Poem from July, 2008

July Morning Vision

Poem from June, 2008

Four About Death

Bonuses

The wasp’s
zigzag journey
up the pane
while I read
down one
page

.

Mushrooms as ghosts:
did you think rot
could fruit this way?
Or taste like this?
Or give you visions?

.

The grackle walks
like a drum major
then leaps straight up
and opens into
a lady’s black silk fan.

.

Mushroom architecture:
Art Deco airport towers,
Destroying Angels pure as mosques,
geodesic puffballs, shagged pagodas,
morels by Gaudi . . .

.

Because of the way
the windows join
their images I see
two robins now –
one solid on the lawn,
the other, next to him,
a see-through ghost.

The solitary double, fierce for worms,
struts unaware of what’s not there.

from Foraging (1986)

Poem from April, 2008

The Self: A Sonnet Sequence

1
If we are what we see, hear, handle,
then I am London now: rainlight and chimneypots,
shuddering buses, streaky bacon flatblocks,
rooks in a queue. Reading your novel, I was a girl

who took up living in a barn, Sense-pestered,
trailing itself around the world,
the self is now and then complete as it looks in
to mingle with an afternoon, a page, a person . . .

In the Siberian frozen tombs they found
wool socks, expressive faces, rugs, fresh leather,
a chieftain’s arm still glowing with tattoos:

what the self freezes, what the self digs up –
what do you want to call it, kid?
Weather. A city on a page. A mirror.

2
Self as imperialist, pushing out his borders?
Oh, the ego rides in armor, bellows threats,
but his helmet’s a pocked kettle, he’ll turn tail
as soon as he sees the torches of the future,

he’s far less real than, say, his horse’s shoulder.
The anarchists he hired are dismantling
what’s left of his soft palace, heaving chunks
into the soft and unbecoming river.

A candle: what it means to do is vanish,
Brightly. The self: what it means to do
is make a candle. Something of that kind,

and the object – horseshoe, cabbage, poem –
is what the self just hoped to run together to
and fill: a cup of anonymity.

3
Well, no, not run together. Scatter: smoke
in its eloquent hoods and cowls. Clouds,
their race and rain. We’re swarms of funny matter
(ice, rust, grasses, moonsparks, puff-paste)

longing and fearing to disperse. “Can’t get away
from you-know-who” (scratched on a mirror), but the eye
sees way beyond the eye, and the mooncalf mind
sits on its shelf and flies great kites.

“After the dancers have left
and the grand ballroom is empty,
the old beekeeper brings

a rustling and humming box;
and the band begins to play again,
but you’ve never heard the music.”

4
My young self comes to see me, fresh and friendly.
He is from 1957, and anxious to get back.
I think he is just polite about my acting
as though we had lots in common. Stands in the doorway,

charming but rushed. I’m amazed
that I like him so much, like him at all,
he has such an air of self-discovery,
as if one day to the next he knows himself

(first love, acting, superficial poems),
a life he thinks I’m merely interrupting.
I live inside his dream, he inside mine,

and we back away from each other, smiling,
a couple of meadows, a couple of knives,
affection brimming between us as we go.

5
Is a pebble. Is a bubble. Drags its little sled
through empty salt flats under a cobalt sky
of nailed-up stars. Is a lamb with real sharp teeth,
a tongue waltzing in a moonlit clearing. Is

a donkey, leaning against a mulberry tree
in which the silkworms spin their mysteries;
hugs itself, hugs itself and cries,
a horn full of sparks, a shadow at a keyhole.

The critic wanted to enter the very brush stroke,
then find the brush, then climb the painter’s arm,
muscle and vein and nerve to mind and heart:

instead he stumbled and then he was falling forever
through meaningless words that were falling too
in exactly the opposite direction.

6
Has its parents strapped on like backpacks,
grandparents in a suitcase; its orders are
to move the grand piano over a mountain
without upsetting the buckets of milk for its children.

