"Lives of the Saints"
1
A loose knot in a short rope,
My life keeps sliding out from under me, intact but
Diminishing,
its pattern becoming patternless,
The blue abyss of everyday air
Breathing it in and breathing it out,
in little clouds like smoke,
In little wind strings and threads.
Everything that the pencil says is eraseable,
Unlike our voices, whose words are black and permanent,
Smudging our lives like coal dust,
unlike our memories,
Etched like a skyline against the mind,
Unlike our irretrievable deeds...
The pencil spills everything, and then takes everything back.
For instance, there I am at Hollywood Boulevard and Vine,
Almost 60, Christmas Eve, the flesh-flashers and pimps
And inexhaustible Walk of Famers
snubbing their joints out,
Hoping for something not-too-horrible to happen across the street.
The rain squall has sucked up and bumped off,
The palm fronds dangle lubriciously.
Life, as they say, is beautiful.
2
One week into 1995, and all I’ve thought about
Is endings, retreads,
the love of loss
Light as a locket around my neck, idea of absence
Hard and bright as a dime inside my trouser pocket.
Where is the new and negotiable,
The undiscovered snapshot,
the phoneme's refusal, word's rest?
Remember, face the facts, Miss Stein said.
And so I've tried,
Pretending there's nothing but description, hoping emotion shows,
That that's why description’s there:
The subject was never smoke,
there's always been a fire.
The winter dark shatters around us like broken glass.
The morning sky opens its pink robe.
All explorers must die of heartbreak.
Middle-aged poets, too,
Wind from the northwest, small wind,
Two crows in the ash tree, one on an oak limb across the street.
Endless effortless and nothingness, January blue:
Noteless measureless music;
imageless iconography.
I'll be the lookout and the listener, you do the talking...
Chinook, the January thaw;
warm wind from the Gulf
Spinning the turn-around and the dead leaves
Northeast and southeast—
I like it under the trees in winter,
everything over me dead,
Or half-dead, sky hard,
Wind moving the leaves around clockwise, then counterclockwise too.
We live in a place that is not our own...
I'll say...Roses rot
In the side garden's meltdown, shrubs bud,
The sounds of syllables altogether elsewhere rise
Like white paint through the sun—
familiar only with God,
We yearn to be pierced by that
Occasional void through which the supernatural flows.
The plain geometry of the dead does not equate,
Infinite numbers, untidy sums:
We believe in belief but don’t believe,
for which we shall be judged.
In winter, under the winter trees—
A murder of crows glides over, some thirty or more,
To its appointment,
sine and cosine, angle and arc.
—Charles Wright
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