After, Then

There will be no return, woman. 
No knock on your door, my once beloved.
We both are too weary to attempt 
Any more old familiar dance.
Any better man knows, there really is
No more having back what was lost.
What was lost impossibly scattered now.
Irretrievable. Irredeemable.
All that we have left, you and I
Are the remains. Only another form
Of ashes. Arms wrapped around yourself
Standing by the closed front door. 
I, looking back at you, at the porch, 
The yard, the house, the neighborhood, 
The curb, the life,
From the rearview mirror.

The Act of Remembering

A dangerous thing, this act.
Betrayal to one's own mind who
once decided and precariously
ordered the will to 
severe part of itself, 
preserving most 
of what spirit remains.

And then suddenly this-- 
re-collecting, bringing back
to make as part again
what had been 
intentionally let fall away.

When still young, there was 
so much strength to push
ahead, against the gusts.
To keep forward the head
steady from not looking back.

Perhaps because the road
was still long, the young
eyes still unable to sense
what lies by the by, 
by the bend.

Our immortal's time.

Now here we are. Here I am.
The familiar autumn 
on my back. I try, I try
to push against the gusts.
To keep away from the act,
from surrendering to
remembering. I do not want

to say I am afraid that come
this winter, the bones will,
on their own, remember.











  

how would you want to be born

If you were to decide, would you want to be born
into exactly the same way you are now?
There is a correct answer and there is 
a truthful one. The correct answer is

always a Yes for all believed-to-be moral
reasons including resignation to fate.
The more truthful one, far from it. Why
would you choose again exactly the same

circumstance that led you beating your own breast
calling out to a universe that does not answer
why all these senseless pain (war-torn refugees,
hunger, true hunger and true abandonment) while

others worry more wind to sail their yacht?
The young people at the university yesterday
organised themselves and came to the streets 
raised their fists in claims of revolution.

Some of them took their poetry and slammed,
invited me to come and speak (with them).
I could not place a word to what I feel.
Perhaps I have grown too old:

I still want to believe, but

because a young artist wrote about and i remember you at dusk at sea with dogs

1
Young men leapt over bonfires
while beginning

2
                           artists pass naked for art.
                           There is a difference

3
in the quiet of solace
against empty.

4
I saw a vision of rain forest
green and leaves wet

5
                            falling back from heights
                            spent finally 
                           
6
on the sheets. You on top
head on my chest.

7
Young girls in this country dream snow
as in any other beginning

8
                            except perhaps when told
                            about such cold, such cold.

9
I spent time in quiet
un-counting moments

                            before the leaving. This warm
                            country of people, sun and storm.








                            
               

drowning with woman

Counterculture communes in the 60s and 70s
attempted to distill love
through music, herbs, and freedom in forest
idyllic edens or as thought to be.

My own short experience told me 
youth has a way of imagining 
as does any spring beginnings.
To have a time of easy belief in hope

has its own good, if only to make the later years
bearable with dream-like memories. 

There is always something beautiful
about the long ago we have lived or survived.
Thus, that smile when we are
alone one morning with second cup of coffee

and remembering. Times, there, of love
also of beauty we had not recognised
while it looked us on the face. Gentle gust.
Perched on our palms like easy wind.  

How time flies. 

The hours we wasted arguing and hating
each other as much as ourselves for 
nonetheless loving both self and other. 
No counterculture communes truly survived.

There is no way to distill love.

the quiet of nothing

The time it takes to float on the surface
of things is equivalent to peace.
We do not insert bird for sorrow.
We do not make room for empty.

Sometimes I still dream of receiving
your letter now long gone.  
We have agreed to be quiet.
We have agreed
and distance have agreed with us.

Into the place where the answers are kept

HOW TO LIKE IT

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

--Stephen Dobyns

Like

Eternal Enemies

when the poem about eternal enemies was written, it meant love and time.  how they can never seem to reconcile, except in marriage.  it was a wedding poem, "epithalamium" for isca and sebastian.  this, of course, written and read on a moment of suspension.  for the world-wise/world-weary knows, of course, there may be no eternal yet in marriage; this, of course, again, being conditional.



