Ideas

In the middle of the wood it starts,
Then over the wall and the meadow
And into our ears all day. But it departs—
Sometimes—like a shadow.

There is an instant when it grows
Too weak to climb a solid fence,
And creeps to find a crack. But the wind blows,
Scattering it hence

In whimpering fragments like the leaves
That every autumn drives before.
Then rain again in the hills—and the brook receives
It home with a roar.

From the middle of the wood again,
Over the wall and the meadow,
It comes one day to the minds of waiting men
Like a shadow.

When buffeted and beaten by life’s storms,
When by the bitter cares of life oppressed,
I want no surer haven than your arms,
I want no sweeter heaven than your breast.

When over my life’s way there falls the blight
Of sunless days, and nights of starless skies;
Enough for me, the calm and steadfast light
That softly shines within your loving eyes.

The world, for me, and all the world can hold
Is circled by your arms; for me there lies,
Within the lights and shadows of your eyes,
The only beauty that is never old.

You looked inside
For what the perishable flesh might hide; 
And now you say that inner part
Will represent her in my heart. 

I tell you no.
Philosopher, I say I loved her so
I did not dig within—content
When seasons came, when seasons went.

When she would frown,
You think I set the meaning of it down?
The meaning goes; but something stays
I shall have with me all my days—

Her forehead bare
One instant, then blown over by her hair; 
A sudden turn; her hand at rest
Upon a window toward the west. . . .

Those years are foliage of trees
their trunks hidden by bushes;
behind them a gray haze topped with silver
hides the swinging steps of my first love
the Danube.

On its face
grave steel palaces with smoking torches,
parading monasteries moved slowly to the Black Sea
till the bared branches scratched the north wind.

On its bed
a great Leviathan waited
for the ceremonies on the arrival of Messiah
and bobbing small fishes snapped sun splinters
for the pleasure of the monster.

Along its shores
red capped little hours danced
with rainbow colored kites,
messengers to heaven.

My memory is a sigh
of swallows swinging
through a slow dormant summer
to a timid line on the horizon.

^{(Written in her fifteenth year)}

How sweet the hour when daylight blends 
   With the pensive shadows on evening’s breast; 
And dear to the heart is the pleasure it lends, 
   For ‘tis like the departure of saints to their rest. 

Oh, ‘tis sweet, Saranac, on thy loved banks to stray 
    To watch the last day-beam dance light on thy wave, 
To mark the white skiff as it skims o’er the bay, 
    Or heedlessly bounds o’er the warrior's grave. 

Oh, 'tis sweet to a heart unentangled and light, 
   When with hope’s brilliant prospects the fancy is blest, 
To pause ‘mid its day-dreams so witchingly bright, 
  And mark the last sunbeams, while sinking to rest. 

                     I. 

Do you hear the witches wailing? 
       Witches wailing, wailing, wailing, 
Do you see the ghost robes trailing?
Ghost robes trailing, trailing, trailing
It is but a nighttime whisper, 
But a whisper of the zephyr?
Or my soul in secret meeting
The dim soul whose fate is loving? 
     Tell me, tell me, tell me, 
            Voices of the dusk. 
 
                       II. 

Do you see those spirits lonely? 
    Spirits lonely, lonely, lonely. 
Can they be for lost souls only? 
    Lost souls only, only, only. 
Are they but the fearful phantoms, 
Fearful phantoms from my fancy? 
Or the sprites of conscience stricken 
From a region long forgotten? 
    Tell me, tell me, tell me, 
           Voices of the Dusk. 

                                  I. 

Your soul and mine have gone the way of life:—

The dusty road where toiled the elfin strife—

Your hand entwined this hand of mine in love,

Your heart induced to scorn the clouds above—

And all the world was like a rose crowned song. 

                                  II. 

Your soul and mine have gone the way of life:—

We twain have bleeding wounds from Love's deep knife,

But you have kissed the tears that moist my cheeks

And lifted me beyond the cragged peaks—

And now the world is like a rose crowned song. 

I found you and I lost you, 
   All on a gleaming day. 
The day was filled with sunshine,
   And the land was full of May. 

A golden bird was singing
   Its melody divine, 
I found you and I loved you, 
   And all the world was mine. 

