Over Skype, I try to document my mother’s

bald-shaved youth—she has a surplus in truths,

and science has proven what it had to prove:

every helicopter-screech I dreamed of was my mother’s first.

Rippling my dumb hand, I wake up in childhood’s crypt,

where prayer is keyless as a foreign laugh overheard

and on the Masjid’s cobalt globe a ghost … an angel?

No, no … who am I kidding. When I say God,

what I mean is: I can barely stand to look

at my mother’s face. So, what if I’ve never seen

what she’s seen. I took the shape of her two hundred

and six bones—I did not choose her eyes. Did not

choose to masticate the ash of witness,

her crooked smile disclosing a swarm of flies,

Yes, missiles hailed there, named after ancient gods.

Hera—a word of disputed root—maybe from Erate,

beloved. And because my beloved is not a person

but a place in a headline I point to and avert my gaze,

I can now ask: would I have given up my mother for an alyssum

instead of asylum? Or one glass of water that did not

contain war? Her wound isn’t mine, yet what I needed most

was our roof to collapse on her like earth around stones.

Rain, the hard absence of skin. The silence of it—

no gust in my goddess. No artificial wind.

Exotic, “omg so thick,” a rug, so to speak—

black cortex, I can almost be beautiful

with you. Once, mother snatched

my split ends like newly acquired money

and named them Taliban Beard.

I never wanted this much of anything,

so I scissored you at the scrunchy

and sold you all to the World Wide Web.

In plastic bags, you were shipped

next to different manes, the past

stored in your filaments like fetuses

in formaldehyde, fragrances distending

as if skin of people huddled

into the eyeless belly of a boat at night.

Cut and alone, dark keratin lies cold

in factory halls: congregation of wait,

you’re patient until you too are wanted.

But when my spools stop, and the silence holds—

let them braid you into other heads.

Let them brush you for my funeral.

Let those of you spared on hospital tiles,

picked from lovers’ teeth, and nestled deep

in the vacuum, or shampooed

between dirt and debris in drains, light up.

May you glow with the weight of love

you can only share with what pries

out of yourself. Those stuck to balloons,

left in brushes, escapees taken away to elsewhere—

what is to be said of you? I won’t be gone

until you are. Heavy root

that rots to bloom when I shrink—

stay and conquer the sargasso in my tomb.

We funnel it between the stones.

What stones become is what

holds them together. A crushing

summer: white hydrangeas, in

dry winds, nod. In Adirondacks

we can’t fix, in a twilight beyond

repair, we recline, and an orange

tanager—what you asked

someone to come back

as—lights, and vanishes.

Oh sure, the pink slip, the lamb’s tongue—little

rougher than when I reached for its shape. A poem

does that—packs in the pastoral to moment,

blazes an erasure of the dried whey protein

feeding the creature, asks you to think of a mother

in a negative shape, feel the process of death

as a child, which is to say, somewhere else and not

any battered twine that touches you. In the corner—

look—that’s the filter I want to frame all the iPhone

pics I take back home: saturated nostalgia but the cold

light to tell you that I see something else,

an understanding that I eat without consequence

but its OK because I caressed the withers of sheep

or cows or whatever, that I knew where their slaughter

lived. My apartment has plants in it. I’m still a farmer.

My moon metaphors work with the almanac, that cold

light, that speculative distance tautening disgust

and reverence. But—look—so cute, so cauterized.

Translated by Marilyn Hacker

1

Begin, begin again, no matter where!

From now on it only

matters that every day you do

some task, a task

performed attentively,

honestly. It only matters

that you add to the unending construction of reality

(never completed) your very small daily share....

Through the telescope or with your one remaining eye

you see slowly, rather badly in detail,

but all in all well enough. Well enough to get your bearings.

Well enough to follow the road that little by little

reveals itself. Well enough to do your part

as best you can. After all, in fact,

does it matter, the task’s particulars,

the outline of the foot’s form in the sand,

or the goal where you finish, late, tired enough,

where you finish perhaps, sometimes, by arriving?

But there is no goal either.

The goal is always receding toward the unreached

dunes.

2

Easter is the opposite of Christmas.

The square empties, the living being disappears.

