This Blue : Poems (9781466875074) (3 page)

white & cheap

an affront to the strollers

jewelried & jacketed

though here and there

a louche jogger

lowers the tone

almost to my level

& a young mother

& a posse of teens

newly gelato'd pass by

Serena Hearts Lucas

names on stone

TO ONE IN PARMA

The privilege

of even being

provincial,

to know the small

humiliating city,

the ever unfinished

cathedral,

that over there

is the real where:

we had none of it.

No one heard

of anything.

The glit and shine

and scut of it shimmered

on TV the satin crotch

of the metropolis

a 13" square

of already thinned

fantasy.

No wonder

the saints

were martyring themselves

repeatedly, furiously

in imagination.

This was something

to die for

a life outlined

in acid-bit etchings

obsolete as the names

of trees we were never given

to know in the neighborhood.

LEVANTO

salt lips & a buoyed band

binds the sea in loose chains

to swim in. the beach's

thinned out, the clouds puffing

in, the last ferry's

debarked a last load.

starting out now

seems impossible

but. the rock walls

break the breakers

in. nothing

cannot be disciplined

or freed. scant pines

stagger the apennines

semaphoring

what. quartz-

striped granite

tells a time

that outlives us.

I am older

than the sea

in me.

IV

TERRAN LIFE

—
an excursion beginning with a line of William Wordsworth

When we had given our bodies to the wind

we found bones in the earth and not in the sky.

We found arrowheads in the earth and not in the sky though they'd flown through the air before grounding.

The era of common sense is over

& finished too the flourishing of horoscopes.

Hey traveler what chart to sign your way? what iPhone app?

All the birthdays have immolated themselves in a far pyre

and no one knows where

they were born.

Earth gods always come after sky gods.

If you could choose

a secret power would it be flight?—

a wish more often expressed

than the desire for invisibility.

“A mythology reflects its region”

and a poet sang the sea the lemon trees and pines

the Ligurian breeze salting his lines

and a lightly placed step on a Greek mountain is the goat song of tragedy.

Jehovah rarely shows his face for we would die of it

die as surely as those who looked to the sky in the bombing raid

the underground tunnels a sudden refuge

Out of ash I come                      Out of the earth

Back to ash I go                          He fashioned them

male and female I tell you

they wore the most beautiful evanescent clothes

in paradise so much subtler than the trawling nakedness of heaving giants

hurling other giants to heaven & some to hell

on the restored ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Thus far clones are of earth, alone.

When you say earth you mean land but more than land         You mean the oceans covering “the earth” as if earth were the substrate of everything and not also the crust.

I found the ground sound, unfaulted, uncracked, even where the continents have split and will again split the archaic seamstress unable to suture the plates of the earth forever.

“Terran life”: what the biologists typically study but “weird life” is also a zone of research. “It is easy to conceive of chemical reactions that might support life involving noncarbon compounds”—

viz.
The Limits of Organic Life in Planetary Systems,
p. 6.

Earth now supports life but could not now initiate it.

Crawl, sway, sashay: you're still doing it on an earth
you take for granted instead of going crazy
yr head blown off by an apple no I meant an IED no

I meant an apple.

Newtonian physics' defunct but that doesn't mean an apple doesn't fall far from the tree composed of atoms whose dark matter you don't know how to measure, supermodel. Me neither.

Gravity thy name is woman
always secretly pulling me toward you
as if I had no resistance
as if the clothes I wore were merely draped
on a mannequin as if I were merely an earthbound species with new skin
that fur an old animal's fur
reclaimed by another.

Did you see the subtle shift from umber to somber to ochre on the walls of Les Caves de Lascaux?

What ibex steps as beautifully as you

what ancient bison shakes the steppes

what gazelle's ankles are so perfectly turned as yours?

There are no crackheads in prehistory but surely

they were addicted to something those hominids

strutting their way out of the savannah—

I demand the sun

shine on me

I demand the moon bare its face in the night

and lo! damn! see how these heavenly bodies do what they do

like clockwork before clocks

like skin before clothes

like the earth before the parting of the waters revealed

the earth was the earth is the earth …

And if she only likes vegetable things

that grow toward the light

and if she will not eat your roots and tubers

how then choose

between a rooting boar and an urban forager—

There is beauty in indistinct areas the microtonal

hover where the ear buzzes so—

There is a gasp a sharp breath in a sharp wind reminding

you the wind was someone's breath chilled.

Clouds are now fashionable as they were in John Constable's day Luke Howard having taxonomized the little buggers in 1803: cumulus, cirrus, etc.

So let's go skying with Constable let's scan

the horizon as if we were sailors

able to read the sky          Let's blast off

and outsoar the noctilucent clouds

I espy with my little stratospheric eye.

Do you think I'm afraid of crashing to earth?

Love we've been falling ever since falling made way for a leap.