I found you and I lost you, 
   All on a golden day, 
But when I dream of you, dear, 
   It is always brimming May.

We two are left:
I with small grace reveal
distaste and bitterness;
you with small patience
take my hands;
though effortless,
you scald their weight
as a bowl, lined with embers,
wherein droop
great petals of white rose,
forced by the heat
too soon to break.

We two are left:
as a blank wall, the world,
earth and the men who talk,
saying their space of life
is good and gracious,
with eyes blank
as that blank surface
their ignorance mistakes
for final shelter
and a resting-place.

We two remain:
yet by what miracle,
searching within the tangles of my brain,
I ask again,
have we two met within
this maze of dædal paths
in-wound mid grievous stone,
where once I stood alone?

Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,

treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:

your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.

Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?
 

I

Weed, moss-weed,
root tangled in sand,
sea-iris, brittle flower,
one petal like a shell
is broken,
and you print a shadow
like a thin twig.
Fortunate one,
scented and stinging,
rigid myrrh-bud,
camphor-flower,
sweet and salt—you are wind
in our nostrils.

II

Do the murex-fishers
drench you as they pass?
Do your roots drag up colour
from the sand?
Have they slipped gold under you—
rivets of gold?
Band of iris-flowers
above the waves,
you are painted blue,
painted like a fresh prow
stained among the salt weeds.

The night has cut
each from each
and curled the petals
back from the stalk
and under it in crisp rows;

under at an unfaltering pace,
under till the rinds break,
back till each bent leaf
is parted from its stalk;

under at a grave pace,
under till the leaves
are bent back
till they drop upon earth,
back till they are all broken.

O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand,
but leave the stark core
of the rose
to perish on the branch.

    That in 1869 Miss Jex-Blake and four other women entered for a medical degree at the University of Edinburgh?
    That the president of the College of Physicians refused to give the women the prizes they had won?
    That the undergraduates insulted any professor who allowed women to compete for prizes?
    That the women were stoned in the streets, and finally excluded from the medical school?
    That in 1877 the British Medical Association declared women ineligible for membership?
    That in 1881 the International Medical Congress excluded women from all but its “social and ceremonial meetings”?
    That the Obstetrical Society refused to allow a woman’s name to appear on the title page of a pamphlet which she had written with her husband?
    That according to a recent dispatch from London, many hospitals, since the outbreak of hostilities, have asked women to become resident physicians, and public authorities are daily endeavoring to obtain women as assistant medical officers and as school doctors?

I will think of water-lilies
Growing in a darkened pool,
And my breath shall move like water,
And my hands be limp and cool.

It shall be as though I waited
In a wooden place alone;
I will learn the peace of lilies
And will take it for my own.

If a twinge of thought, if yearning
Come like wind into this place,
I will bear it like the shadow
Of a leaf across my face.

It is best now
to give suffering its way with me,
like a sea with a stone,
and let the spray which is others' joy—
the spray dancing on those
I bumped against
while bounding and tumbling and rolling here—
give me content.

Suffering
carves smoothness
which cannot cut any longer—
should I roll again. 

Come to me in the silence of the night;
    Come in the speaking silence of a dream;
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
    As sunlight on a stream;
       Come back in tears,
O memory, hope, love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter sweet,
    Whose wakening should have been in Paradise,
Where souls brimful of love abide and meet;
    Where thirsting longing eyes
       Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

Yet come to me in dreams, that I may live
    My very life again though cold in death:
Come back to me in dreams, that I may give
    Pulse for pulse, breath for breath:
       Speak low, lean low,
As long ago, my love, how long ago!

I am not yours, not lost in you,
Not lost, although I long to be
Lost as a candle lit at noon,
Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

You love me, and I find you still
A spirit beautiful and bright,
Yet I am I, who long to be
Lost as a light is lost in light.

Oh plunge me deep in love—put out
My senses, leave me deaf and blind,
Swept by the tempest of your love,
A taper in a rushing wind.

(War Time)

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

How like the sea, the myriad-minded sea,
Is this large love of ours: so vast, so deep,
So full of myseries! it, too, can keep
Its secrets, like the ocean; and is free,
Free, as the boundless main. Now it may be
Calm like the brow of some sweet child asleep;
Again its seething billows surge and leap
And break in fulness of their ecstasy.

