American Poetry Read online

  or for some other reason.

  EVOLUTION

  My nakedness is very slow.

  I call to it, I waste my sympathy.

  Comparison, too, is very slow.

  Where is the past?

  I sense that we should keep this coming.

  Something like joy rivulets along the sand.

  I insist that we “go in.” We go in.

  One cannot keep all of it. What is enough

  of it. And keep?—I am being swept away—

  what is keep? A waking good.

  Visibility blocking the view.

  Although we associate the manifest with kindness,

  we do. The way it goes where it goes, slight downslope,

  like the word “suddenly,” the incline it causes.

  Also the eye’s wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave

  by wave

  pack down and slick.

  The journey—some journey—visits me.

  Then the downslope once again.

  And how it makes what happens

  always more heavily

  laden, this self only able to sink (albeit also

  lifting as in a

  sudden draught)

  into the future. Our future. Where everyone

  is patient.

  Where all the sentences come to complete themselves.

  Where what wants to be human still won’t show

  its face.

  VIA NEGATIVA

  Gracious will. Gracious indistinct.

  Everything depends on the point where nothing can be said.

  From there we can deduce how

  from now on nothing will be like.

  Here lies: a border then the un-

  just. Do I have, for example,

  a heart? Does it only feel if you make “sense” of me?

  Can it, for example, make me “see”?

  Can it make me not see?

  That we shall never know, of each other now, more.

  That there is a no more. Hot and singular.

  Surrounded by our first-persons: the no-more.

  Before death’s obligatory plurality.

  But I do know you by heart.

  Also know other things by heart.

  Interior, spiral, damnation, your name.

  What would be the opposite of “you”?

  When I “think,” it is near the future, just this

  side of it.

  Something I can’t conceive of without saying you.

  The desert is fueled. My desert is fueled.

  Daybreak a chaos in which things first come forth

  then mix

  as in an oasis, thirsty

  for distinguishment.

  Then the angels who need bodies to walk in.

  Then something breaking light further as in: “it came to

  pass,” or

  the way my words, encountered, are cancelled,

  especially if true, and how they insist on encounter:

  finally: in the world: “the impossible”: “the little”:

  “in the house over there”: “elsewhere than here”:

  What is this (erasure) (read on) is it a warning:

  omit me: go back out: go back in: say:

  no way to go in: go in: measure:

  the little fabric vanishes, ascends, descends, vanishes,

  say twenty seconds, say wall

  (at the same time there is a specific temperature)

  (so that eventually the light goes down all the lights go out

  together

  till the level is reached where a fall begins) (more or less

  long)

  COVENANT

  She was being readied by forces she did not

  recognize. This in an age in which imagination

  is no longer all-powerful. Where if you had

  to write the whole thing down, you could.

  (Imagine: to see the whole thing written down.)

  Everything but memory abolished.

  All the necessary explanations also provided.

  A very round place: everyone is doing it.

  “It”: a very round and glad place.

  Feeling life come from far away, like a motor approaching.

  And in its approach: that moment when it is closest, so loud, as if

  not only near you, but in you.

  And that being the place where the sensation of real property

  begins. Come. It is going to pass, even though right

  now

  it’s very loud, here, alongside, life, life, so glad to be in it,

  no?, unprotected, thank you, exactly the way I feel.

  And you? Lord how close it comes. It has a

  seeming to it

  so bright it is as if it had no core.

  It all given over to the outline of seem:

  still approaching, blind, open, its continuing elsewhere unthinkable as a

  gear-shift

  at this speed.

  Approaching as if with a big question.

  No other system but this one and it growing larger.

  All at once, as if all the voices now are suddenly one voice.

  Ah, it is here now, the here. [Love, where is love, can it too

  be this thing that simply grows insistently louder]

  [It seems impossible it could ever pass by] [she thought]

  the eruption of presentness right here: your veins

  [Meanwhile a dream floats in an unvisited field]

  [There by the edge of the barn, above the two green-lichened

  stones, where for an instant a butterfly color of chicory

  flicks, dis-

  appears]How old-fashioned: distance: squinting it

  into

  view. Even further: rocks at year’s lowest tide.

  The always-underneath excitedly exposed to heat, light, wind, the

  being-seen. Who could have known a glance could be

  so plastic. Rubbery and pushing down on all the tiny hissing overbright

  greens.

  O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?

  The engine [of the most] is passing now.

  At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me

  passing now.

  So as to leave what behind?

  We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?

