My flowers are reflected
In your mind
As you are reflected in your glass.
When you look at them,
There is nothing in your mind
Except the reflections
Of my flowers.
But when I look at them
I see only the reflections
In your mind,
And not my flowers.
It is my desire
To bring roses,
And place them before you
In a white dish.

mr. parker, here i
meant to speak
of dust, dust
and how
even
its perniciousness
echoes
godforce thru light,

perhaps what i
am trying to say:
i’ve grown tired
of singing
the blues,
mr. parker.
all these things i be,
bubbling up; heart-thawed
for a new round of reckonings,,

still, i
am not
who i
am when i
was where i
was,,,

i
am
only
these jangling
night lights
fixed
to a spirit
pleading
for the next
break of dawn
to lay me out
sunny-side,
to thread
my sternum
through to you;
bring
you a
love you
can
hold,,,, 

i’ll build
a glass house
of these
wonders, everything clear-
cut and brilliant and
still,
sometimes,
that late-june
sun unsexes
me
whole,,,,,

The pearls of his spine
came unstrung
at a bullet’s bite.
 
His regal neck
(that  Darling-
don’t-you-love-me?-curl)
 
just hung.
Two red dahlias
bloomed through white down,
 
dropped petals
on his chest, 
dyed the water maroon. 
 
                     -

I bring the brass swan
from junk shop
to bedside,
 
pack the wound
in its back
with pink plastic flowers,
 
say Yes, yes, I do,
each night before sleep.
In dreams I go
 
circling the lagoon
with webbed feet,
calling, calling for you.

Comes brazen, even in daylight, ordained by the gods
Holds infinite motes in suspension, appears citrine
Enters sometimes obliquely, outwits the amulet, the chant
Leaves a hot-to-touch scar, initiates a tenderness of decades
Says you are gone
Causes drought, chronic longing, the unwitting
             all-night vigil, tears on linoleum, the shut door
Manifests as pestilent thorns if overindulged or ignored
Transforms if acknowledged, gazed
           lightly upon, if made recipient of secret letters
Granulates in a climate of continuous acceptance
Reduces to lambent dust, self-luminous
Bestows a capacity for seeing, breaches
              the retina, darkens the limbal ring of the eye
Does not ever really leave, but suffuses the system
Hums in spring in the skull on the lap of the Magdalene
Links to the global network through which compassion passes
           as juice passes through my hands now folded on the tablecloth
           and into the hard green beginnings of our orchard’s plums
Repeats you are gone
Looks, under a microscope, like sugar many times refined
Heats the bulbs, the clenched peonies, the bunched-up
clumps of leaves to a point of capitulation
Opens glossy folios, ultraviolet, in the mind.

^{translated from the Arabic by Ammiel Alcalay, Khaled al-Hilli, and Emna Zghal}

It’s not on you, that when you left you realized house had no
arms to embrace, that you didn’t see its eyes to guide them to
where you hid the bundle of sorrow, and that it didn’t have a
shoulder upon which to whisper love, ask to attend to the rest
of the clothes, the china cabinet, and what’s left of the cough
medicine, don’t be uneasy if memories cling to your legs like
an orphaned girl, and if they don’t want to stay, take them
with you, like the bag of flour and the canister of gas and
the eye drops, you’ll find a place for them wherever you are.
Don’t tell them with your worn-out wisdom, stay to keep
the house company, don’t let it go through this alone.
It’s not on you — house, your child that you coddled,
is now a young man who will endure loneliness and bullets.
The kid you raised is a man who will endure war, and taste
the jabs of tanks for the first time, it’s not on you, you’ll see
it fatigued when you come back to it, yes, wounded maybe,
but still sure in its standing, soothing its shattered spirit,
drawing the shredded windows to its chest, and you,
like a Father, puzzled as to how to dress house’s wounds.

March 1, 2024

 

خارِج مِن البيتِ

،لا عليكَ، إنْ لمْ تَجِد للبيتِ حينَ خَرجتَ أذرُعاً للعِناقِ
،إنْ لمْ ترَ عَينيهِ كَي تَدِلَّهُما أينَ خَبّأتَ صُرَّة الأَسى
،وإنْ لمْ يَكُن لَهُ كَتِفٌ لِتهمسَ عندهُ بالمحبةِ
وتوصيه على بقيةِ الثيابِ، على خزانةِ الصحونِ، وما تيسَّرَ مِنْ
،دَواءِ السعالِ
لا تَكن ضَجِراً إنْ تعلّقتْ بساقَيك الذِكْرَيات مِثل طفلةٍ يتيمةٍ، ولمْ تَشَأ
البَقاء، خُذْها معك، مثل كيس الطحين وجرّة الغاز وقَطرة العَينِ، ستجِد
.لها مكاناً حيثُ تكون
لا تقلْ لها بحكمتِكَ الباليةِ: إبقِ، لتُؤنِسي البَيتَ ولا تدعِيه وحدَهُ
،يعبرُ التجربةَ
لا عليكَ، فالبيتُ طِفلُكَ الذي دلَّلْتَهُ، صارَ شاباً سيَحْتَمِلُ الوحدةَ
والرصاص، طفلُكَ الذي ربّيْتَه صارَ شاباً سيَحْتَمِلُ الحربَ ويتذوَّقُ للمرةِ
،الأولى لكماتِ الدبابات
،لا عليكَ، ستراهُ مُتعَباً حينَ تعودُ إليهِ، نعم، جريحاً، ربما
لكنّهُ واثقاً من وقوفِه، يهدْهدُ روحَهُ المفتَّتَة، يَلُمُّ على صدرِهِ
،نوافذَهُ الممزقة
.وأنتَ كأبٍ يحارُ كيفَ يضمِّد جراحَ البيتِ
،١  مارس/ آذار
٢٠٢٤

I got curious about the etymology of girl.
It did not always mean female—
originally girl meant small, ignorant,
lacking heft, intellect. Some philologists
say that girl once connoted

worthlessness, any living creature
considered weak, whether human or animal.
Others wager the word’s source more obscure.
No one knows the first time
a human girl decided to starve herself,

go further toward the vanishing
people want from her.
The penance of fasting, taken up
by those longing to be saints and the word girl
emerge at about the same time and place: Medieval

Europe. Starving yourself is old
hat, it goes back, transcendent.
Along the lines of girl also, call-girl, match-girl, girlie.
Catch-words for the discardable.
Finally, at age 15,

after a year of boundless fasting, I stopped
starving myself. But it took decades
after that to lose the habit
of silence, hunger’s match.