It is the end of visible fleshly life,

of meals, of hours of sleep. It’s the end

of action at once observed and dubious, measurable, measured,

kept secret, discreet.

                 Only two or three women encounter

the Present. They don’t ask themselves questions, they want

to know what is or isn’t. Then a few disciples, in groups,

including Thomas. Who must be approached and shown.

There thus do characters, states of mind differ.

                 At the same time, flowers, trees, life overflowing

the fields, awakened animals, moved to mate,

to feed, to kill. The triumph of the visible begins, the

material, which will not start to melt, to disappear

till the start of winter. Splendor of pelts.

Splendor of eyes, of paws. Total ignorance.

Ignorance of a more durable, longer-lasting world.

Is this the grossest, heaviest stage

of the stupefaction visible to the soul, there where it

cannot even remember, in any case no longer say...

3

No more sleeping pills. No more appearances.

No more symbols, in truth, neither stones nor plants.

Nor houses. Nor trees.

Come forward on my deserted paths, approach

my deserted spaces. I will be henceforth

the voice of silence, the shadow at your left on days

of brilliant light, the sound of steps on pebbles,

time that passes and passes so slowly, so fast;

I am your silence and what surrounds it; I am

your silence and what’s deepest, if seldom, in it.

Say goodnight to me, say good morning, good morning especially,

a long good morning as a work day starts

say good morning to me to call me, me here and now

me in my turn, you in your turn, us in our turn

to call us

to the creation.

4                                                        Easter Monday

Listen. Follow me. The man in the chapel,

excuse me, the church, Anglican, official and all that

explaining, commenting on, while looking at no one,

some very brief word in the Epistle to the Hebrews,

insists on that essential teaching of Christ,

preaching to us like the greatest pioneer.

Follow me. Come along after me. Walk behind me.

Is it a predilection for discipline? For modesty?

Is it authentic intelligence and heart?

I don’t know. I don’t even know

what is due to me, what I take undeserving?

I don’t know when I ought to stop.

And telephoning my confidante would in truth

be useless. She would vaguely reassure me, one might say at most,

for a few moments, at most. Those birds flying off,

are they carrying a ray, a crumb, a paltry

piece of my heart? Or nothing? Their shadow?

The shadow of their fear and of their lightness?

I would have so many questions for you.

5

Yellow beak, curved beak, rabbit’s nose,

swan’s bill. Bring me nothing. Teach me nothing.

I must wait. In the silence and the dark.

In the tormented night’s unsavory shadows.

In disorder. Must wait without even

a specific hope. Must wait until

the waited-for result has been achieved.

Wait, that is to say, for moments, opportunities,

the rarely fruitful I don’t-quite-know-whats.

Farewell, Floriane! I no longer know who you are,

what or whom you resemble. It’s too far.

It’s too shrill, too childish, too unimportant,

too free of everything, only a whim of the heart,

or was it the eye? Right now the others

are traveling, will soon try to sleep. Still others

are in bed and sleeping deeply. And others,

insomniac, finish reading one last

chapter. In other longitudes, others

celebrate the last hour of the day or the first

hour of the morning. The mistral solves nothing.

It takes time to make a single

observation, simple and true.

6                                       Easter Monday, 1:20 a.m.

Would I still know how to fill a day?

Or simply how to wait?

Fill nothing? Not even think of it,

not think of how to tell the difference

between filled urns and empty urns, but only

between the sleeper and the one who truly keeps watch.

7                                                                         2:30

Which one is it, which part, which, not the body

but some comparatively minimal part of the body, which one is it

that doesn’t want to sleep?

8                                                                         4:15

Wait for the morning, why? To be through with waiting?

Will it let me fall asleep comfortably at last?

To fall deeply asleep? As if I were

a healthy being, affirmed in his health at habitual hours.

Wait for the morning, let it come at last and dawn

on the indifferent hills, spread new light,

all fresh, on the indifferent streets

among the sleeping spectators.

When will I be able to return to what I knew?

9                                      Wednesday the 23rd, 1:45

Who needs you? No one.

Of course there are some who wouldn’t mind

having a drink, telling a story, taking a walk,

just talking, and who, in a way, for a moment,

if you were dead, would regret your disappearance.