Each wave so like the wave which came before,
Yet never two the same! Imperative
And then persuasive as the cooing dove,
Encroaching ever on the yielding shore—
Ready to take; yet readier still to give—
How like the myriad-minded sea, is love.

The hours steal by with still, unasking lips—
     So lightly that I cannot hear their tread;
And softly touch me with their finger-tips
     To find if I be dreaming, or be dead.

And yet however still their flight may be,
     Their ceaseless going weights my heart with tears;
These touches will have wrought deep scars on me—
     When the light hours have worn to heavy years.

When they finished burying me, what was left of me
sent up a demand like a hand blooming in the fresh dirt:

When I’m back, I want a body like a slash of lightning.
If they heard me, I couldn’t hear their answers.

But silence has never stopped me from praying.
Alive, how many nights did I spend knelt between

the knees of gods and men begging for rain, rent,
and reasons to remain? A body like the sky seeking

justice. A body like light reaching right down into the field
where you thought you could hide from me.

They’ve taken their bald rose stems and black umbrellas
home now. They’ve cooked for one another, sung hymns

as if they didn’t prefer jazz. I’m just a memory now.
But history has never stopped me from praying.

for Thapelo Makutle

All throat now      already brighter than the stars.

I could hold you in my song. Sotto voce, tremble

against me: a breeze slips in, cools my blood

to garnet      bed stained with stones, cold and finally

useless            I Orpheo,       I lyre.  Down river, even damned

with hum, there is room for your cry in my mouth       Sweet,

sweet sotto voce, I sang your moan until       the machete

swung      then I kept singing. I eyeless,      I eternal.

The guards hold blades to the sky and cut the dark open.

Do you hear me raining        from the wound? My tongue

is a kingdom       You live there.

Let them not say:   we did not see it.
We saw.

Let them not say:   we did not hear it.
We heard.

Let them not say:     they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled.

Let them not say:   it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands.

Let them not say:     they did nothing.
We did not-enough.

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned.

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

—2014

I have violence in me, of rage, and of necessity, and my love has none.

When pushed to it I would punch a man, or maybe wield a gun, but I am stopped by his pure disgust.

This is something new in me: I have sometimes wished death, where I hadn’t before.

While I wasn’t looking it left me, some of my tenderness, and in leaving something tensed where it had been.

Like A., praying for the man to get hit by a car who yelled at me so loudly, for so long, followed us to keep yelling.

There is malice in the world, and maybe some of it is ours now.

“Why should I cater to you” he said to me, so loudly, in my white high-waisted shorts and my clogs like my mom’s with my hair piled on top of my head, and this word, “cater,” it made me laugh.

Sometimes a poet can tell when a word is not a speaker’s own.

So that I could stop obsessing about this very possibility, I had practiced a response to yelling, and though I surprised myself by responding in exactly this practiced way of course nothing changed.

Language can be about force instead of relation.

When an experience is not really “about you” you can still be there, experiencing it.

“There are only two kinds of people,” he said, so loudly.

Maybe he’s right: maybe there are those who are violent, or who could be, and those who aren’t.

But the watermelon I bring home is yellow on the inside, and the melon my mother takes from the bin of smooth-rind honeydew is a cantaloupe.

This is not about fruit.

A poet is not inherently good.

It’s about how, at the end of the violence, I still want to know—what did it matter to him?

I can’t remember my dad calling me a sissy,
but he definitely told me not to be a sissy.
I secretly (or not so secretly) liked all the sissy
things. We had a hunting dog named Sissy.
Really: Sissy. My father nicknamed my sister: Sissy.
Still, he says, “How’s Sissy?” and calls her Sissy
when she goes home to visit him. Belinda (Sissy)
is one of the toughest people I know. My sissy
(sister) has kicked someone’s ass, which isn’t sissy-
ish, I guess, though I want to redefine sissy
into something fabulous, tough, tender, “sissy-
tough.” Drag queens are damn tough and sissies.
I’m pretty fucking tough and a big, big sissy,
too. And kind. Tough and kind and happy: a sissy.

who hurt you here by the river
at the supermarket who hurt you
who saw you hurting who hurt
you who saw you hurting who
turned around and walked away