    Let all the flowers wake to life;
  Let all the songsters sing;
Let everything that lives on earth
  Become a joyous thing.

    Wake up, thou pansy, purple-eyed,
  And greet the dewy spring;
Swell out, ye buds, and o’er the earth
  Thy sweetest fragrance fling.

    Why dost thou sleep, sweet violet?
  The earth has need of thee;
Wake up and catch the melody
  That sounds from sea to sea.

    Ye stars, that dwell in noonday skies,
  Shine on, though all unseen;
The great White Throne lies just beyond,
  The stars are all between.

    Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
  And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
  Ring out the stains of sin.

    O banners wide, that sweep the sky,
  Unfurl ye to the sun;
And gently wave about the graves
  Of those whose lives are done.

    Let peace be in the hearts that mourn—
  Let “Rest” be in the grave;
The Hand that swept these lives away
  Hath power alone to save.

    Ring out, ye bells, sweet Easter bells,
  And ring the glory in;
Ring out the sorrow, born of earth—
  Ring out the stains of sin.

Joy shakes me like the wind that lifts a sail,
Like the roistering wind
That laughs through stalwart pines.
It floods me like the sun
On rain-drenched trees
That flash with silver and green.

I abandon myself to joy—
I laugh—I sing.
Too long have I walked a desolate way,
Too long stumbled down a maze
Bewildered.

Yesterday, against admonishment,
my daughter balanced on the couch back,
fell and cut her mouth.

Because I saw it happen I knew
she was not hurt, and yet
a child’s blood so red
it stops a father’s heart.

My daughter cried her tears;
I held some ice
against her lip.
That was the end of it.

Round and round: bow and kiss.
I try to teach her caution;
she tries to teach me risk. 

Tamed by Miltown, we lie on Mother's bed;
the rising sun in war paint dyes us red;
in broad daylight her gilded bed-posts shine,
abandoned, almost Dionysian.
At last the trees are green on Marlborough Street,
blossoms on our magnolia ignite
the morning with their murderous five days' white.
All night I've held your hand,
as if you had
a fourth time faced the kingdom of the mad—
its hackneyed speech, its homicidal eye—
and dragged me home alive. . . .Oh my Petite,
clearest of all God's creatures, still all air and nerve:
you were in your twenties, and I,
once hand on glass
and heart in mouth,
outdrank the Rahvs in the heat
of Greenwich Village, fainting at your feet—
too boiled and shy
and poker-faced to make a pass,
while the shrill verve
of your invective scorched the traditional South.

Now twelve years later, you turn your back.
Sleepless, you hold
your pillow to your hollows like a child;
your old-fashioned tirade—
loving, rapid, merciless—
breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.

Clara strolled in the garden with the children. 
The sky was green over the grass, 
the water was golden under the bridges,
other elements were blue and rose and orange, 
a policeman smiled, bicycles passed, 
a girl stepped onto the lawn to catch a bird, 
the whole world—Germany, China—
   all was quiet around Clara.

The children looked at the sky: it was not forbidden.
Mouth, nose, eyes were open. There was no danger.
What Clara feared were the flu, the heat, the insects.
Clara feared missing the eleven o'clock trolley:
She waited for letters slow to arrive,
She couldn't always wear a new dress. But she strolled in the garden, in the morning!
They had gardens, they had mornings in those days!

I cautious scanned my little life,
I winnowed what would fade
From what would last till heads like mine
Should be a-dreaming laid.

I put the latter in a barn,
The former blew away —
I went one winter morning,
And lo! my priceless hay

Was not upon the “‘scaffold”’,
Was not upon the “beam”,
And from a thriving farmer 
A cynic I became.

Whether a thief did it —
Whether it was the wind —
Whether Deity ’s guiltless
My business is to find.

So I begin to ransack —
How is it, Heart, with thee?
Art thou within the little barn
Love provided thee?

My life closed twice before its close—
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me

So huge, so hopeless to conceive
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.

The night knows nothing of the chants of night.
It is what it is as I am what I am:
And in perceiving this I best perceive myself

And you. Only we two may interchange
Each in the other what each has to give.
Only we two are one, not you and night,

Nor night and I, but you and I, alone,
So much alone, so deeply by ourselves,
So far beyond the casual solitudes,

That night is only the background of our selves,
Supremely true each to its separate self,
In the pale light that each upon the other throws.

^{—after Salvador Dalí}

Not much to pray for here:
the thin blue sky holds you, 
ecstatic, stuck.

Slumped in the corner, a tossed linen—some pale blouse, 
weary from too many echoing alleys,
a rag to stop a wound?

No.

In my dream, I unfold the sheet in fields of marigold; 
hazel forest edging the landscape
full of rain and bees.

She is there at the window,
back turned—my punishment here in the still noon—

and I, blazing forgotten in the center of a rose,
beyond the window’s frame;

without borders, 
without perspiration.

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time—
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two—
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

12 October 1962