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UNDER A BLOSSOMING PLUM TREE
—Labor Day, 1996
Under a blossoming plum tree
In a summer of peace,
Tallying the steps
The gang of jays made near the blackberry-
Entangled roses, I thought of the glassy
Distance between loved ones—
A river without a bridge,
Dying lilacs
In the merlot bottles.
What the Earth means—
The dirty crabapple leans down
Crippled more
Than a windblown candle.
Like murmuring
Old men
Fearlessly bowing
Their heads
To the eternal flame,
The apples keep falling
Bruised for weeks
In the humid grass.
Once waking at night
My lover beside me,
I watched the slick grass
Sputter: the heart’s like that—
A wick in a drafty window.
I’d awakened
From a dream
Of a black room
Filling with water.
My lover beside me,
Her eyes like chicory.
She was swimming
In and out of
The tumbling waves,
Turning her head
To open her mouth
To the actual air.
Inside the vinegar bottle
Is the Caribbean.
When I turn the glass
Upside down
The imprisoned sea
Tumbles, pounds,
and settles
Like dust.
When I hold the ocean
In a bottle sideways
The bubbled air
Stops still:
This day, the next,
The purpose,
The work,
Is language.
What if Uncle Rueben hadn’t said a week before his 97th birthday
That he didn’t believe in god, because where was god
When the Jews were holding their six million last breaths,
And I said, how do you account for it not being seven million, fifteen million, fifty million?
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FRENCH KISS
He never had a psychograph to fetch the sagging gripes of the sufferer. He was ripped with suffering, pummeled,
A prawn of manpower. And yet for all his droning in the mouth of the gynarchy, and though he sang
Praises to the soul kiss, it got to be a chore, a jerk of the groin, and he got so frail he withdrew like a hurt moth—
A scene in a play (seen now or by crowds a hundred years hence), that moment came and went.
So he turned to a lectionary of runts, but without triumph. Instead, the marvelous vanity
Festered and shut down like a fenestra. Then a darkness rose out of the mind’s bubble—with a guileless pipit crying Modernist America is dead and gone.
And when he thought to try again on the bed of arch and strafe, when he thought that life was worth the threat of life,
And his dreams broke inside his head like sparrows and dancing was the sorrow of pilgrims and beggars,
He suddenly feared that silly sketch of easy-blown theater could disappear again like his centuries-forgotten mother tongue.
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POETS
William Butler Yeats
I liked best the desolate nights that rained the color of slate and mimicked complexities of cats and kings.
Also, unseeing eyes. The sun helped no soldier. It never broke or slaughtered fear or changed
The winds or damaged mavournin muse with her unforgiving beauty. Whining gave tenure to generations.
They should know—playboys of petty summary. Passion, precision: I wished most to know these fraus
(There’s desire worth residing in). I feared to pull back, aging into spongy italics, but the torn accounts
Cackled like pulp. ...