The house is sheared open by the wrecking ball
and there is the bathroom, flashing its mirror,
the wallpaper, losing track of its pattern,
the chest of drawers where father kept his condoms.

Tear rolling down the hill of the corpse’s
Cheek. Big tear that rolls off the stiff blue chin.
Things left behind, trashbin and junkyard.

Rain won’t be different from skin.
Eye won’t be different from view.
Smoke will take root and every flower float.

7
Hyde, this is Jekyll: no more rages,
no more rapes and stranglings. I leave this flat
only for necessary shopping.
On the horizon, the orphanage burns.

Evelyn Waugh, timid of ridicule,
built up a carapace so thick
he could hardly move inside it – except to write
painful, hilarious novels, ridiculing the world.

The daylight brightens, dims and brightens.
Late March. Atoms of nostalgia,
flakes of essential self. Crusoe on his beach

pondering a footprint. Still March. Outside
the blown rain writes nonsense on the windows,
the pear tree strains against its ivory buds.

8
One of those houses where the eyes of portraits move
and suits of armor mutter by the stairs.
But this was worse. The chairs had body-heat
and every sink was specked with blood.

I swept from room to room, my cape
billowing out behind. Sat by the fire
poking the panting coals. Hid beneath a bed
and listened to them screwing in the attic.

Think of a liquid. Dog slobber. Cattle drool.
Dipped up in a leaf-cup from a spring. It’s true,
anything other than human could comfort me now

like that French poet who could put his face
against a hanging side of beef
and still his fear.

9
Goodbye to the night sky, the Milky Way
a bone-seam on a cranium, vein in a cave.
Now dawn is a rooster, noon a pheasant
crossing the road. I drive. Land’s End, Tintagel,

the landscape fills me slowly, like a sail.
A daylight display, a wind off the Atlantic,
ego shadows sailing across pieced fields,
a herd of clouds without a shepherd.

Sometimes the world will fit you like a sweater
and you think ingenuity and fortitude
can see you through, your recipe and axis.

I have to say this clumsily; at best,
the image trembles in its instant, star
in a pail of water carried through a glade.

10
In Voronezh did Mandelstam
sing of his death the winter I was born
in Davenport, in Iowa, all mother’s milk and love
against his sour tea and fear. The contrast

makes me wince. I want . . . to be a goldfinch too?
No, and I’m not the point. Nor Mandelstam. We’re both
exhibits of the self, the flesh made word,
singing its own confusion and delight:

all this takes place despite the big world’s Stalins.
I write this in The Royal Mail, in Islington.
“Hullo, Stanley,” says the barmaid. Pool balls click,

the jukebox throbs. We bob on currents,
taking the world as best we can, each planet
cruising its dawns and dusks around the sun.

England. (January-May, 1979)

Poem from March, 2008






Poem from February, 2008


Chopping Garlic

The bulb, an oriental palace
shrouded in gray and lavender paper,
splits open into a heap
of wedge-shaped packets housing
horns, fangs, monster toenails
all of a pungent ivory -- I
could string them into a necklace
but I smash them flat instead,
loving the crunch, brushing away
all the confetti – clouds
of odor bloom around me now
as I chop, this way and that,
with my half-moon blade
in the scooped wood
that will never completely lose
the fragrance that oils it, smears
my fingers, wants to be in
the pores of my skin forever . . .
trumpets and cymbals blare
as I dump the grainy mess
into the pan, oh, holy to the nose
are the incense and sizzle that summon
folks from all parts of the house
to ask about dinner, sniffing,
while up in one end of the sky
a crescent moon hangs crazily
a glowing clove,
a dangerous fragrance
filling the very corners
of some god's smiling mouth.


from At The White Window (2000)

Poem from January, 2008

A Calendar: The Beautiful Names of the Months


........ ..January
On this yearly journey two
faces are better – a weary
woman, a wary man.


........ ..February
Where the earth goes
to run a fever. The care’s good.
Herbs brew. The rooms are airy.


........ ..March
Bridge curving over a swamp.
A bruise that smarts, the long
patience of an army.