But the fact that in the end, for you, on this earth,

not for them, you’ve disappeared, wouldn’t affect

their mood, their appetite, their wish to get going,

and why should that change anything at all?

Those, then, are the limits to keep in mind.

Within those limits, there’s a bit of space.

Nothing outlandish, but enough for the really

free man, really reasonable (if that word still

means anything whatsoever). It’s only, after all

about

preparing the usually ungrateful ground

where you will sow the seed, mediocre,

or, better still, uncertain, of your difficult growth.

And they, they also like to sleep, do nothing special,

believe a little, read a lot, take walks,

and not be forced each day to make useless

and uselessly spectacular choices. One doesn’t want

things to happen; one wants them to be, and to only change

slowly, very slowly, like real tissue

of a real body. That said, of course

I thank the guardian angel and think I recognize him

as well as is possible without yet having seen him.

Without having felt or heard or even

really sensed him. But I believe he exists.

Like the postman whom after all I’ve never seen

after six months in this new apartment.

How quickly time goes with its damages

at least as quickly as with its pleasures.

My little daughter is sleeping at this hour. Deep, even

breaths. Deep? Perhaps, yes, and in any case,

even. A tree, perhaps, believes it feels

insects darting or animals scratching

their rump on its thorns

or flies in search of unlimited flight.

This writing has become hard to read, minuscule,

not terribly clear, and—perhaps—destined

to fall back—perhaps—to a confused

and dubious level. Better to start learning

again, with elementary lessons

concerning the whole length of the body.

No strength to protect the titles and credits

in the developing of your film, or is it

the cover drawing in particular, with so many

drawings sometimes deformed or cut in two

in “artistic” cover designs?

Lord, allow me

to stay patient, to not ask for too much,

to know how to wait for the unpredictable,

the unpredicted, emerged briefly from some

shipwreck or catastrophe, if we escape it.

10                                                         Saturday 0:30

Nothing to say—everything to wait for

nothing to undertake—everything to do

and anyway, what’s poetry,

who knows, really knows?

No one knows it, no one does it

without a doubt, without a doubt in the soup,

in the salad, in the dessert.

Go to bed and try in your sleep

to be.

11                                                          2-5-57, 01:15

And there it is closed once more, the door that led

  to the dark, subterranean waters.

Of course, there is still damage. One closed eye.

  A large scar on the skull.

The insomnia of the first part of the night.

  The wretched teeth. The still-mediocre

memory. But all of that alive.

  What will you do from now on?

Sedentary work, somewhat solitary.

  A house in the country.

What will you do? That which must be done.

  That which presents itself. That which

insists. What will you do? You will live.

  A long time. Patiently. Without protesting.

You will live because you must live, because one must

  do what one was born to do. There is no

escape, no real one, possible. There is only

  the possibility of doing what one was born to do.

12                                                  3.5.57, 0100 o’clock

disorder is stubborn

Disorder, as soon as one has stopped wanting, always

returns by itself and easily.

Is disorder death’s preparation

or life’s goods acquired in passing,

untuned, unpunctuated, unpredictable?

Farewell slumber, farewell energy!

The spirit, unwearied, unsatisfied,

scours the walls of the afflicted brain.

The body, half asleep, is annoyed, tired,

doesn’t manage to oppose it.

It’s irritating, the spirit brings nothing,

finds nothing, only seeks,

perhaps only moves, sluggishly,

a few tiny degrees from left to right,

from right to left, without stopping, not

satisfied, finding no peace.

Will this dismal vigil go on for long?

Translated by Rebecca Ruth Gould and Kayvan Tahmasebian

I Justice

Each word

is sacrificed to a sword

that beams forth its light.

It rains.

Each word wears a white mask

and a self to be

submitted to the rain.

Each word is an angel

trembling from nakedness.

I have lifted the sword.

I rip the mask

off the word

and place it on my face.

I submit myself

to the rain

and before the scent of life ascends,

I take flight

with the angel’s two wings.

The rain has stopped.

The sun of language

draws near!

II Misty Dreams

The sky wanted

a misty sip from me

when the hood of the stroller filled with dew.

In the stroller, sleep seized you!

Through the vineyard, through the mist,

slumber and wine were distributed.

Cheers

in the mist!

Icarus

fell.