Epithalamium
             by Adam Zagajewski


Without silence there would be no music.
Life paired is doubtless more difficult
than solitary existence--
just as a boat on the open sea
with outstretched sails is trickier to steer
than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners
after all are meant for wind and motion,
not idleness and impassive quiet.

A conversation continued through the years includes
hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred,
but also compassion, deep feeling.
Only in marriage do love and time,
eternal enemies, join forces.
Only love and time, when reconciled,
permit us to see other beings
in the enigmatic, complex essence,
unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement
in a valley or among green hills.

It begins from one day only, from joy
and pledges, from the holy day of meeting,
which is like a moist grain;
then come the years of trial and labor,
sometimes despair, fierce revelation,
happiness and finally a great tree
with rich greenery grows over us,
casting its vast shadow.  Cares vanish in it.

palimpsest

Perhaps the reason why we are not meant 
to live longer than we have to is the burden 
the weight of years, in incremental memories
layering one on top of another.  

Imagine
the skin of the world seen by your mind's eye
and the thousands more associations
only you can conjure.  How at times they come

and go only when they so pleases.  Such that
in mid of something else entirely, you remember 
the minute details of her and of the scene
surrounding her.  In a vividness that could

outlast the very strength of you, finally
grown weary with all the years.







 

an old song

an old song drifts itself.  a familiar one, even, a little more.  the old song was once played in public, upon request, in dedication.  all the coy, and all the bravura of teenage years.  when love meant spirit.  and spirit meant eternal joy.  that little love story lasted a month or so, but took nearly half a year to finally move on.  its worth now: a little anecdote.  something to smile about:  how young was that "i" in another lifetime; what kind of version was love at that time.
 

on essentialism and selves

possibly not the same person who takes the foil and the épée and point at another's chest to kill.  for sport.  a physical version of another involving the killing of hundreds and millions in several stages until one's own pawn becomes greater than another's king.  plans for war.  kill time while sharping the mind.  possibly 

not the same person who tends the basil, the tarragon, the wild mint, the parsley, the dill.  who takes time to watch the sunrise glow and dreams of sea.  not 

the same person, angry and a vise, who throws without regret, lines, lives.  not the same one who collects.  memories and serenity, joys in souvenirs.  the one who sings with a guitar and writes

the world as it is as is, and life as is, it is. 

under a tree

to understand is to stand under
stand under a canopy
of something

Blake on graying streets

Blake




I watch William Blake, who spotted angels
every day in treetops
and met God on the staircase
of his little house and found light in grimy alleys--

Blake, who died
singing gleefully
in a London thronged
with streetwalkers, admirals, and miracles,

William Blake, engraver, who labored
and lived in poverty, but not despair,
who received burning signs
from the sea and from the starry sky,

who never lost hope, since hope
was always born anew like breath,
I see those who walked like him on graying streets,
headed toward the dawn's rosy orchid.










by Adam Zagajewski

translated by Clare Cavanagh 

time keeping

 there is a kind of peace in running and in being with one's dog.  in spite of all the humidity one tries but cannot avoid.  and later, in the high of noon when every thing is so bright it hurts the eyes.  and every thing else is lazy, and balmy, and not wanting to move.  good to sit on the couch by the window with a glass of water.

(and come friday, a performance for women's month.)


(come saturday, the beginning of the graduate school trimester.)

(tuesday, T to fly over and talk about graphic illustration.)
     

but in the mean time, here.  zagajewski in his so many things breathing in between the said.  the consciousness and the sense of present-ness a construction from memory.  lewyka, the comic(?) banality of the tangible  where "[c]urls of apple peel slide off the table on to the carpet, where they are trodden into a fragrant mush."