........ ..April
Neither grape nor apple.
Any monkey, a pearly sprig,
a prism. Flute notes.


........ ...May
The arch opens. Crowds.
Goats, babies, vowels and
the wind, permitting anything.


........ ..June
A jury rises.
The moons of Jupiter
set. Bugs, berries, prairie grass.


........ ..July
Jewelers snooze on the grass,
one eye open for the tall
constellation-poppies.


........ .. August
Clearing your throat of dust.
Wading in lagoons . . . algae,
hot bursts of wind.


........ ..September
Lives away from his brothers,
gentle-tempered, a little solemn.
Bears pests, eats peas and beets.


........ ..October
Cold roots and a fresh-caught owl
rocked on a cot.
An orange boot.


........ ..November
Toothache and memory.
Nine women. Overdressed beavers.
No new members.


........ ..December
Something decent, easy.
Frozen meekness. Wax. A good
end, an ember, then ten of them.


from Box Cars (1974)

Poem from December, 2007

The Poem of the Cold

Admit you tried to make it pretty. Start again. Talk about the huge
nails going in, the serene blows of the hammer. Flocks migrate at
great cost, animals crawl painfully into burrows. A starving man
chews on a bird’snest, cursing. It may be true that wonderful things
go on – a polished haw swinging on a tree in the oxlike wind, an old
woman splitting wood next to a sand-colored barn – but you must
avoid these. For you are the cold’sthin voice, that thickens everything
else As you sing, warm things ball up, shrivel, stiffen. Hands become
mittens, heads become hoods. Shadows lose their outlines, gates lock,
waterfalls hang silent as their own bad portraits. And gradually, as you
shiver and wince, your poem will grind to its own slow close, like the
works of a twenty-five pound clock, freezing beside the overturned
dog sled, the scattered supplies, the man whose face froze around his
tears and beard, the five dead huskies.

from Work Lights (1974)

Poem from November, 2007

At the Back of the Year in a High Wind

winter

the sun crawls through a sewer pipe

the moon that silver truck
drives off through shaking trees

little shrubs that edge potato fields
are wringing their hands saying We
were not meant to be adventurous

and here comes a prairie chicken
tumbling over and over
_________________she has come
a long way
________from the west

and is going a long way

to the conventions of the clouds
the master classes of the snow

from Boxcar (1973)

Poem from October, 2007

October’s Stem and Head-Piece

I’ve carved this pumpkin with a moonslice grin
and star-shaped eyeholes. I want him to go rolling
among the reaches of the universe, hung glitter,

and let the spirits spinning on themselves
among the ice, the burning dust, the gulfs,
the inky gasses, streaky bursts of starlight,

know how this blue sky and this honey locust
are just what the great gods would have booked
if they could order up a world of form and color.

I want him hinting of the wells of being here
quenching the greatest thirsts, those wells we taint
when we forget we need to sing the death-chant

that wraps me now, as I flush seeds and pulp and strings
into the rippling creek, then hurl the cerebellum
into the brush where nobody will find it.

All night the sallow face smiles at clouds,
licking the cream, winking at the wolves,
as pinprick after pinprick fills the sky.

from At the White Window (2000)

Poem from September, 2007

Poem About Hopping

Rabbits in Alabama hop
into clumps of Syrian grass
to nibble the stalks, thinking of
sorghum, hardly noticing autumn.

Along the Great Divide the bighorn
sheep hop casually from rock to
rock in the wind and glare, seriously
considering leaping silver rivers, as

salmon in crazy waters jump
upstream for love – oh it’s
a nervous country. When you
walk through stubble, the hub

of a wheel with grasshopper
spokes, or sit over bowls of excited
cereal, what can you say to your heart
but, Down sir, down sir, down?

from Sweating Out the Winter (1969)

