think

  it so). Nothing

  compared. And yet it is

  there, truly there, in all sizes, that dry

  creation—

  woods, dappling melancholias of singled-out

  limb-ends, lichened trunk-

  flanks—shockedr />
  transparencies as if a rumor’s just passed

  through

  leaving this trail of inconclusive

  trembling bits of some

  momentous story.

  Was it true, this time, the rumor?

  The wherefore of our being here?

  Does it come true in the retelling?

  and truer in

  the re-

  presenting? It looks like laughter as the

  wind picks up and the blazing is tossed

  from branch to branch, dead bits, live

  bits,

  new growth taking the light less brightly than

  the blown-out lightning-strikes.

  Look: it is as if you are remembering

  the day

  you were born. The you. The newest witness. Bluish then

  empurpling then

  pink and ready to begin continuing.

  Lord of objects. Lord of bleeding and self-

  expression.

  I keep speaking this to you, as if in pity

  at the gradual filling of the vacancy

  by my very own gaze etcetera. Also the

  words—here and here—hoping

  this thing—along with all else that

  wears-out—will

  do. I think

  about you. Yet is only thinking omnipresent?

  Omniscience, omnipotence: that is all drama.

  But omnipresence: time all over the

  place!

  It’s like a trance, this time unspooling in

  this telling.

  Like land one suspects must be there, but where?

  The ocean kisses every inch of the seeable.

  We live. We speak at the horizon. After a

  while even the

  timidity

  wears off. One speaks. One is not mad.

  One lives so long one feels the noticing

  in all one sees.

  Years. Chapters.

  Someone is asking for your hand. One turns

  to speak.

  One wishes so one could be interrupted.

  AFTERWARDS

  I am beneath the tree. To the right the river is melting the young sun.

  And translucence itself, bare, bony, feeding and growing on the manifest,

  frets in the small puddles of snowmelt sidewalks and frozen lawns hold up

  full of sky.

  From this eternity, where we do not resemble ourselves, where

  resemblance is finally

  beside (as the river is) the point,

  and attention can no longer change the outcome of the gaze,

  the ear too is finally sated, starlings starting up ladderings of chatter,

  all at once all to the left,

  invisible in the pruned back

  hawthorn, heard and heard again, and yet again

  differently heard but silting

  the head with inwardness and making always a

  dispersing but still

  coalescing opening in the listener who

  cannot look at them exactly,

  since they are invisible inside the greens—though screeching-full in

  syncopations of yellowest,

  fine-thought, finespun

  rivering of almost-knowables. “Gold” is too dark. “Featherwork”

  too thick. When two

  appear in flight, straight to the child-sized pond of

  melted snow,

  and thrash, dunk, rise, shake, rethrashing, reconfiguring through

  reshufflings and resettlings the whole body of integrated

  featherwork,

  they shatter open the blue-and-tree-tip filled-up gaze of

  the lawn’s two pools,

  breaking and ruffling all the crisp true sky we had seen living

  down in that tasseled

  earth. How shall we say this happened? Something inaudible

  has ceased. Has gone back round to an other side

  of which this side’s access was [is] this bodywidth of

  still sky

  deep in just-greening soil? We left the party without a word.

  We did not change, but time changed us. It should be,

  it seems, one or the other of us who is supposed to say—lest

  there be nothing—here we are. It was supposed to become familiar

  (this earth). It was to become “ours.” Lest there be nothing.

  Lest we reach down to touch our own reflection here.

  Shouldn’t depth come to sight and let it in, in the end, as the form

  the farewell takes: representation: dead men:

  lean forward and look in: the raggedness of where the openings

  are: precision of the limbs upthrusting down to hell:

  the gleaming in: so blue: and that it has a bottom: even a few clouds

  if you keep

  attending: and something that’s an edge-of: and mind-cracks: and how the

  poem is

  about that: that distant life: I carry it inside me but

  can plant it into soil: so that it becomes impossible

  to say that anything swayed

  from in to out: then back to “is this mine, or yours?”: the mind

  seeks danger out: it reaches in, would touch: where the subject

  is emptying,

  war is:

  morality play: preface: what there is to be thought: love:

  begin with the world: let it be small enough.