  And to have it come so close and yet not know it:

  how in time you do not move on:

  how there is no “other” side:

  how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot

  ever

  get away with it—the instant—what holds the “know”

  [as if gently, friend, as if mesmerized by love of it] [love of

  (not) making sense] (tide coming in) (then distance taking

  the perplexion

  of engine

  whitely in) (the covenant, the listening, drawing its parameters out

  just as it approaches its own unraveling)

  the covenant: yes: that there be plenitude, yes,

  but only as a simultaneous emptying—of the before, where it came

  from—and of the after (the eager place to which it so

  “eagerly” goes). Such rigorous logic, that undulating shape

  we make of

  our listening

  to it: being: being on time: in time: there seeming to be no actual

  being:

  all of it growing for a time closer and closer—as with a freight

  of sheer abstract

  abundance (the motor

  sound)(is all) followed by the full selfishness (of such

  well being) of the being

  (so full of innocence) actually (for the instant) here:

  I love you: the sky seems nearer: you are my first

  person:

  let no one question this tirelessness of approach:

  love big enough to hide the cage:
/>   tell them yourself who you are:

  no victory: ever: no ever: then what “happens”:

  you can hear the hum at its most constant: steady: the era:

  love bestowed upon love close-up:

  (quick, ask it of heaven now, whatever it was you so

  wished to

  know) the knowing: so final: yet here is the road, the

  context, ongoingness,

  and how it does go on regardless of the strangely sudden coming un-

  done of

  its passing away.

  Silence is welcomed without enthusiasm.

  Listening standing now like one who removed his hat

  out of respect for

  the passage.

  What comes in the aftermath they tell us is richly

  satisfying.

  No need to make a story up, for instance.

  We have been free now ever since, for instance.

  Three Poems

  Michael Palmer

  STONE

  What of that wolfhound at full stride?

  What of the woman in technical dress

  and the amber eye that serves as feral guide

  and witness

  to the snowy hive?

  What of the singer robed in red

  and frozen at mid-song

  and the stone, its brokenness,

  or the voice off-scene that says,

  Note the dragonfly by the iris

  but ask no questions of flight;

  no questions of iridescence?

  All of this

  and the faint promise of a sleeve,

  the shuttle’s course, the weave.

  What of these?

  What of that century, did you see it pass?

  What of that wolfhound at your back?

  AND

  The ship—what was her name, its name?

  Was it The Moth? Or The Moth

  that Electrifies Night? Or The Moth

  that Divides the Night in Half

  in its Passage toward the Fire?

  The fire of forgetting, that is,

  as we remember it,

  while in the scatter song of dailiness

  as it eddies out

  near turns to far, beeches, red cedars and oaks

  dating to the revolution, and a few long before,

  suddenly in unison are seen to fall,

  for so somewhere it is writ.

  And your project abandoned in fragments

  there beneath the elements,

  the snow of the season enfolding it,

  the flames of the season consuming it,

  improving it: Hashish, the tales it

  tells, the scented oils and modern festivals,

  the sphinx-like heads and the shining ornaments

  for ankle, waist, neck and wrist,

  dioramas, cosmoramas, pleoramas

  (from pleo, “I sail,” “I go by water”),

  the hierophant in wax, the iron and glass,

  the artificial rain and winds,

  mosaic thresholds, all of this

  bathed from above in diffuse light.

  We share the invisible nature of these

  things, our bodies and theirs.

  And the moon did not appear that night.

  —to the memory of a suicide

  UNTITLED (FEBRUARY 2000)

  The naked woman at the window

  her back to you, bowing the violin

  behind the lace curtain

  directly above the street

  is not a fiction

  as the partita is not a fiction

  its theme and variations

  ornaments and fills

  not a fiction

  as the one-way street still

  wet from all this

  rain is no fiction

  and nakedness not a fiction.

  It reads us like a book

  as we listen to its music

  through milky eyes wide shut.

  And what does this fiction think of us?

  The rain, the notes, both softly fall.

  Slight errors of intonation do not matter

  in the faded green

  notebooks where we record these

  things, and conceal other things.

  What’s the name of that tree, anyway,

  with yellow flowers, small silver leaves,

  planted in the concrete—

  I used to know.

  As for today, Leap Year Day,

  the window was empty.

  Reef: Shadow of Green

  Mark McMorris

  (rubble)

  As wordy as the wind, and as stifle as the leaf at noon

  the buildings of the town are standing by their word

  as I pass them, and double around to the wharf, to

  catch fish by the waters. All around me is the

  mangle of history that coughed once on the sidewalk—

  left, and I have wondered about the colors, behind

  the detritus of sea ports, cannon, juridical wigs, murders

  and the rum parties—dance hall bodies bumping, and

  I’ve been to the yards with kerosene tins boiling bananas

  and who was it that said, no relief for the black man?