Poem from August, 2007

Putting My Father's Ashes in the Cemetery
at Springville Iowa

August 7, 2003

My brother and my sister shade their eyes
against the noonday glare. My cousins stroll
among the graves. These Grant Wood hills
rich now with corn and soybeans,
seem to be just the place to set
this marble shoebox
deep in the earth, next to my mother’s,
this earth that’s full of relatives:
grandparents, uncles, aunts, the infants too,
some that lived long enough for names, some not,
each generation giving ground to others,
hidden and peaceful, like the family farms
down at the end of narrow shaded lanes
where tractors doze and trees stand tall and green
dreaming the summer into autumn.

from Black Lab (2006)

Poem from July, 2007

Vermont Summer: Three Snapshots, One Letter

Imaginary Polaroid

In this picture I am standing in a meadow,
holding a list of fifty-one wildflowers.
It is Vermont, midsummer, clear morning
all the way to the Adirondacks.
I am, as usual, lost. But happy,
shaggy with dew. Waving my list.
The wind that blows the clouds across these mountains
has blown my ghosts away, and the sun
has flooded my world to the blinding-point.
There’s nothing to do till galaxy-rise
but name and gather the wildflowers.
This is called “pearly everlasting.”
And this one is arrow-leaved tear-thumb!
Hawkweed, stitchwort, dogbane, meadow-rue . . .
The dark comes on, the fireflies weave around me,
pearl and phosphor in the windy dark,
and still I am clutching my list,
saying “hop clover, fireweed, cinquefoil,”
as the Milky Way spreads like an anchor overhead.

Robert Frost’s Cabin

He perched up here at the lip of the woods
summer after summer. Grafted his apple trees
into a state of confusion. Came down
two or three times a season to be lionized.
Mesmerized visitors with talk,
or hid from them. Or both.

Charles and I look in his windows.
There’s his famous chair.
The place is tiny, but the view is good.
We shake our heads at his solitude.
Couldn’t he have the kind of friendship
that brought us here together?

How can we keep from becoming such molluscs?
Easy, says Charles. Don’t live that long.

Hay-Henge

After the meadow was mowed and before
the bales were gathered, the students
erected a midget Stonehenge in the moonlight.
It stood there all the next day:
real from a distance, and up close
sweet-smelling and short-lived.

Off and on I’ve been pondering models:
I think they are all we have.
Snapshots, cabins, lists. Metonymies.
At Lascaux they’ve opened
a replica of the caves. I shall get
Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream . . .
The sun goes down beyond Hay-Henge;
clouds and mountains mix in the distance.

Letter to Chloe

Since you left, we’ve had
wild blackberries, northern lights,
and one grand thunderstorm.
Again, these mountains have been
Chinese with their graduated mist.
Tonight it’s clear and we hope to see
a meteor shower. I’m teaching Vaughan,
who tried to show us another world
with images of light, and knew
he needed dark to make the light more real.

I shake my head, still lost.
I’m lucky if I find a berry,
name a flower, see a shooting star.
You and I cried a little at the airport:
each parting’s a model for something bigger.
But I don’t think the models mean much.
We try to take them as they come:
A trefoil in the hand, a meteor trail
crossing the retina, a black and glinting
tart-sweet berry in the mouth.

from Foraging, (1986)

Poem from June, 2007:

from "Four Songs on a Bone Flute"

1. Summer

This sprig of basil
out of my garden
teaches each sense –

green glow to light me
the way through the world
even the underworld

fragrance of summer
rough coasts and hills
baked in the sun

touched, it releases
even more odor
clouding my hands

flavor will hurry
all over my tongue
bursting horizons

and then there’s the song
even more rousing
for making a silence.

..................from AT THE WHITE WINDOW (2000)

Poem from May, 2007:

Walking Home on an Early Spring
.....Evening

Every microcosm needs its crow,
something to hang around and comment,
scavenge,
alight on highest branches.

Who hasn’t seen the gnats,
the pollen grains that coat the windshield ---
who hasn’t heard the tree frogs?

