The Brooklyn Rail

Poem

Keats’ pleasant death mask
Such a young guy to die like that
As they did then
One eye on a star
The other on a banana peel
He looks so focused on eternity
On love, beauty, sleep
A little guy with a prominent nose
Handsome they say and yes at least
He looks that way, Poetry and Fame
His milk and meat
And love of a lovely girl
To keep it all afloat
They had such a time those young
Ambitious men with their magazines
Echoing down through history
He was 24
What did he know?
He made it all up and believed it

Poem

Saint Francis never knew the nun
  Perished in Deutschland’s wreck
Booted out of Germany after Luther
  In fury of religious might wanted all
Crazy Catholics gone, yes, Mr
  GM Hopkins crazy like that too,
Catholics crazy to see martyr in
  Plain sad death, body’s hurl as
Jesus-heart plunge tower-waves
  Come crashing down when ship’s aground
On sandbar off Kent coast
  And Hopkins thinks now Catholics
Will ravish English soul
  At last…
Yet O how true
His dapple-swooning portmanteau words
  Extravagantly cobbled through his faith-besmirched
Transcendent-eared sloe-bespeckled heart
  Yes, death’s mere carcass-bump
And fleshly end no big deal as earth
  (‘Adam’) return to self
Recharge and redistribute

But O in heart
Such metaphor-fervor
  Such over-arching truth-feel in the mouth
Filling the brutal the tragic the sea-fueled crash and blow
With a drop of human meaning

A you

That they then came for
The ones not ready and
Waiting for them the
Ones they insisted on
Naming as the problem for them
And that their erasure
Be the problem’s solution
That they knew to begin with
Was not so but each problem
Must have a solution
Or be understood to have a solution
Where there is no solution
And the creation of such solution
Is necessary as an explanation
To sooth the wound
Inherent in being one in the world
Of many how painful they all say
To be one then none
There must be an explanation
There must be a problem
To be solved there must be
Another one responsible
For all this resentment
As answer to this discomfiting question
A you

Earth Ode 8

Where one’s assigned a place in time
A name an identity
Look at all the things in your room
Where you are sitting reading things
The poem is blind to
But earth knows for nothing that is
Can be exception to the rule
Of color everything’s some color some
Shape even a thought’s
A shape or the line of a poem
Or a poem’s jawline or plumbline
Fishing line a line
Of credit’s a shape nature knows
No straight lines
Yet nature of all there is
Is most unnatural
What it’s made of so am I
Made of and as the
Gesture sweeps me up
Into form so the gesture
Of the breath
Sweeps me down into parts
That return to soil
As a baby returns to its mother
At night turn off the lights
And it will be dark
But somewhere it will be light
If it is dark in other locations
Hear the dog waking up
When you wake up
And let your dreams always
Be forgotten
In them take up heroic causes
And let your uncanniness rule
For people who love tales
There will always be heroes
Who will overcome obstacles to win victories
Yet in the true story of your coming to be
There are disintegrating plot lines
It’s a story of cleverness
Not bravery
Of indirection
Not victory
Of ongoingness
Never defeat
You read it at your peril
And misunderstand
For it does not feed you as you’d
Expected — see the
Very dark sea churns
And the bloodred sky
Burns over it
Plunge then with your tongue
Into the heart of how the world tastes
In human desperation
At the glimmers of verisimilitude
Torching the edges of spite
Renounce understanding
Since there is no choice
And take your chances
With the mere bluster
That is your true birthright
So that the seas can
Lip the shores
Without wonder or worry