                          exit exit we must exit but how i have no
                          advice no direction but up and over and
                          swerve swerve the metal circle rusted and
                          dissolved on the side of the road it was left
                          after construction de stabilize meaning
                          and reinvent history but only if history
                          oppressed you six women naked in a hot
                          tub and we won't leave this house in the
                          country six women naked in a hot tub

we end it together so we can begin it
again we begin it was a different
rhythm we don't forget our fear we
were never afraid in the woods even
though we knew what was in the woods

we looking in the dirt
for something we all
putting our hands in the
dirt a gesture we saw
before somewhere on
someone she didn't
speak we didn't speak
to each other the forest
lit our hands a gesture

erase ignore separate
they say they tell us
they tell us to be an
individual that we can
be individuals we
cannot be individuals
any more

turns out
there are more planets than stars
more places to land
than to be burned

I have always been in love with
last chances especially 
now that they really do 
seem like last chances

the trill of it all upending
what’s left of my head
after we explode

are you ready to ascend
in the morning I will take you
on the wing

This is like a life. This is lifelike.
I climb inside a mistake
and remake myself in the shape
of a better mistake—
a nice pair of glasses
without any lenses,
shoes that don’t quite fit,
a chest that always hurts.
There is a checklist of things
you need to do to be a person.
I don’t want to be a person
but there isn’t a choice,
so I work my way down and
kiss the feet.
I work my way up and lick
the knee.
I give you my skull
to do with whatever you please.
You grow flowers from my head
and trim them too short.
I paint my nails nice and pretty
and who cares. Who gives a shit.
I’m trying not to give a shit
but it doesn’t fit well on me.
I wear my clothes. I wear my body.
I walk out in the grass and turn red
at the sight of everything.

^{Yet I was, in peculiar truth, a very lucky boy.
            —James Baldwin}

In any case, the story begins
with darkness. A classroom. 

A broom closet. A bowl of bruised 
light held over a city. Or, the story 

begins with a child playing
the role of an ashy plum—

how it rises to meet the man's teeth
or doesn't. How the skin is broken 

or breaks because the body just wants
what it wants: to be a hallway 

where men hang their photos
on the wall. Does that make sense?

To want to own the image of the man
but not the man? To bask in that memory

of what first nailed you to the dark? 

No matter how old you are,
it helps to be young
when you’re coming to life,

to be unfinished, a mysterious statement,
a journey from star to star.
So break out a box of Crayolas

and draw your family
looking uncomfortably away
from the you you’ve exchanged

for the mannequin
they named. You should
help clean up, but you’re so busy being afraid

to love or not
you're missing the fun of clothing yourself
in the embarrassment of life.

Frost your lids with midnight;
lid your heart with frost;
rub them all over, the hormones that regulate

the production of love
from karmic garbage dumps.
Turn yourself into

the real you
you can only discover
by being other.

Voila! You’re free.
Learn to love the awkward silence
you are going to be.

we cannot explain the world, named the same as marrow beaten to glue
            bones circling the belly of the Earth
            our voices shattering the glass windows
of unrelenting, heated houses: mother describes the world: a tumour. yes.

the broad and flat elements of borders. yes. like zodiacs.
            yes. mirage of a late world, slung from tractor factories.
            yes. still hidden from the door, a warbler is undone by singing today. 
yes. Signal Hill, Castries, Bagatelle, until gone, we—sudden and halved.

my mother says, look how we are astonished
            by the jails, I say, by the floors holding our reflections
knowing enough medicine, enough 
            to call the burning world back to love

if I outline myself in nothing now, a time-travelling letter
            is it that I have known the map
the maker of it, the doors, 
            the maker of them, and yet near the last of time, 
your trembling, so endless, it is that I am static stunned, 
            still, by our movements between forms 

            and for the sake of alchemy we talk of butterflies
            passing over New York, meeting no resistance 
going past the galvanized sheds. they are cut-outs of themselves
at 560 miles beyond our Earth, passing through the tall grasses

next to a fortune of mirrors and years, more sounds of fur 
            find me there with yellow mud, enough and more tiffs
            proof of the waterlog of companionship, the demisting riverbed
more terrifying now: the body embattled by itself. things we are astonished by—

Proof that we live in a broken world and a broken world is unlivable.