  GULLS

  Those neck-pointing out full bodylength and calling

  outwards over the breaking waves.

  Those standing in waves and letting them come and

  go over them.

  Those gathering head-down and over some one

  thing.

  Those still out there where motion is

  primarily a pulsing from underneath

  and the forward-motion so slight they lay

  their stillness on its swelling and falling

  and let themselves swell, fall …

  Sometimes the whole flock rising and running just

  as the last film of darkness rises

  leaving behind, also rising and falling in

  tiny upliftings,

  almost a mile of white underfeathers, up-turned, white spines

  gliding over the wet

  sand, in gusts, being blown down towards

  the unified inrolling awayness

  of white. All things turning white through

  breaking. The long red pointing of lowering sun

  going down on (but also streaking in towards) whoever

  might be standing at the point-of-view place

  from which this watching. This watching being risen

  from: as glance: along the red

  blurring and swaying water-path:

  to the singular redness: the glance a

  being-everywhere-risen-from: everywhere

  cawing, mewing, cries where a

  single bird lifts heavily

  just at shoreline, rip where

  its wing-tips (both) lap

  backwash, feet still in

  the wave-drag of it, to coast

  on top of its own shadow and then down to not

  landing.

  *

  Also just under the wave a thickening where

  sun breaks into two red circles upon the

  carried frothing—

  white and roiling, yes, yet unbreakably red—red pushed (slicked) under

  each wave (tucked) and, although breaking, always

  one—(as if from the back-end of distance red)—

  and that one flowing to

  here to slap the red it carries in glisten-sheets

  up onto shore and (also as if onto)

  my feet.

  *

  [Or onto my feet, then into my eyes] where red turns into “sun” again.

  So then it’s sun in surf-breaking water: incircling, smearing: mind not
<
br />   knowing if it’s still wave, breaking on

  itself, small glider, or if it’s “amidst” (red turning feathery)

  or rather “over” (the laciness of foambreak) or just what—(among

  the line of also smearingly reddening terns floating out now

  on the feathery backedge of foambroken

  looking)—it is.

  *

  The wind swallows my words one

  by

  one. The words leaping too, over their own

  staying.

  Oceanward too, as if being taken

  away

  into splash—my clutch of

  words

  swaying and stemming from my

  saying, no

  echo. No stopping on the temporarily exposed and drying rock

  out there

  to rub or rest where nothing else

  grows.

  And truly swift over the sands.

  As if most afraid of being re-

  peated.

  Preferring to be dissolved to

  designation,

  backglancing stirrings,

  wedged-in between unsaying and

  forgetting—

  what an enterprise—spoken out by

  me as if

  to still some last place, place becoming even as I speak

  unspeakable

  and so punctually—not even burnt

  by their crossing through the one great

  inwardness of

  mind, not by the straining to be held (grasped) by my

  meanings:

  “We shall have early fruit

  this year” one of the shades along the way

  calls out,

  and “from the beginning” (yet further on). Words: always face-down:

  listening falling upon them (as if from

  above):

  listening greedy, able to put them to death,

  flinging itself upon them: them open and attached

  so hard to

  what they carry:

  the only evidence in them of having

  been.

  And yet how they want to see behind themselves,

  as if there is something

  back there, always, behind these rows I

  gnaw the open with,

  feeling them rush a bit and crane to see beneath themselves,

  and always with such pain, just after emerging,

  twisting on their stems to see behind, as if there were a

  sun

  back there they need, as if it’s a betrayal,

  this single forward-facing: reference: dream of: ad-

  mission: re

  semblance: turning away from the page as if turning to a tryst:

  the gazing-straight-up at the reader there filled with ultimate

  fatigue:

  devoted servants: road signs: footprints: you are not alone:

  slowly in the listener the prisoners emerge:

  slowly in you reader they stand like madmen facing into the wind:

  nowhere is there any trace of blood

  spilled in the service of kings, or love, or for the sake of honor,