In the long march that takes us all our life,
in and out of sleep, sun up, sun gone,
our aging back and forth, smiling and puzzled,
there come these times: you stop and look,

and fix on something unremarkable,
a parking lot or just a patch of sumac,
but it will flare and resonate

and you’ll feel part of it for once,
you’ll be a goldfinch hanging on a feeder,
you’ll be a river system all in silver
etched on a frosty driveway, you’ll

say "Folks, I think I made it this time,
I think this is my song." The crow lifts up,
its feathers shine and whisper,

its round black eye surveys indifferently
the world we’ve made
and then the one we haven’t.

Poem from April, 2007:

Easter Ghazal

Dreaming the dead back to life: pleasure & gentleness.
Grateful for this miracle, this bubble of reunion.

Harps bounce & hum there in the firmament.
The fundament. Coining likenesses. Did you say something?

Bricks crumb, bones powder: this helps make potting soil.
Clay reproduces! Ploughs heal the fields they wound.

Today we trim the rabbit’s nails upside the hutch,
Nail up the bat-house, baptize each other with the hose.

I’m flame. A flag going up a flagpole. I’m
The beetle dropped by the mother bird, picked up again.

The heart’s a tomato with lips. Woodpeckers tap hosannas.
Sleepy blips & explosions fleck love’s radar screen.

Something rises. Something drops. Elastic days!
Tonight this window’s black with possibility.

Poem from March, 2007

from “Water Diary” (Boxcars, 1973)

walking the tracks in early March
thinking where would I store a handcar
we ponder the fast clouds my son and I
and stare at winter’s house 1 look down:
smashed grass gravel in a pool rainrings
wet rust on the tracks the creek rushing
no trains today no setting out arriving
the wind bucketing off through the trees
and sunset a skin of ice on each red puddle

Poem from February, 2007:

Section 10 of “Dancing in the Dark,”
from “Poem in Three Parts,” Earthshine

And yesterday a red-tailed hawk
killed and ate a mourning dove
in the middle of a snowstorm
in our back yard. For five minutes
that made a violent, bobbing center
for everything else in sight:
the swirl of flakes, the pine boughs humped with snow,
the smaller birds who fled,
our curious eyes and breath.
And then the center shifted.

Any still point we choose
is relative to observation;
the planet rolled ahead, dragging
its dead and gorgeous moon,
great storms shot up on the sun,
whole galaxies stood by and gleamed,
and maybe an owl in a hollow tree
two hundred yards away from us
swiveled his head and blinked,
hearing the little death.
The hawk rose up, his tail a flare of rust,
and a sprinkle of torn feathers
began to blow across the blood-patched snow
till we could see no more.

February, 1985

Poem from January, 2007

Two New Year's Poems by DU FU
0oo0 o00(from a manuscript in progress)

1. What a Night!

What a night this is --
old year out, new one in

long watch, bright candles
none of their light wasted

here in the local inn
what pastimes do we have?

we can throw dice
to keep ourselves amused

one man leans across the table
begging for five to come up

another rolls up his sleeves
before he throws and loses

all the politicians
roll dice too, and lose

but an accidental meeting
might just bring good fortune

don’t laugh at that!
remember that nonentity, Liu I,

penniless
and willing to risk millions!

ooooooooooooooooooooooooDated 746

2. New Year's Eve at TU WEI's

It’s best to watch the year depart
with members of the family

singing songs
drinking pepper wine

nervous, out in the stables,
the horses make a racket

the crows are rousted from the trees
by all the torches and lanterns

tomorrow I leave
my fortieth year

my life has started to race
downhill, toward its evening

and what is the use of caution
the value of restraint?

better to put my cares aside
and just get drunk.

ooooooooooooooooooooooooDated 751

Poem from December, 2006

Christmas: Ohio and Capolongo

Like a soft doll the raptured angel lolls
above the dusty crèche; lights flicker
in all the downtown trees, while carols
crisscross the air from boxy speakers.

I’m in two places now: my country,
where the Nativity is clumsy but familiar,
and that inept museum, east of Nervi,
which shows me crèches of another order:

elaborate pageants, carefully arranged,
all lace and straw and flat-out piety,
the underside of what made art both strange
and wonderful, that Catholic sense of deity.

