More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
My thirties. Everyone I knew was living The same desolate luxury, Each ashamed of the same things: Innocence and privacy. I’d lug Home the paper bags, doing Bank-balance math and counting days. I’d squint into it, or close my eyes And let it slam me in the face— The known sun setting On the dawning century.
From the Weathered bed of planks outside the cabin Where he goes to be alone with his questions.
Tiny flowers throw frantic color At his feet.
If he tries—if he holds his mind In place and wills it—he can almost believe In something larger than himself rearranging The air.
A MAN’S WORLD
The days Are bright but cold. Our shadow Spreads like ash across each road. How much more will we bury In the earth? How much
In this dark where the earth floats?
I love you,
The angles of it scraping at Each throat, shouldering past The swirling dust motes In those beams of light That whatever we now knew We could let ourselves feel, knew To climb. O Woods—O Dogs— O Tree—O Gun—O Girl, run— O Miraculous Many Gone— O Lord—O Lord—O Lord— Is this love the trouble you promised?
History is a ship forever setting sail. On either shore: mountains of men, Oceans of bone, an engine whose teeth shred all that is not our name.
It is as if I can almost still remember. As if I once perhaps belonged here. The mountains a deep heavy green, and The rocky steep drop to the waters below. The peaked roofs, the white-plastered Brick. A clothesline in a neighbor’s yard Made of sticks. The stone path skimming The ridge. A ladder asleep against a house. What is the soul allowed to keep? Every Birth, every small gift, every ache? I know I have knelt just here, torn apart by loss. Lazed On this grass, counting joys like trees: cypress, Blue fir, dogwood, cherry. Ageless, constant, Growing down into earth and up into history.
Every chance I get, every face I see, I find myself Searching for a glimpse of myself, my daughter, my sons. More often, I find there former students, old lovers, Friends I knew once and had until now forgotten. My Sisters, a Russian neighbor, a red-haired American actor. And on and on, uncannily, as though all of us must be Buried deep within each other.
You pull canvases from racks: red daisies, Peonies in a blue vase, an urn of lilies Like spirits flown from the dead. A self- Portrait in a white dress, faceless but for one eye, And all around you what could be empty Coffins or guitar cases, or dark leaves
On a swirling sea. On a column in a black frame Hangs a photo of your mother, a smiling Girl in an army coat. Can any of us save ourselves, You once wrote, save another? Below her, All beard, practically, and crevassed brow, Tolstoy stares in the direction of what once Must have seemed the future.
I am you, one day out of five, Tired, empty, hating what I carry But afraid to lay it down, stingy, Angry, doing violence to others By the sheer freight of my gloom, Halfway home, wanting to stop, to quit But keeping going mostly out of spite.