  (air)

  The john crows wheel and drift over the green Warika Hills

  vulture birds that sometimes land and forage dogs

  still graceful from afar, prints on blue sky like cuneiform.

  I used to watch them through my father’s binoculars

  the wing-stabilizers, five feathers spread as from a hand

  articulate nature with her bestial ironies, the birds that love death

  wheel and drift, circulate in the heaven, biding their omens.

  (stone)

  The sweetie man selling chewing gum and stockings

  sets up on a bridge—a business to leave to the children?—

  that’s his regular spot. And I wave to him one day, passing

  through the village in a car, how yu doin’, Star, an he

  nothin’ doin’, Boss, you see how Mary get married? I

  don’t know any Virgin Mary, but he meant the 10-year-old

  now 30 who lived behind the dead-end, at the hillfoot,

  with Errol, or Maiah, or Hedley—some name like that,

  that means a man who is always looking for work

  with his own machete, his own spliff, and maybe a dog,

  an artificial leg, a big-belly concubine, a motorcycle.

  Mary come and go, sell newspaper, do a little day’s work

  washing and ironing, and keep the house clean, go and come.

  (wire)

  The wind says: I smelled the salt blast of the Palisadoes in my face,

  and was glad

  to see the airport still striving to be international, all that

  time to get landing rights for BOAC and Lufthansa, so a man

  can go to Germany and Holland, if him want. Driving in,

  things reek like dead jelly-fish and sweat, along a Paradise Boulevard

  and I spoke the teller, one morning at Barclays’ Bank,

  young lady, what is the hex change rate for 10,000 US?

  And she replied: either you is a thief or a capitalist, you know,

  is where you a get so much money? You think say me fool?

  My brethren you get lost in the Bible, over in Babylon

  but I have a Subaru to drive, an import license

  for TV dish and camera—digital, audio, telephoto banjo—

  a cell-phone, ackee and saltfish, Big Mac, more than I can eat

  until one day I went north to visit the Botanical Gardens

  that have its gate shut, because everything dead and dry.

  I telling you, that’s how it work down here, wid de suffaras.

  And you know what? I buy a dictionary to converse:

  (speech)

  yabba

  close yu mout, hear mi
r />   calabash and yarn

  a will full suspend of be leaf

  I be lieve in yu now, hear

  (politician talk)

  (light)

  No one was there, and nothing to beat it, and not any song

  that I can remember will say it better than the birth blood

  the 10,000 born in a gulag and that’s nothing in the scheme

  so quiet yuself and get wid the pogrom, a so them sey.

  And so, as in a tumbler of rum, the face trembles, and the hand

  swerves to ward off the light and of course there’s too much

  of it down here for a single image to contest, the sky eye—

  It does not give out. It does not diminish: words.

  callaloo

  two ell two oh: sailboat to America

  bangle

  name for a wrist chain copper

  gold

  tumblers of a watch, water proof

  (iron)

  (Leo dunk the watch in a bucket of water

  before him buy it to test the guarantee)

  Let me spell it out for you: water proof

  I back off because the problem is solved.

  (wood)

  The camera’s eye-lid, a noisy blink: yellow petals flowering

  Some sent their daughters to Vassar College in the north

  I married one, one yellow tree, one college, one minister

  some woke later than the gardner who cut the lawn

  and went astray, in the back yard, catching butterfly.

  One could still catch butterfly in those days, believe me,

  and I caught lizards, a bad cold, a beating, other things.

  Went to the wharf to see the skyscraper ships (New York).

  Went to university to see the knowledge heads (New York).

  No joy.

  Agouti is an animal and

  today is the hero’s birthday

  a statue erect: Bob Marley at the Arena

  gouging the population

  a South American movie

  I found the log book, a translator.

  * * * *

  The log-book opens: “America is conquered.

  We have seen no savages in months—no trace.

  The gods have left for more habitable spots.

  Send reinforcements: seven armadas, grazia.

  I leave these heirlooms to my replacement.

  rotting wood, methane gas, pulped star-apples

  the conchs carelessly dead

  (Our wives—were we ever married, were we?)

  Someone kept a catalogue of the landfall.

  (tongue)

  The undressed jungle at the water’s edge—

  green leaf like a naked belly.

  (Our wives—were we ever married?)

  The starfish with her pimply arms as

  rigid as a tongue on my neck.

  The sea urchin washed up from the sea bed—

  her prickly sex.

  The wounded skin of driftwood—