III Icaruses

The word with its movement—the word in flight—

has filled the space with the scent of flesh.

What is a poem but the movement of a word?

In the room the women

are talking of Icarus

while Icarus’s poem

is not composed.

Just one word:

the sun!

And if you return someday

from that burning pilgrimage,

I will fill the torches cup by cup with the sea

and you will know that its flame

is the bluest and coldest of flames.

IV In Reverse

                   to Mohsen Saba

1

The one who left will never return

will collapse.

At the cloud the narcissus stares at the cloud.

It rains. It does not rain.

Beneath the wet cloak,

when will I be moved to bring the firewood?

2

Oh, my friend! My friend!

Twice is enough.

The third is spring air.

When Icarus falls

from the green sky

the narcissus’s corolla fills with rainwater.

Look inside! A small Icarus

ascends.

V From Icarus and the Bondsman of the Deer¹

Just as the thunderstorm in the rainbow

mixes colors with colors,

I wish that poetry could mix the two legends together

so that we could stare at each other in the poison sunrise,

and the plants would recognize water in the poison sunrise.

(Water is our majestic selflessness and has taught them

the secret of life and us the secret of death.)

And the sun would fit into the grape.

(The grape is the Holy Last Supper.)

Now that the flood of sun has taken the wing away,

the deer is helpless.

He falls.

Generous deer bestow nothing.

They watch and watch and watch.

Now that the sun slowly

moves west

on the hill, two fires have turned red.

The horizon is recognized in your compromise.

This horizon of bliss: the bondsman of water

concealed in wet firewood.

¹“Deer Bondsman” is a title for the eighth Shia Imam, Reza (whose name, meaning “bliss,” is referenced in the second to last line of this poem). According to legend, Imam Reza protected a deer from being killed by a hunter. He died after being poisoned by grapes. The two legends to which the poet refers are those of Imam Reza and Icarus.

I split three pills with my ficus and now

it’s being weird. It won’t drink my breath or eat

the sun or fight off

the spider and his wife, whom I also

split three pills with,

because it’s Christmas, because

I was sad driving past

the shuttered stationery shop and the woman

dragging her kid on a leash.

I split three pills with the woman

and three pills with the kid. I measured my heart rate

and pronounced myself legally dead. My ficus

gave me three pills. I felt better. I told

a bath towel, and my friend’s bulldog,

and the dregs at the bottom

of my tea. I told the three pills in my pocket

and the three pills

in my bed. Each one

a loose pearl

ready to string together

in my belly, in the bellies of people I loved

or thought of when I watched a pigeon

disappear inside a hawk.

I rode to Heaven on a bird that did-

n’t look like any bird I ever saw

Before I saw it    the bird’s wings    were wide

And long and brightly    colored and had no

Feathers but    panels    like glass    held together

By black bones criss-    crossing them from the ground

They must have looked like stained glass flying to Heaven

Church windows carrying    a black bird’s wing-

less body and my body up    between them

The bird’s    body was black as the night sky

Was back    when I was running with my momma

Before I wouldn’t    run no more and she

Beat me and Mrs. Davis saw and took me

Like glass    like any hard thing    would’ve broke them

You walk through Heaven anywhere to any-

where on that soft green grass    or nowhere it

Don’t matter anywhere you walk a bright

And cool and it’s about    a foot-wide stream of

The cleanest water anywhere with each

Step you take parts the grass beside you

On your left side    if you’re left-handed

And on your right side otherwise just reach

Down if you’re thirsty or you’re dirty or

You’re hot    they got the sun in Heaven still

And folks get hot sometimes    me    sometimes I

Walk just to see the stream appear

Sometimes I lead it    through my name    on Earth I couldn’t spell

My name now my great thirst has been revealed to me

Looking out at Constable’s distances,

nothing I wanted to be, what I am.

He grows on you, Constable, so childish

at the beginning, toy farms, slow pastures,

the small trees bundled up as if for sale,

everything schooled out and diminished in

the direction of Salisbury—or

is it Dedham?—1804, thirty,

and already decades behind Turner.

History is easy. I could write all day

dropping names into the spaces between.

Most of C’s best oils are on paper or

are drafts of pieces that get too finally

finished, even the very great ones

on which his fame, as we like say, “rests.”