EMBROIDERED EARTH

embroidered earth

refusing an undesigned mind

uphold me now

it's hard to walk

secure on your pillowed ground

mossed ferned & grassed

this tapestried field

may it yield to an unsteady step

& take only the softest impress

the enfolded brain pressing

against a carapace

millennia ago unfolded

a species and its walk—

a steady upright walk

ICE PEOPLE, SUN PEOPLE

Something to it, the thought

of a people like its clime

or thereby impressed—

my lunchtime lassitude dissolved

the minute I moved from the sun

to this shadowed grass.

I could invent the wheel now

& soon the cotton gin

and steam engine &

let's not forget

it won't be long now

before nuclear fission.

Nothing's beyond

my airconditioned ken.

My offshore multinational's

humming more power

than the biggest powerstation in Hoboken.

My shadowed shade

my intemperate glade my big fat thrum.

Let's call it progress, this.

Let's call it whatever it is.

BELFAST

Your velvet hills came to me

last night in the pool

how they hugged the fraught city

the pubs filled and buzzing

the Europa unbombed now for years.

Your political murals are kitsch

and history's a ditch

for lying if we let

the gravediggers

name us. Let's bury

our pseudonyms

all undisclosed.

Was Scarlett O'Hara's father

a blustering Ulsterman

or was he a peasant

like granddad from Wicklow

tender and fond amidst the riot

and kind to his slaves

but for the obvious?

White people are weird

with their vitamin D

and sunravaged skin.

So far from an equator

it's hard to walk the line

in a cleaved world.

Orange, green, navy blue

the colors are weapons

as were some horses

in the 19th century.

Freed by machines

see how they race

on fragile ankles—

beauty a late flower

of disuse. Your storefronts

were boarded, your university

Victorian, the linen quarter

defunct. The solid brick

that shelters us unmortared

smashed a window.

Your sky hung low your beer

rode high your visiting Masons

sober and punctual.

A Days Inn here

is a Days Inn anywhere

but for the marchers gathering

their ribbons' gaud at odds

with their drawn gaunt faces

shut like a purse

around an old watch

that still keeps time

DEBATABLE LAND

The palest green immerings on the slopes

the snow'd made white near overspread

the snowdrops ungeared for fighting

yet strive they do to live in this suddenly

    coldened place.

The silence of the knowes rising above

St Mary's Loch is almost the silence

of nearby graves but the yow-trummle

pierces the mizzle we've decided

    to plow though.

Other people's disputes are not yours

till they are. Whose debatable land

did you walk on whose unmarked graves?

The village of free blacks buried below

    Central Park.

The Hanging Tree an English elm anchoring

a corner of Washington Square Park

knows nothing of the disintegrated dead

who long fed its soon-to-be

    commemorated roots.

Let's unpeel the world

and bite that big fruit the earth

it took us too long to remember

well-being just being holy land just land

the hanging tree a tree the son

    of man a man.

THINGS OF AUGUST

Not fog not hail not sleet

but rain boring

as ever the same

rain less acidic

now the Midwest has failed

and new laws prevailed.

We shall abandon

our cars. We shall walk

unadorned under stars

whose names we shall learn

in four languages, minimum.

Our maximum velocity

will be no faster

than an average human can run.

Everything scaled

once again to the body.

The body? My amplified

brain's going haywire

not to mention

my juiced-up tits

and pumped lips. An army

of amputees marches

on Dacron prosthetics

the military should do better by.

I was nostalgic

until I got over it.

My diabetic sister's living

and a million women past

predicted deaths in childbirth.

Good. I can't think

my way out of this

covert. I'll just stay

here with the soft frightened

rabbits while the hunters

storm the brambles looking

for whatever today's kill might be.

Those hunters who fed

or still feed me.

REPLAY / REPEAT

Amazing they still do it, kids—

climb trees they've eyed for years

in the park, their bicycles

braced against granite hewn

hauled & heaved into a miniature

New Hampshire Stonehenge …

Your white-pined mind

fringed with Frisbees saucering

the summer into a common

past—look, it's here! two red

discs! & the goldplated trophies

everyone gets for team effort.

Human beings always run

in groups. Sure there's a solitary

walker, can't bother

him, iPod breaking his brain

into convolutions

you'll never get the hang of.

Go skateboard yourself.

My maneuvers are old-

school, yes, but so's school

& summer & children

& these fuckedup resilient trees

which tell time like the Druids

by the same old same old sun.

BROADBAND

Before I open my mind

to the sludge

the open connection

will carry

let me tarry

with archaic diction

and ancient bodies

the sun & my own

shaped by a code

unfolding itself

through millennia.

For thousands of years

art had no fashion

was the beautiful

drawing we did.

In cave after cave

the ochred bison run

by charcoaled aurochs

and a delicate ibex

an opposable thumb

grasped. Don't think

they've gone

from your mind

I remind myself

rousing from sleep

the screen of my brain

WESTERN

I can see the big sky

people have a point

the clouds mounting high

above the lake give

the lie to the fat claims

of mountains. The eye

requires a horizon

Thoreau somewhere sd.