Proof that the carrot turns into the stick and vice versa. Proof that that seems normal, self-sufficient.

Proof that we sometimes destroy things that are broken and can’t be
fixed and sometimes fix things because to live with them broken is
unthinkable.

Proof that we switch roles, sometimes to destroy things that are
broken and can’t be fixed and sometimes to live with things that are
broken because to fix them would be unthinkable

Proof that we learn to live with the unthinkable.

Rectangles in tangerine, orange and persimmon fall into place, take
our names, simulate full hands. Proof that having full hands leaves
no time for questions.

Proof that we can’t help grabbing the sharp end, even when all the
warnings are there.

Proof that we find the hot water, the hot water finds us.
Proof in the tongue of ruin and burn. Fluent in the language of minus.

The trees have fallen and the forest comes apart.

Proof then by reading it on paper. Proof in unmarked bills. Line by
Line our eyes fill up with witness: Morning as clear as glass.

Can stones be far behind?

To the night I offered a flower
and the dark sky accepted it
like earth, bedding
for light.

To the desert I offered an apple
and the dunes received it
like a mouth, speaking 
for wind.

To the installation I offered a tree
and the museum planted it
like a man, viewing 
his place.

To the ocean I offered a seed 
and its body dissolved it
like time, composing
a life.

The sound of quiet. The sky 
indigo, steeping 
deeper from the top, like tea.
In the absence
of anything else, my own
breathing became obscene.
I heard the beating
of bats’ wings before 
the air troubled above 
my head, turned to look
and saw them gone.
On the surface of the black
lake, a swan and the moon
stayed perfectly 
still. I knew this was
a perfect moment.
Which would only hurt me
to remember and never
live again. My God. How lucky to have lived
a life I would die for.

I talk to a screen who assures me everything is fine.

I am not broken. I am not depressed. I am simply

in touch with the material conditions of my life. It is

the end of the world, and it’s fine. People laugh

about this, self-soothing engines sputtering

through a nosedive. Not me. I’ve gone and lost my

sense of humor when I need it most. This is why I

speak smoke into a scene. I dance against language

and abandon verse halfway through, like a broken-

throated singer. I wander around the front yard,

pathless as a little ant at the tip of a curled-up

cactus. Birds flit in and out of shining branches.

A garden blooms large in my throat. Color and life

conspire against my idea of the world. I have to

laugh until I am crying, make an ocean to land

upon in this sea of flames. Here I am.  

Another late-winter afternoon,

            the sunset and the purple-flowered tree

trying their best to keep me alive.

The shrieks of children
tumbling in the roaring body of the ocean
                 is glee.
But fill me with dread—glee? the ocean? children?
And the hysterical 
           wisteria. That frantic and purple
                      emissary of the encroaching jungle. 
I think the jungle will win, wind—in the end—its tensile vines
around the throats and raised swords of sun scorched monuments,
collapse the flag poles and balustrades, whatever stakes
           are planted there, will charge
the volition of its green abundance, wild against the wild
                     volition of the frothing ocean. Marry it. What children
will march in that conjugal procession with crowns of kelp
                                             and frantic purple flowers?

^{“In 2015, the Spanish Parliament [. . .] enacted a law inviting the Sephardim—Jews who trace their roots to Spain—to return.”
            —from “Spain’s Attempt to Atone for a 500-Year-Old Sin”
                The Atlantic, Sept. 21, 2019}

Land slit like a throat, life poured out
like gold coins on cobblestone. Confessions
pulled from tongues like toenails off toes.
Piled with scorched scrolls: our paschal pyre,

confessions extracted like gold, coins swallowed
then picked from the coals. Nothing sacred
but pyres piled, a pathetic penance, my hands
washed with my blood, an act of faith?

Is nothing sacred but my ashes, picture
of oblivion, my name oblivion? My faith forgets
its name, washed with blood, my act
of courage or escape. Am I nothing? What is nothing?

Oblivion forgets my name, my faith the thing
they cannot take, the gold I protect with my life.
What is courage or escape? It is nothing I can lose
or forsake, they took everything that tied me to this place.

They cannot take my faith, I protect it like gold
pulled from tongues like toenails off toes,
there’s nothing left to tie me to this place.
Land slit like a throat, gold poured out.