92. Blackberry

A plaque in this meadow memorializes
Thomas Cook, who must have loved
these sunny fields of Grantchester.
I would hope to be so lucky,
buried in the humid shade
of a blackberry bush swollen
with fruits darker than the darkest parts
of creation, blushing deeper
than the quietest places
between the limbs of the girl
I would make blackberry pies with
in college, crushing the ichorous fruit
in a bowl for its tannins and sugar.
She’s gone with Mr. Cook, now,
but like him was “courageous,
gifted, and loved.”
When the pies were finished we would fill
our mouths with what remained,
holy frenzy of relinquished restraint.
Today my teeth remember how
the sweet fruit yielded,
such an easy comfort, as I pick
little gifts from the grave
of Mr. Cook and place them
like a sacrament
on my tongue.

91. Dreaming Earthling

or, The Life of the Mind

A cliffside archangel,
a world of lost souls
and the oceans they drown in;
these are dreams I’ve never had.
I am a fortunate child
of the joyful sea
and with our friend have
sailed its bays, plumbed its
depths and seen the masked
face of God illuminate
the Eastern shore with
his lieutenant shafts of light;
I am the son of an earth
that needs no angels.

But I, too, have seen the end
walking along the dreamy sands
at the end of my life
I was just that:
dust, red and fine,
held together by the superlative
tensions of alpine highs
and petite-mort lows.
When, with such an ecstatic shudder,
our friend’s logical engine halted
a black-winged chess piece
took off around the room;
we live trapped in our cavernous
imaginations. I would ask
St. Michael to protect me
from myself.

You asked what I believed,
dear beautiful mind.
I would live a half-week’s dream
again, to exercise my intelligent self
and hear your visions.
But I didn’t choose
the blackberried fields of England.
I chose instead the sun
and stand to inherit its fortunes.
In my dream I walk a long hallway
only once, trying to peer through
the closed doors.

90. Earthly Witness

Oh to be a Romantic!
To haunt the wide meadows
of Grantchester or summer
bluffs of Exmoor drenched
in the sublime excesses of inspiration.
Even the brutal, craggy Alpine peaks
of Switzerland would present only
an opportunity to briefly ascend
closer to heaven on Earth.
I’d take the ugly realities,
the tuberculosis, classism,
crippling restraint–
worth it to see the sunny ecstasies
of springtime and know them
for what they are,
to capture them perfectly with a pen
and desire.

89. Tramcar, Budapest

A man steps onto the crowded car with,
on his gloved and alarming hand,
an unhooded falcon, and as my mind drifts
to gyres and loss I realize
I am not held fast to the earth
and could tsay on this tram
to its terminus, get out and
keep walking, I could never return
or speak again to a single body I’ve met
before. I am neither the mold
nor the hot iron nor the lost falcon
but just as unbeholden to the earth.
It is a joyous but dizzying thing
to be an active soul
and all I’ve ever sought is certainty.
So I collect the rays reflected
from the arrangement of sunlight
and mortar covering the facade
of a bomed-out old building
we are passing and try to hold them
with me as a talisman against
the world’s wind-change. I meet
the severe, crystal eyes
of the falcon in front of whom
I am transparent and hold
to the steadiness of buildings,
the rock fastened
by hand to the earth.

88. Women

There are some days, like today,
when the gray air is threatening to condense
to rain around me and my only sanctuary is the
fresh outdoors,
that I wish women didn’t exist, that
my wet solitude would be more rapturous
if I were not haunted by the thought of who
I did or did not kiss the night before.
I wish I didn’t find myself routinely trying to impress
some uninteresting character simply because she
is more attractive than I am, that I were
not powerless to defend myself
from persuasive charms, that I
were not such a dog,
but then I reach the cathedral
and ascend its belltower to be closer
to God and further from this wordly dismay,
only to find the roof scratched with lovers’ graffiti
and my wounds singing laugher
remembering how this misery is an awfully joyful
kind of hopelessness.

87. Bag Poem

When travelling I carry
my worldly life in a bag
I sling over my back. I like
that I need to feel its
heft daily, measure the
weight of what I need.
I admire it sometimes, pleased
at its self-contained certainty.
I enter the world as myself
and drag the bag behind me,
but that’s all there is.
Whatever doesn’t fit in the bag
I leave behind.

And so I become like the bag,
I hold things:
a liver, some stale air, temporarily
a chicken bone in my mouth.
Also my stomach, bladder and
welled-up anger;
the body is, after all, a kind
of bag of its own,
a leather sack full of smaller containers.
It moves its various contents
around and pretends it is more solid
than it is. Without my few bones
I would be a frightening blob
on the floor. But, thank God, I retain
that small amount of structure
and meander down the street
carrying my bag
passing a homeless woman with
her clutches of plastic containers
and full of what secrets and treasures,
what necessities of life?

86. Budapest Haikus

I.

Woman with your ferret
leashed for a walk, what
do you know that I don’t?

II.

I have no seen the
sun for weeks, yet there it is
cloudless and stunning

III.

Terrible sound, terrible joy[1]
the sea moving icebergs
in its mouth[2]

[1] Cf. Sufjan Stevens “The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!”
[2] Cf. Bill Holm, “The Icelandic Language”

85. The Poet Dreaming

So many poems about water,
light, love–
so why do they all abandon you
when you wake in the midst of
an anxious dream?
The cool certainty of realism
but no arias,
sonnets, or great, formal oceans
of metaphor[1]
interrupt the night.

At least the grounds
are familiar ones,
a bed is a bed,
you needn’t care where
or even its exact dimensions.
The rose is night[2],
terrors and projections
and the shivering
nightmare,
waking to find
the world changed.[3]

It is and is not
we witness many realities
at once and are frightened
but the dream is
what we are become,
and gladly!
It replaces the dull earth
with mysteries;
it staves off our certain death.

[1] Cf. Maxine Kumin, “The Excrement Poem”
[2] Cf. Li-Young Lee, “Rose”
[3] Cf. UKLG, “The Lathe of Heaven”

84. Anxiety

“…a strange, large beauty, a serener beauty
than that of any dweller, any walker on the earth…” — UKLG, “The Lathe of Heaven”

Anticipation, the measured
breaths before bursting
into the liquor store with a gun
to do the talking,
only there is no liquor store and
no weapon and no war, however
personal. There is individual insignificance
in the shadow of an enormous universe,
there are jobs to do until you die,
there is incalculable and indefinite
loneliness always close at hand.
There are the many challenges
of survival, the certainty of
that enterprise’s eventual failure,
and the equal assurance of
countless smaller prior defeats.

There is always something to worry about.

But equally, we hope, there are
instruments of radiance present
within us: pauses
to admire the striking expansiveness
of a poppy field, new sprouts in
a ruined country, all the things
we don’t have to do.
And, of course, there is the other,
the perfect distraction of human contact,
the mundane discourse of the living
that slows a heart as sureley
as life’s attendant details
frighten it to speed.
There are sources of calm that swell and rain
when we bend toward the most present
of things.

83. Prague

Even in the husky cloudcover,
what a supple texture
the quality of being alive
lends to the air
in this city-temple to forms
and the aspiration of men,
still crossed by
the odd ferret beneath a
parked car,
an overcoated man reading
his cellphone with a
magnifying glass,
the Vietnamese woman
composed behind the
mini-market cash
register,
may I love all of you, please?
Beloved counselors,
will you come across
the bridge with me
in the bright light of morning?