The Mad Scene, by James Merrill

Again last night I dreamed the dream called Laundry.
In it, the sheets and towels of a life we were going to share,
The milk-stiff bibs, the shroud, each rag to be ever
Trampled or soiled, bled on or groped for blindly,
Came swooning out of an enormous willow hamper
Onto moon-marbly boards. We had just met. I watched
From outer darkness. I had dressed myself in clothes
Of a new fiber that never stains or wrinkles, never
Wears thin. The opera house sparkled with tiers
And tiers of eyes, like mine enlarged by belladonna,
Trained inward. There I saw the cloud-clot, gust by gust,
Form, and the lightning bite, and the roan mane unloosen.
Fingers were running in panic over the flute’s nine gates.
Why did I flinch? I loved you. And in the downpour laughed
To have us wrung white, gnarled together, one
Topmost mordent of wisteria,
As the lean tree burst into grief.

Last hyperbolic statement of post-election joy (from me, at least)

via Hayden Carruth's poem "Ecstasy."

Ecstasy

For years it was in sex and I thought
this was the most of it
so brief
a moment
or two of transport out of oneself
or
in music which lasted longer and filled me
with the exquisite wrenching agony
of the blues
and now it is equally
transitory and obscure as I sit in my broken
chair that the cats have shredded
by the stove on a winter night with wind and snow
howling outside and I imagine
the whole world at peace
at peace
and everyone comfortable and warm
the great pain assuaged
a moment
of the most shining and singular sensual gratification.

Run

It's half-marathon week, so expect some run-talk. Meanwhile, there's this, written shortly after a long run.

I was wheezing, left
right. The buttons
called nothing. Fights
on billowy terrain,
light taut. The run
was overwrought,
an arrival ingrained,
the time for precision.

Your names were elisions,
and I was skidding. Laterally
speaking, I wasn’t budging
but through the fog below
I knew left right. Draining
out of me were vowels,
decisions, and deeds. Pace.
Write left in little trowels.

Tamer visions fleeing.
Linear on the grid, topheavy
dimensions. Logging
real hours to sealed rhythms.
Open closed, close to them.
Are the names really done?
Sunbeaten trod, muddy grass
waving follicles at our pass.

Redolent, gamin-toed trot
weathered well. Right. I left
without going anywhere.
Arrived through no threshold.
Thinking I had picked daisies
without ever touching a flower,
traipsing gaps in fear, beads
in shower. The finished end so near.

Covering distances vaster,
the apartness moving faster.
It was farther or further,
though I didn’t know. I knew
little, but I knew well
how the shell formed, and why
scorned, we are in flight. Left.
Right. Left. Right.

Wordlessness, again

Having not seen anything for a long time,
the yellow came as a surprise. Pixels like
javelins darting into orange, red, and finally
into a dark brown, somehow blacker than black.
Virtually all of the living creatures
with which I come into contact are terrified,
truly terrified, of me. Squirrels, cats, insects.
I think the humans just regard me with a frothy mix
of apprehension and befuddlement. I tell them
it’s not my fault but the words aren’t there,
and I can’t sign or signal.
When I woke up, it felt
like I had seen my way through a fight
– I was battered, limbs in need of peeling,
the feeling that a freight of steel
was parked behind my forehead.
Concussion marks streaking the pillow.
A song I hated greeted me,
followed by a song I liked,
and I realized they were the same,
but in my dream I could only hear
the good one, a quality of sound trick.

I learned to make do with less,
until all my artwork was
white flecks on a white canvas
and all music was hi-hats.
Friends were token statements,
typed with unfocused abandon,
barely signifying the likelihood
that we were thinking of each other,
and it mattered little whether
I was thinking of the violence
that might visit them, or of how
the same violence might dissipate.
Wanting to scream, I wrote a poem
about wordlessness, knowing that
it could never say anything to anyone.

You needed reinvention,
and you had to seek it elsewhere,
and you told me this
because I imagined
your fingers curling
their way through my hair
like a life turning on itself, though
of course you had no way
of knowing that I knew.
I worked on a self-portrait
but in it my hands looked frantic,
repeatedly signaling danger, danger.
Instead I would lie awake before dawn,
when the streetlights turn off
and for a half-hour
the windows actually go black,
and somehow that stillness
darkened and delirious
was enough.

