American Poetry Page 4
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—shocked
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,