Monday, September 10, 2018

I burn for my own lies.

At the Executed Murderer's Grave

for J. L. D.

Why should we do this? What good is it to us? Above all, how can we do such a thing? How can it possibly be done?
—Freud
1
My name is James A. Wright, and I was born
Twenty-five miles from this infected grave,
In Martins Ferry, Ohio, where one slave
To Hazel-Atlas Glass became my father.
He tried to teach me kindness. I return
Only in memory now, aloof, unhurried,
To dead Ohio, where I might lie buried,
Had I not run away before my time.
Ohio caught George Doty. Clean as lime,
His skull rots empty here. Dying’s the best
Of all the arts men learn in a dead place.
I walked here once. I made my loud display,
Leaning for language on a dead man’s voice.
Now sick of lies, I turn to face the past.
I add my easy grievance to the rest:

   2
Doty, if I confess I do not love you,
Will you let me alone? I burn for my own lies.
The nights electrocute my fugitive,
My mind. I run like the bewildered mad
At St. Clair Sanitarium, who lurk,
Arch and cunning, under the maple trees,
Pleased to be playing guilty after dark.
Staring to bed, they croon self-lullabies.
Doty, you make me sick. I am not dead.
I croon my tears at fifty cents per line.

   3
Idiot, he demanded love from girls,
And murdered one. Also, he was a thief.
He left two women, and a ghost with child.
The hair, foul as a dog’s upon his head,
Made such revolting Ohio animals
Fitter for vomit than a kind man’s grief.
I waste no pity on the dead that stink,
And no love’s lost between me and the crying
Drunks of Belaire, Ohio, where police
Kick at their kidneys till they die of drink.
Christ may restore them whole, for all of me.
Alive and dead, those giggling muckers who
Saddled my nightmares thirty years ago
Can do without my widely printed sighing
Over their pains with paid sincerity.
I do not pity the dead, I pity the dying.

   4
I pity myself, because a man is dead.
If Belmont County killed him, what of me?
His victims never loved him. Why should we?
And yet, nobody had to kill him either.
It does no good to woo the grass, to veil
The quicklime hole of a man’s defeat and shame.
Nature-lovers are gone. To hell with them.
I kick the clods away, and speak my name.

   5
This grave’s gash festers. Maybe it will heal,
When all are caught with what they had to do
In fear of love, when every man stands still
By the last sea,
And the princes of the sea come down
To lay away their robes, to judge the earth
And its dead, and we dead stand undefended everywhere,
And my bodies—father and child and unskilled criminal—
Ridiculously kneel to bare my scars,
My sneaking crimes, to God’s unpitying stars.

   6
Staring politely, they will not mark my face
From any murderer’s, buried in this place.
Why should they? We are nothing but a man.

   7
Doty, the rapist and the murderer,
Sleeps in a ditch of fire, and cannot hear;
And where, in earth or hell’s unholy peace,
Men’s suicides will stop, God knows, not I.
Angels and pebbles mock me under trees.
Earth is a door I cannot even face.
Order be damned, I do not want to die,
Even to keep Belaire, Ohio, safe.
The hackles on my neck are fear, not grief.
(Open, dungeon! Open, roof of the ground!)
I hear the last sea in the Ohio grass,
Heaving a tide of gray disastrousness.
Wrinkles of winter ditch the rotted face
Of Doty, killer, imbecile, and thief:
Dirt of my flesh, defeated, underground.

Wednesday, June 13, 2018

The Applicant

(For Annie)

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

-Sylvia Plath

Mary Don't You Weep

James Baldwin



“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive...

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death--ought to decide, indeed, to earn one's death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” 

I laid bare my chest, said do your best


Destroy me.
I've been to hell and back so many times, I must admit it kind of bores me

-Ray Lamontagne

Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you

Boris Pasternak, best known for his penning of the epic Russian novel, "Doctor Zhivago", is also one of my favorite poets. He didn't write a lot (comparatively), but what he did write will dissolve you into one million particles of light.



~

The shiv'ring piano, foaming at the mouth,
Will wrench you by its ravings, discompose you.
"My darling," you will murmur. "No!" I'll shout.
"To music?!" Yet can two be ever closer

Than in the dusk, while tossing vibrant chords
Into the fireplace, like journals, tome by tome?
Oh, understanding wonderful, just nod,
And you will know I do not claim to own

Your soul and body. You may go where'er
You want. To others. Wether has been written
Already. Death these days is in the air.
One opens up one's veins much like a window.
 

~

"February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noice of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all you grieving
Are muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out. " 

~

"Poetry is a rich, full-bodied whistle,
cracked ice crunching in pails,
the night that numbs the leaf,
the duel of two nightingales,
the sweet pea that has run wild,
Creation's tears in shoulder blades."

~

Immovable titans will choke in the black vaults of day. Are these poems fermented enough to stun the thunder? It must have been delirious, to consent to be earth.


