47. I was young once

On the last day of July I’m left
with just the word “lightning.”
Nowehre does it thunder like the Midwest,
nowhere is so bold or simple.
I want to ask James Wright how he knew
the branch would not break,
or if he was wrong.
How does the rock remain,
the dirt keep its secrets in darkness?
I crumple in the heat of July days
but want its warm nights
in Illinois parks.
I would lose 30 days of sunlight for
those nights back again,
moist and enabling as a postage stamp.
The horizons that shimmer and blink
from existance at sunset,
the thunderheads, fields, ditches,
and cassettes for the drive home.
Cicada, windmill, engine block,
asphalt, loam and river.
The yielding, giddy dark
and the face of a love, the one I nearly
forgot, lit by the light of the moon.

46. Real Bodies (2)

It flooded that March.
We kept our ears to the ground
and listened to the water table rise,
the corn send down new roots.
Dinners at your house your mother made fish
and your father said nothing.
But you wrote it all down
late evenings with a notebook and a radio.
You wanted to be a poet
you had all the words
the sweet nouns and the oranges I left you.
Out under the heavenly bodies of spring
we opened up our chests to the
sky and its arrangement of light.
We had it all: the car, freedom,
a hallowed horizon
most of all each other
the sighing sound when
I bit your clavicle
and new wind coming over the plains.

44. Hiroshima (Sestina)

It’s raining in a city of bells.
The A-bomb dome no longer keeps out rain
but forms a skeleton chime’s note
to call to ground a thousand cranes.
The paper soaks up water,
slowly turns to ash.

The burial mound is full of ash
in a dome shaped like a bell
sustained by what water,
what terrible gray rain
do the wings of cranes
wing through cloud and steam to note?

I heard in the air a fugue note;
who is the we that rained ash
on this ground? I crane
my neck to see the memorial’s bell.
From here what rain
do I inherit, what water?

The heat of July turns air to water
the phoenix trees take note,
grow greener in the rain
fertilize with bone & ash
and blossom to the music of bells
hung about the city by cranes.

The domes of paper cranes
bow with the certainty of water.
I have been my whole life a bell
and never seen to note
the undone dust of ash
in a sweet-smelling rain.

Today in Hiroshima it rains
and I bend like a folded crane
to witness the turning of ash to ash;
I don’t know what to do with all the water
the sound it makes on the pavement, the notes
of tiny shattered bells.

Dark storm of ash, let loose the rain
and on the bell strike the wish of cranes:
peace, and water’s noun, a long, low note.

remix Friday #6

43. Collective

We would make a pretty good portrait
for maybe university diversity
or student body welfare
if it wasn’t for all the red cups.
When I showed up to that picnic
Max said, I’ve gotta ask you a question
I’ve never had to ask you before
which is, Are you on meth?
No man,
just high on your sweet collective lovin
and whatever else I ingested that day.
Incidentals.
We ate that whole chicken
flung paint in poetic arcs
and said yeah, this is who we are
and always were.
Good company,
who else could I run with on the beach
strip down and bolt into the surf
free as I’ve ever been?

42. System

The body is a rich ground for poetry:
the beating heart,
the sympathetic nervous system
stretching into every crevice of your corpus.
I can tell when you’re nervous,
that heart beating and the muscles
around your throat tightening.
I’m sympathetic, love, as you are,
as rigid as your epinephrine made you
I can see your tenderness
as soft as a glass of water.
I can watch you stand by the
sea and know you, when you shrink
your dazzled pupils at
the many scattered pebbles of light
on the water’s surface,
your hands caught in a cry
just below your mouth.

41. Drinking Coffee in Unknown Chinese Locale

I can drink coffee in any city,
be another face in a shop
and get myself worked up for nothing.
What’s exciting?
Not the music or locale,
or strange artwork on the
walls (my favorite Lucky’s Cakes,
motto: “Beautiful and Romantic,
soft to the touch” no indication of
what this might be describing,
certainly not the coffee).
I can drink coffee in any city
but not pass unnoticed, always, no
order effectively and without difficulty
only often in some tortured gesticulation
and ending up with
a strange, sweet concoction.
But it doesn’t matter, the body’s
reliable thrill comes back and this
is wonderful, just wonderful, a
testament to universal communication and
exchange and my magnificent nerves.

40. Stepping Onto the Street in a Polluted Chinese City

Outside it is hard to breathe,
and I steady myself on the loom
of a colossal building
that it might give me back
the sweet air,
stillness and the inner wind.
The mist today is coarse,
grainy like my memory of the sun
whose last glimpse I now scarcely recall.
So now I do not walk up hills
in the hot morning,
or step outdoors to gulp
from the sky’s fountain.
The currents above
swirl in discontent.
That’s a futility I know, like
trying to build a poem from words, only,
not memories or love
or the dew I used to but now dare not
touch like a sacrament
with my tongue.

38. Poem for Heat

Sunday morning in a big, bulky Chinese city
I have a hangover
and the gentlemen down the street are setting off
low grade explosives
whose echoing reports from neighboring skyscrapers
are alarming;
we can hope that they are fireworks
(why not, after all, set off fireworks
at ten am on a Sunday)
The smog is thick today, and I can only see
a few buildings down from the window.
“Hunan is famous for three things,”
they told me last night,
“hot food, hot temperatures, hot girls.”
It’s ninety three,
the snake I ate for dinner
was so hot I couldn’t more than nibble,
and the women, well,
I think I blew that
when I threw up on her shoes last night.

39. Fireflies at Meadowbrook

When stepping into the canyon forests alone
on the blacker edge of twilight
my way is lighted by a thousand fires.
Here are voices that know
the shock clarity of a beacon
to the pilgrim or seeker.
I come for the gray, lonely canvas
of the moonlit sky
and the branch tangles
that would hide it from me,
but I am not given only that solitude.
Instead every light
blazes through the frenzy of gloaming
when I enter the wooden chapel.
How to hold on to the clench
of fear that prefaces discovery?
This is a country I no longer inhabit,
that I enter only in the assurance of memory.
Here is a host that will welcome me only
when I close my eyes to return to darkness.

37. Lightning over Changsha (2)

The light is full tonight,
the sky mumbling to itself
but sometimes sparking to anger,
understandably.
Times like this
when the world begins to look poetic
I am filled with a vast sympathy
for its visceral and brimming noises.
The sky bursts like the schizophrenic
I saw screaming “shut up!”
at the two Cantonese ladies
beside him in front of a store’s plate glass windows.
But I no longer wait for moments to unfold
like a map of the present.
The light is arrhythmic and inchoate
but its frustation is genuine;
I am sympathetic to its righteousness.
I write it all down.
I am a jealous hoarder, now,
of occasions and lines,
but still the sky comes thunderhead
and the line of taillights
on the street below doesn’t stop
for even an upward glance.
I am not the good witness.
I am the poet only,
weatherbell and watcher,
observing two motorcycles colliding
on the sidewalk,
two men getting up to walk away.

remix friday #5