Elegy Owed Read online

  it’s over, who is late to tell you

  he never loved you, also in the rain,

  as wet as a goat in the rain or a statue

  of rain in the rain, if there is one,

  would have epaulets of rain in the rain

  and be made of bronze or toffee, you are running

  now in the rain, your version

  of the human spirit, your very private instance

  of converting sunlight when available

  into vitamin D, for the energy

  to believe we are more than energy, hoping

  that you are wrong in the rain,

  that it will never be over, as he

  is hoping that he always loved you

  in the rain, three blocks, two blocks, one block

  to go and there he is, more lickable

  than prophecy, like dew has taken human form

  and put on a yellow shirt and shaved

  in the rain, the rain so hard

  you fuck in the rain and no one notices, the rain

  fuck-shaped where you are fucking, an animal

  with its mouth to your ear, and you

  an animal with your mouth to its ear, everyone

  on equal footing in the rain, the rain

  speaking to your panting with its panting, the rain

  washing away the rain

  Born again

  One day I was introduced to a bed

  in which a woman was born, gave birth, and died.

  The woman who introduced me to the bed

  was the granddaughter of the woman

  who was born in the bed and never lived

  in another house.

  Being a child of wind, I whispered

  in the company of so much permanence.

  The woman found my reverence ridiculous.

  I knew this because she took off her clothes

  and got on the bed as a way of asking me

  to join her in making the bed a living bed.

  It was in that bed that the woman told me

  she tried to kill herself at seventeen.

  Lots of Valium under a tree with horses nearby

  ignoring her to eat.

  This is my second life, she said, the one I got

  for not knowing more about drugs, for being shy

  when it came to my father’s shotgun

  in my mouth.

  By then, she’d lived a hundred years

  in dog years beyond when she’d wanted to die.

  When I told her this, she said, Woof.

  The bed squeaked each time we turned

  or breathed our bodies into each other.

  I keep asking myself if this story is true.

  I seem to believe it is, seem to admire time

  and making love on top of musical springs

  and the world every day for not killing itself,

  not exploding or burning down

  as it might reasonably want to.

  And the woman?

  I seem to know her or contain her or think

  the valley in which I live

  would resemble her if someone had the language

  to convince it to rise and be a woman

  wearing a flowered dress.

  Women are more likely to wear gardens

  than men, to be valleys, to hold time

  in their bodies and take us

  inside what is passing

  as it passes, what is arriving

  as we leave.

  And the man?

  I seem to be him or want him

  to be the feeling that stars

  would look down on us and ask

  What are you going through

  if only they had mouths.

  Scarecrow overhears himself thinking

  I love crows, so midnight at noon. Me,

  a suit stuck on sticks

  that no longer suits your life. As if this aways

  who you are, your self-imposed

  supposes: suppose this is it — this field,

  this light? What does, anyway, fill you

  if not sun up or down, if not harvest,

  yield? We should switch, I’ll hop off

  and gimp around, you’ll hang

  among scavengers for company,

  for keeps, your straw-thoughts pecked

  by wind. Are you me alive or am I you

  dead? I lied: I hold my arms wide

  not to shoo but greet, to say

  to plunder, Feel free, dig in.