We’re never going to get God right. But we
learn to love all our failures on the way.

Peom from November, 2006

Tree Time-Trips

.....1
My shoes crush acorns.
I’m thirty-nine I’m seven.
Far down the yard
my father and a neighbor
sail horseshoes through the air.

The clank and settle.

And the past I thought would dwindle
arcs back to me, a hoop.

The men wipe their necks,
the boy walks round the oak:
sometimes our lives rust gently,
a long-handled shovel, leaned
against a sun-warmed wall.

.....2
Fourteen, I perch on the wicker seat
in a nimbus of misery, love’s shrimp,
hearing the streetcar’s crackle and hiss
as the drugstore turns on its corner.

And what was real? The whipped sparks,
the glove puppets, bobbing, the pocket dreams,
this poem-to-be, my father’s wharf
of set belief, the wicker and shellac?

Learning to be imperfect –
that’s erudition!
Like coolies in flooded fields,
we wade on our own reflections.

.....3
November bleach and brownout. Acid sky,
falsetto sunlight, wire and fluff of weeds, pods,
bone and paper grass-clumps. The dog bounds off,
stitching the field with her nose. Hound city.

It’s thirteen years. Different dog, same field,
and double grief: dull for the slumped president,
stake-sharp for my friend’s ripped heart – faint
night-cries in the mansions where we lived.

But the bullet grooves are gone, the first dog’s dead,
and here is the field, seedy and full of sameness.
Speech fails, years wrinkle. Dream covers dream

that covered dream. My head starts up a jazz
I never could concoct. I have to grin. On the cold pond
the tinsmith wind is whistling at his work.

Poem form October, 2006

October Couplets

1
Again the cold: shot bolt, blue shackle,
oxalic acid, bleaching a rubber cuff,

a cow-eyed giantess, burning roots and brush,
the streak and smash of clouds, loud settling jays,

crows roosting closer – my older-by-one-year bones
have their own dull hum, a blues: it’s all plod,

but they want to go on, above timberline,
to boulders, florets, ozone, then go free

in the old mill that the wind and the frost run
all day all night under the gauze and gaze of stars.

2
Somewhere between sperm cell and clam shell
this space cruiser takes me places I’d rather

stay clear of: a planet all graveyard, mowed,
graveled and paved, bride-light and parson-shade,

or a milkweed, bitter, about to burst, or a dropped
acorn even a squirrel didn’t want, browning to black,

and I have to learn to relax with it all, to sing
“Where the bee sucks, there suck I,” though the lily

is sticky and choking, bees don’t suck, and the sting
is a greeting you never recover from.

3
“Steam of consciousness,” a student’s fluke,
makes me see a lake, linen-white at evening,

some amnesia-happy poet all curled up
sucking a rock at its black bottom;

oblivion tempts everyone, but I
would miss too much – whales and ticks,

the weather’s subtle bustle, blue crab clouds,
my kite rising, paper and sticks, a silver ember,

while the poem’s ghost waits by the empty band shell,
does a little tango, taps out its own last line.

4
But this fall rain, somehow both thread and button,
sewing itself to the malachite grass,

beading the clubs and brushes of the spruce –
all day I have sat as if gazing over water,

wind feathering the reservoir, stupid as a church,
and thought of summer: all those burst horizons,

mineral cities, rosy meat, clean seas and shaggy islands,
the wine cork popping in the grape arbor,

these things seem better and clearer and than gods just now,
raspberries hung like lamps among their brambles.

5
These leaves, these paper cutouts drifting my yard,
stars, fish, mitten, saddles: the badges and epaulets

of emptiness – last night in my dream
I was the killer, the guard who failed to stop him,

and the child who froze and was spared. Nothing lasts,
sang the crowd, and I answered, It sure does;

Is nothing sacred, roared the statesman – I do
believe it is, said I . . . I wake and shave,

still full of my dreamflood – oh skim milk sky,
oh brown star curling in my hand . . .