Please look at his A Cart with Two Horses,

1814, workhorses of course, one

posed in profile, the other turned toward

the back of the painting, sold privately

cheaply, like most of his work. Millionaire

Turner evolves into near abstraction,

asking light to be sunlight purely, fire

from within nothing but what he calls a

landscape. Besides, he traveled, an antique

traveler in antique lands. But I love C’s

local Study of Tree Trunks, with a figure

beside them, more oil on paper, seven

years after Horses. Constable’s aging.

He thinks I’m a cloud, a long white body

lying in the air over Hampstead; he thinks

clouds of storm shapes are bodies, like great elms.

I’m his anomaly, still thinning out.

Another day he sees me lying down

undulant in the middle distance, the

cloud come at last to earth as the earth is

part of the corn, the good ground under corn,

the painting piecemeal, the way he paints, so

that you have to stand at a real middle

distance just to see me. Turner wants me

to be The Angel Standing in the Sun,

apocalyptic in the afterlife,

though I prefer my body as a field

in which I live over again as flesh—

or is it flush?—against a stream, or of

the stream, as C also sees me, where a

boy on a barge on canvas is taking

a cloud-white horse to its destination

far downriver. And I am the water.

And the light in the water. And if it

is possible, having also been of

the plowed and planted and replanted earth,

I am the sky domed over the boat boy’s

possible future, when he then arrives

and puts to work all that really matters.

The last of my kind, one of the last lovers of flowers

and the lawns of the northern grasses, and certainly

one of the few able to rub backsides with the baobab

and the century-nearing oak still surviving in the yard.

The trick is stone, to look like something broken

from a mountain, something so leftover so as not

to be alive, yet resemble in demeanor dream anger,

the kind that wakes you out of breath talking to yourself

in that language that starts in the belly and the bowel.

Old age is a disguise, the hard outside, the soft inside.

Even the plated armor is turning dust, then one foot

after the other, neuropathy my gravity, the footprint

larger, deeper. I hardly recognize myself except in

memory, except when the mind overwhelms the lonely

body. So I lumber on, part of me empty, part of me

filled with longing—I’m half-blind but see what I see,

the half sun on the hill. How long a life is too long,

as I take my time from here to there, the one world

dried-out distances, nose, horn, my great head lifted down,

the tonnage of my heart almost more than I can carry....

               Machine

guns

between their brows—

blood flowers bloom.

               Child of summer

dawn—

               tracing

horses in the mud.

               Midnight

               Skylarks

under storm, ferrying

               bodies one

by one.

               Rage

Volcanic

               ash

covered highlands:

               jittery dance

of

the jewel beetle.

Sunflower

               petals,

falling on a

black mass

               of

ants.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways:

1. autonomy 2. elective howl 3. showed teeth

4. used the veto 5. with hello 6. a wet economy

7. clothed 8. two-tone 9. elusive 10. the way home

11. at home 12. coveted 13. until we see how 14. hotly

15. steely hot 16. on leave 17. with too much weed

18. two (loosely) 19. dew theme 20. in vacuo 21. the the

22. tentatively we 23. somehow 24. the loud echo

25. the détente 26. touchily 27. a wholesome vow

28. the old way 29. cue the wolves 30. the emotion

31. semidevoutly 32. how we once 33. at the hotel

34. wholesale 35. too mute 36. in the towed Chevy

37. when woe lets me 38. to the void 39. oh acutely

40. sweetly 41. moved out 42. alone 43. with the echo

^{Between Memphis and Bristol}

Turtletown  Cottontown  Reagantown

Trade Pigeon  Forge  Coalfield  Hurricane  Gray

Huntersville  Fisherville  Manlyville  Guys

Static  Gentry  Difficult  Bride

Shackle  Island  Bone  Cave  Pioneer  Swift

Wartrace  Nixon  Ransom  Stand  Gift

Barren  Plain  Nameless  Cherokee  Pope

Campaign  White House  Purdy  New  Hope

Bugscuffle  Speedwell  Tazewell  Yell

Brick Church  Hanging Limb  Burnt Church  Bells

Littlelot  Bucksnort  Bitter End  Boone

Needmore  Prospect  Liberty  Moons