X as a Function of Distance from Ignatz



MONICA YOUN

(she opens the door)
(he is twelve inches
away) her fingers

still splayed across the
battened-down brass latch
of his sternum (she

closes the door) (he
is eight feet away)
her palm skids down the

banister clings to
the fluted globe of
the finial (he

is twenty-eight feet
away) (she opens
the door) the black air

is fast flowing and
cold (she closes the
door) she clutches her

thin intimacy
tight under her chin
and trips down the steps

(he is forty feet
away) the stiff wind
palpably stripping

his scent from her hair
from the numb fingers
she raises to her

mouth a cab pulls up
(she opens the door)
she bends the body

hitherto upright
(she closes the door)
the cracked brown vinyl

(he is ninety feet
away) biting the
backs of her thighs red

blotches suffusing
her cheeks I’m sorry
please stop she says (he

is four hundred feet
away) please stop the
cab (she opens the

door) the cab stops she
pushes a twenty
through the slot (he is

seven hundred feet
away) (she closes
the door) the husk of

something dry and light
falls to the sidewalk
crumbles away (she

opens the door) (he
is two feet away)
(she closes the door)

DISRESPECTFUL THRILLS


Lord Birthday, Instagram

To siphon light


14. wait
Monica Youn

To stand and wait is a task far weightier than simply to wait. It is to permit the distractible body neither ease nor action, nor food nor drink nor any such reprieve; it is to pit the body in enmity against its own heaviness.

To abide in readiness as in a winter orchard, the lacerated land bandaged in snow. To exist inert as if limbless, skin seamless as if reknit over what had been pruned away, knotted rootstock fit for no other service: no branch, no leaf, no fruit. To persist as a stripped stick persists in a white field, bark peeled back from one exposed split, uptilted as if eager for the grafted slip.

To stand and wait for the one who reaps where he has not sown.

Mercy sugars the starving soil with nitrogen, potassium, phosphate. Mercy captures rain in silver beads and stitches them through the threadbare weave of cloud. Mercy wields a scalpel cutting a cleft in the lopped-off stump, mercy forces home the rootless wand, mercy seals the join with tar and tape.

To foster the raw scion as if it were a son, to siphon light down through its body as if it were your own.

Blindness


2. wide
Monica Youn

The “wide” is always haunted by surprise. In a dark world, the “wide” is the sudden door that opens on unfurling blackness, the void pooling at the bottom of the unlit stairs. To be bounded is our usual condition; to be open is anomalous, even excessive.

A wide-eyed girl is extreme in her unliddedness, her bare membranes flinching at any contact, vulnerable to motes, to smuts, to dryness. A wide-hipped girl extends the splayed arches of her body to bridge the generational divide. A wide-legged girl unseals a portal between persons; she is disturbing to the extent that she is open to all comers, a trapdoor that must be shut for safety’s sake. A wide-eyed girl is often thought desirable; a wide-hipped girl is often thought eligible; a wide-legged girl is often thought deplorable. A wide-legged girl is rarely wide-eyed, though she may have started out that way.

We can understand why Milton, in the narrowing orbit of his blindness, would have considered wideness, unboundedness to be threatening. What’s less clear is why the wideness of the wide-legged girl is also considered threatening. Does the wideness of the wide-legged girl evoke a kind of blindness, a dark room where one might blunder into strangers, the way two men once met each other in me?

Audrey at barre







Richard II, Act II, scene i



"This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle,
 This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, 
This other Eden, demi-Paradise."

The Accounts



The nest was at rest for a time, not being
made. Before the eggs were laid, it softened.
The robin sleeping. Inside the house,
the sound of laundry
in the dryer, the sound of a zipper
tumbling inside
the apparatus, and shirts with buttons,
as well as napkins
and a tablecloth printed with blueberries
and stalks of lily of the valley, oval,
for the table with claw legs
and extra leaves for guests.


II.

In one account, the angels come, their hands
emerging from their wings like sentences
staying, as long as it takes,
for the windows to go from indigo
to black, as long
as it takes for a breath to land in the base
of the belly, in the cavity
wisdom tells us wisdom comes from
or first dwells in, before it navigates
the narrows of the throat, becomes mantra,
becomes guttural, becomes spit to aspirate
the language the mouth makes.
The native obligation of this account
to its subject is care. The form
of music the wind chime makes
registers the commitment
of a furious system, filled with
conviction, to the continued
transformation of what
is. Do not ask what has been
lost. Ask what changed. An instrument
of will, the guitar echoes this, a chord,
more reminder than absolute, the hand
arouses but does not create the scale.
In this way what rests gets taken up.


III.

In another, the mind makes a decision
to end its disorder. The mind wants first
to end the face. The subject
has had enough, one too many
figures walking through the orchard, the call
and response of conversation
become an imposition on some other world
unbroken by the idea of separate bodies,
an idea one has never been convinced of,
and so now it is a relief to believe
what one has suspected, that separation
a trick of perspective, though such a revelation
does not undo the fatigue of existing
in the continuing illusions of others. And yet, the obligation
to be kind, to show interest in strangers
when they visit with flowers, to family
whose hands are empty, and to doctors,
not to mention the pain.


IV.

In the last account, the explosions
are too small to be seen, and oxygen
takes both thirst and hunger away
as it ceases to find a home in the lungs,
and the patient, having ceased to feel, ceases
to breathe, as the heart shuts down
before the brain and shuts
the dreaming down, the settling on a nest
of images, not feeling any form of distress.
The pathways to distress are blocked,
but the senses doubled, the ears know
the house more than they ever did,
whose clothes occupy the dryer,
which voice accompanies water.


V.
Angels be patient with this subject.
I know what she would say to you
if she could speak,
                                 if she could see
you just inside the window whose top right
pane frames what we call a family,
when the almost mother bird
finishes what she is thinking about,
barely but still hidden from sight.
If you stopped to look at the nest
you would see a sleep so purposeful
the ladder of adoration would reverse
and you would stay on earth.