  Elegy’s

  almost eulogy, is nearly dearly

  beloved, I am un-gathered here

  where you are not, I confess

  I obsess, repeat myself to feel

  this speaking’s more than the creaking

  of a pew in an empty church, where

  as a tyke, surrounded by an absence

  I was priestly asked to think of

  as love, I couldn’t wrap my mind

  around such a zilch, whereas you

  I touch and smell in the rough flesh

  of memory, the word sonically

  wants to be remember me, in my head

  at least, you thrive some, you die some

  daily in this weird-ass and misty mix

  of ghost and gone, to which

  I address what pretends to be

  litany but is no more

  evolved than this stuck

  list: come back, come home

  Desire

  Having assumed it’s none of my business

  that our cats sniff each other’s asses

  while I prepare their breakfast, I turn now

  to the window and resume the relationship

  I’ve had with two horses who may be

  two different horses since I fell in love

  with shapes moving horse-like

  in the distance eight years ago. I watched

  one dusk in Michigan a horse mount

  and conspire with another to make

  yet a third, the mounted horse

  completely not stopping eating

  while the other quickly did his thing,

  which resembled my thing in how it held on to

  and cherished blood, as if for a while

  it were a heart. I didn’t expect that thought

  but there it is, the dick-heart, and weirdly,

  when I put their food down, the cats usually

  go look at birds, as if to remind themselves

  what the real life is

  and that it isn’t this one, though for me,

  this has been completely authentic

  from day one, such that if you gathered

  all of my desires in a bag, I would marvel

  at the size and hunger of the bag

  and want that too, and we could talk

  well into the night about how to slip the bag

  holding everything into the bag

  holding everything without dropping a thing,

  like where else could you fit the sky

  but the sky?

  Take care

  Nuclear missiles are rusting in their silo sleep,

  gaskets are failing, firing mechanisms are going bad

  but the engineers who designed them are retired

  and records weren’t kept, we couldn’t make the missiles

  today if we wanted to, and the thousands we have

  might work if fired but might not, or leak, or go off

  because they feel like it, Why are we talking

  about anything else, I said to the waiter when he asked

  if we had any questions. He cried and sat on one

  of the two extra chairs at our table, one of the two spots

  for emergency seating that were in our control,

  then a second waiter came up and wondered aloud

  if we were ready to order, I asked to hear

  real silence, not the kind with my breath inside it,

  my wife wanted the moon to ma
ke up its mind, to be full

  or empty but nothing in between, our new friend

  the first waiter wanted the second waiter

  to make us take it all back, to tell him the missiles

  were fine, that we knew how to repair death

  on the magnificent scale of the atom. That’s the least

  we can do, I told the second waiter, look at how

  we’ve wounded his face, it suggests a painting

  by Francis Bacon that’s been chewed on by a dog.

  So we told our new friend the first waiter

  that we were circus people, that we lie about everything —

  there is no Strongest Man on Earth, The Lion Woman

  has more ocelot in her than lion — he smiled, the world

  had been healed, and he rose, and served his country

  beautifully that night, bringing it sustenance

  over and over on plates large enough to hold a human head.

  Obituary for the middle class

  This whole thing, this way of living beside a can opener

  beside a microwave beside a son beside a daughter

  beside a river going to college, you get up

  and kiss the mortgage and go go go with coffee-veins

  and burger-fries and pack your soul on ice

  till sixty-five, when you sit down with a lake

  and have a long talk with your breath

  and cast your mind far away from shore, fish nibbling

  the mosquitoes of your thoughts: they will whisper of this life

  a hundred years from now to children before sleep

  who will call them liars, “Once upon a time,

  they had two and a half bathrooms and tiny houses

  for their cars and doctors who listened

  through tubes to their fat hearts, they named

  their endeavors and beliefs four-wheel drive,

  twenty-percent-off sale, summer vacation, colonoscopy,

  variable-rate loan, inheritance,” and we will be

  as gods to them in that they won’t believe in us,

  and we will be spared the eternity of their worship

  as they will be spared money, the counting

  and the having and the memory of the middle share

  of what gets harder and harder to call a pie

  Song of the recital

  for David

  A man plays guitar beside the second-oldest river

  is low in the world. That can change any minute. The Nile

  is older than guitar, more Egyptian than the porch

  is falling. A house from 1854, undulant floor, a train

  goes by between the river is falling and guitar. A song

  derived from the tango runs like a shudder through his hand

  to the night is soft with the pliancy of bats. This one

  javelins his voice at the stars have removed their veils.

  This one lifts her anvil to the moon keeps to itself

  but shines its diffidence upon the elms. A man

  sets his guitar free on the river muttering homeless

  to the north, fingerprints of music on the sandbar

  I have been in various guises of my drowning.

  Folding chairs applaud as grapes appreciate the chance

  to live one hundred years as wine. A man plays a song

  that is eternal as long as we’re here to listen

  we might as well paint the river with our faces. The tango

  shudders like a hand up the dress of how hard it is

  to be what experts call “yourself.” If you set your breath

  by the river, it’s always time to shine to go.

  People keep flicking the porch-light on like they miss

  the sun is doing meth on the other side of the world

  if you ask me to stay I’ll stay receptive to the chance

  we can strike the matches of each other’s heads

  without burning the minutes down. Don’t take my word

  for the juicy fragility of beauty: ask the baklava.