The blessing in wordlessness
was forgetting about subjunctives.
There was only the life we were all living.
Awoken from the dream of silence,
I stood up, though my eyes weren't open.
I wanted to do push-ups,
and to sleep, and to
hold time in place,
stopping the gigantic carousel
that brings us closer for a second
before orbiting away.

Now that I have words again,
they don't seem to fit in the holes
I prepared. Big ones say little,
like "contrarily." Littles ones weigh
far too much, and we don't
exchange them freely. Our currency
remains the inflicting of pain
through the use of small, pointy words,
and we still forgive - not by saying,
"You are forgiven," but with kind deeds
that say, "I recognize your realness,
and I see that behind your
temperate forehead there is a mind,
a mind not unlike mine, a mind
whose existence will never be undone,
even when all the words we know
leave us in a silent fury."

More on mornings, breaking

Recycled some images from "Second floor, at the bar" for this one. Riffed? Self-plagiarized? Irrelevant, I guess.

A.M.

the morning broke hopeful
on coarse tonsils

you were thinking
about empty houses and wings

and beating, beating,
how the gaze swivels.

the morning broke pearly
grazing you

uncouth pedestrians
and their incurious intrusions.

the morning broke people
it snapped them

it was relentless
on your spine

core muscles made from paperbacks
and were we running then, even?

the morning broke itself
its yolk bowing

but nothing was left
and no one knew what

morning breaking
really meant.

But we expected
a thing or two

from packed houses
with parked wings

and it was early again
when we first noticed
how the morning breaks.

Second Floor, at the Bar

In a place that won’t do, you notice
too much. The sun makes you take
big gulps and too soon the voice you hear
cecomes rounded at the edges, effluvial.
There is not enough, and there is too much
and always there is also neither.
You want there always to be neither
and both, and you want things you say
to be true for a day, and on that day
yhey will also have been true forever,
but you have only enough conviction
with which to stand in the shade,
wishing for life to give you smaller portions.

The night cracked open, and the yoke bowed.
I had brined it, but the jar was brittle
and impatient. It was hard to understand
at that moment how the moon would inspire
anyone to do anything, and I saw
in your eyes that only I was impervious.
It was such a deliberate message conveyed
wordlessly – not “you feel impervious
And I don’t,” but “you are the only one
who feels the way you do.” Looking around
for confirmation, I realized the message
must be printed on the inside of my irises
and that the salty yolk of the moon
was projecting it in sepia, a portrait
of thoughts too stupid to be thought,
the only ones I seem to able to hold anymore.

We always say morning “breaks,”
but only people who don’t see sunrises
talk that way. When have you stayed up till dawn
and thought that you had witnessed something breaking?
I guess when you have pieces scattered all around
because nothing fits anymore, you get a pass,
you get to say morning has “broken”
but we will silently critique your lack of specificity.

Why are we even capable of saying things
that we wouldn’t believe ourselves capable of saying
a few short hours later? Why are we able to
think anything that won’t be true for longer
than a day? We must either enjoy
passing time that way, or we must not know better.
It is enough to make me see how nothing
is anything, and how some things are everything,
and even then how every dream or trim sentence
is also about the loneliness and impossibility of it all.

The Continuous Life, by Mark Strand

This is one of those poems that I think is just perfect. Not an awkward phrase in sight. Every word in its right place.

What of the neighborhood homes awash
In a silver light, of children crouched in the bushes,
Watching the grown-ups for signs of surrender,
Signs that the irregular pleasures of moving
From day to day, of being adrift on the swell of duty,
Have run their course? Oh parents, confess
To your little ones the night is a long way off
And your taste for the mundane grows; tell them
Your worship of household chores has barely begun;
Describe the beauty of shovels and rakes, brooms and mops;
Say there will always be cooking and cleaning to do,
That one thing leads to another, which leads to another;
Explain that you live between two great darks, the first
With an ending, the second without one, that the luckiest
Thing is having been born, that you live in a blur
Of hours and days, months and years, and believe
It has meaning, despite the occasional fear
You are slipping away with nothing completed, nothing
To prove you existed. Tell the children to come inside,
That your search goes on for something you lost--a name,
A family album that fell from its own small matter
Into another, a piece of the dark that might have been yours,
You don’t really know. Say that each of you tries
To keep busy, learning to lean down close and hear
The careless breathing of earth and feel its available
Languor come over you, wave after wave, sending
Small tremors of love through your brief,
Undeniable selves, into your days, and beyond.