  Leave a message

  When the wind died, there was a moment of silence

  for the wind. When the maple tree died, there was always a place

  to find winter in its branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy

  of the vase. When the shoe factory died, I stopped listening

  at the back door to the glossolalia of machines.

  When the child died, the mother put a spoon in the blender.

  When the child died, the father dug a hole in his thigh

  and got in. When my dog died, I broke up with the woods.

  When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held

  by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines

  that we know of, still we call.

  Blue prints

  Up and up, the mountain, but suddenly a flat spot

  exactly the size of the house they would build,

  and when they went to dig for the foundation, the foundation

  appeared, just as the beams for the floor, as they started

  to set them in place, revealed they had always been there,

  it was like coming into the room to find your diary

  writing itself, she told the interviewer, who wanted to talk

  about her paintings but she kept coming back to the house,

  including the sky above the house, how it resembled

  her childhood, forgetting how to rain

  when it wasn’t raining, remembering blue

  just when she needed to be startled most, don’t you think

  it odd that my life has always had just enough space

  for my life, she asked the man’s recorder

  as much as the man, hoping the recorder

  would consider the question and get back to her, then you moved

  to Madrid, the interviewer was saying, and started painting

  your invisible landscapes, I remember the first window

  we lifted into place, she replied, that the view of the valley

  it would hold was already in the glass when we cut the cardboard box

  away, we just lined them up, the premonition

  with the day, he had twenty more questions

  but crossed them off, I have always wanted to build a room

  around a painting, he said, Yes, she replied, A painting

  hanging in space, he added, A painting of a woman

  adjusting a wall to suit a painting, she said, Like how the universe

  began, he suggested, Did it begin, she wondered, is that

  what this is?

  What the great apes refer to as a philosophy of life

  Looking for someone to mug, asking politely

  Can I mug you, a kindly grammarian responds, May I mug you,

  and hands me her purse, her child, her mortgage,

  I have to feed the child and pay for the house, a small thing

  like the smell of piss in the streets

  makes me nostalgic for New York in ‘82, when everyone

  was mugging everyone, it was more

  like a cultural exchange or a kind of greeting, I’m worried

  about the child’s standardized test scores,

  about how I look carrying a purse, it’s not my color

  and styles are always changing, just last week

  I was looking for someone to kill, the week

  before that, someone to scold me

  for not being an intravenous drug user, these things,

  God does these things like send us halfway out

  on a rope bridge before telling us

  He’s changed His mind about rope,

  it shouldn’t exist, it’s not going to exist

  any moment, like we are not going to exist

  any moment, and I have never applauded a grape

  in an alley, I have never put my hands around the face

  of a stranger like a chal
ice, there’s so much to do

  if I want to be fully human, not three-quarters

  or half or sort of human, I have to hoist you

  on my shoulders so you can jump over the wall,

  I have to build the wall higher, I have to catch you

  on the other side, I have to shoot you

  for trying to escape, I have to call your mother

  and tell her you won’t be coming home, I have to set

  another place, I have to gather rain

  into a body and make love with the rainbody

  and teach the rainbody to moan and be taught

  by the rainbody how to fall apart

  into the most beautiful future reaching of grass

  with its billion billion somnolent tongues

  into the quiet applause of sunlight, into the pliant embrace

  of air, may I mug you, may I kiss you,

  may I sit with you on the veranda or build with you

  such verandas as we need, such skies

  as will hold the verandas in their arms, such martinis

  as Plato never went on about or I’d read him

  more often, sure the cave, sure the fire, sure the shadow,

  sure we’re stuck, but a drink now and then

  makes philosophy more bearable, in that it’s hard

  to hold a drink in one hand and a book

  in the other hand and a hand

  in your other other hand, I choose the drink

  and the hand hand over the drink

  and the book hand, these are my priorities,

  if they suit you, we can may share

  The order of things

  Then I stopped hearing from you. Then I thought

  I was Beethoven’s cochlear implant. Then I listened

  to deafness. Then I tacked a whisper

  to the bulletin board. Then I liked dandelions

  best in their Afro stage. Then a breeze