A Working Brain

It’s not about pleasure. Someone’s child

who cannot see or speak or walk expresses

pleasure, & grief. Someone’s wife cries

if her wine is withheld & cries wanting

to go home, doesn’t know why she’s not

home, the space where her mind thrived

before it unraveled. Someone survives

for more than forty years absent speech

or reason, potent with fear & violence,

unable to mend. Meanwhile the able we

fashion selves, register claims, engage

in agon day after day after mortal day

until we too miss the warp thread

& follow our shuttle rocketing far away.

Ode to Psyche

by John Keats

O Goddess! hear these tuneless numbers, wrung

        By sweet enforcement and remembrance dear,

And pardon that thy secrets should be sung

        Even into thine own soft-conched ear:

Surely I dreamt to-day, or did I see

        The winged Psyche with awaken'd eyes?

I wander'd in a forest thoughtlessly,

        And, on the sudden, fainting with surprise,

Saw two fair creatures, couched side by side

        In deepest grass, beneath the whisp'ring roof

        Of leaves and trembled blossoms, where there ran

            A brooklet, scarce espied:

Mid hush'd, cool-rooted flowers, fragrant-eyed,

        Blue, silver-white, and budded Tyrian,

They lay calm-breathing, on the bedded grass;

        Their arms embraced, and their pinions too;

        Their lips touch'd not, but had not bade adieu,

As if disjoined by soft-handed slumber,

And ready still past kisses to outnumber

        At tender eye-dawn of aurorean love:

            The winged boy I knew;

But who wast thou, O happy, happy dove?

            His Psyche true!

O latest born and loveliest vision far

        Of all Olympus' faded hierarchy!

Fairer than Phoebe's sapphire-region'd star,

        Or Vesper, amorous glow-worm of the sky;

Fairer than these, though temple thou hast none,

            Nor altar heap'd with flowers;

Nor virgin-choir to make delicious moan

            Upon the midnight hours;

No voice, no lute, no pipe, no incense sweet

        From chain-swung censer teeming;

No shrine, no grove, no oracle, no heat

        Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

O brightest! though too late for antique vows,

        Too, too late for the fond believing lyre,

When holy were the haunted forest boughs,

        Holy the air, the water, and the fire;

Yet even in these days so far retir'd

        From happy pieties, thy lucent fans,

        Fluttering among the faint Olympians,

I see, and sing, by my own eyes inspir'd.

So let me be thy choir, and make a moan

            Upon the midnight hours;

Thy voice, thy lute, thy pipe, thy incense sweet

        From swinged censer teeming;

Thy shrine, thy grove, thy oracle, thy heat

        Of pale-mouth'd prophet dreaming.

Yes, I will be thy priest, and build a fane

        In some untrodden region of my mind,

Where branched thoughts, new grown with pleasant pain,

        Instead of pines shall murmur in the wind:

Far, far around shall those dark-cluster'd trees

        Fledge the wild-ridged mountains steep by steep;

And there by zephyrs, streams, and birds, and bees,

        The moss-lain Dryads shall be lull'd to sleep;

And in the midst of this wide quietness

A rosy sanctuary will I dress

  With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain,

        With buds, and bells, and stars without a name,

With all the gardener Fancy e'er could feign,

        Who breeding flowers, will never breed the same:

And there shall be for thee all soft delight

        That shadowy thought can win,

A bright torch, and a casement ope at night,

        To let the warm Love in!

Dogwood

Solstice brings dogwood, the yellow-tinged white-

blooming trees my mother wheelbarrowed home

to plant in our front yard puddle. Downpours

sent us splashing, sprawling in mud & grass

beneath the swollen buds, the dished blossoms,

veined leaves, fragile dinner-plate branches

we were not to climb. The smaller of Uncle Tommy’s

dogwoods flowered at his mother’s front door

flanked by lilacs, the larger over the laundry line.

Here one must rise from my bog to remind me

of West Medway, of Atlanta, of beauty in trees.

Palaver

by C. S. Giscombe

Neighborhood? Proximities change on you sooner or later. There’s a level of artfulness; my luck has changed more than one time. Love could be an embankment, even an esker, or Customs; or a sailing ship, noisy at the horizon. The idea was that the wind could carry your voice from here to there, from one side of the field to the other. I was always leaving a place at the point where I’d begun to care for it. These was the gain of singing; the devil’s hungry (in a song), the devil is sweet. How do I look? Neighborhood’s a little fishtail in the substances.

Rabbit Hole

I wonder how they eat

faraway friends — raw fruit? broiled meats?

once intimates gang astray

or was I the stray who gang? you who prayed

once, then forgot me, not for malice

nay, merely closer concerns than for Alice

fallen into circumstance —

circumference, bowlered rabbits, idle dance

of hearts & spades, cholera

smites the lesser pips, funeral folderols
naught but guides to rigaudon

allemande, bourrée, gavotte, chaconne

Roots

Magnolia, ligustrum — tangled roots I grub

to unearth wood far too thick & meaty

to lop, targets for Ben's grinder, steely

sharp jaws that judder, chatter, & stab

what watered & fed the trees, living sponge

reduced to slivers, bones of the old garden

food for the new, nothing is ever virgin

all of us spring from ravaged ancestral dung.

A Polar Explorer

by Joseph Brodsky

All the huskies are eaten. There is no space

left in the diary, And the beads of quick

words scatter over his spouse's sepia-shaded face

adding the date in question like a mole to her lovely cheek.

Next, the snapshot of his sister. He doesn't spare his kin:

what's been reached is the highest possible latitude!

And, like the silk stocking of a burlesque half-nude

queen, it climbs up his thigh: gangrene.

After Dorothy

after dinner we walked to Loughrigg

the falls very fine, after a flood

of tears my heart eased, Wm not well

went to bed at half past seven

I ironed all day until three, very hot

walked to Rydale to gather mosses

the coppice wood turns brown, Coleridge

not well, great boils on his neck

gathered peas, baked a giblet pie

Coleridge didn’t eat to cure the boils

Wm lay down until five, we walked

halfway to Keswick, met the Lloyds

for tea, Wm wrote in the sheepfold

asked for late dinner, was unproductive

we walked to Ambleside, rock soft

as velvet, letter to dear C., Sally’s

learning her marks, noisy hail & wind

toothache all night, the lake beautiful

in moonlight, we rowed to Stanley’s

supped, rowed back at ten past one

the morning rainy, mended stockings

for dinner pork from the Simpsons

headache eased, Wm & I walked

with Tom to John’s Grove, Tom & I

to home, Wm still among the rocks

Coleridge came at eleven, Wm asleep

we sate talking until half past three

Endymion [excerpt]

John Keats

Nor do we merely feel these essences            
For one short hour; no, even as the trees  
That whisper round a temple become soon  
Dear as the temple’s self, so does the moon,  
The passion poesy, glories infinite,  
Haunt us till they become a cheering light            
Unto our souls, and bound to us so fast,  
That, whether there be shine, or gloom o’ercast,  

They alway must be with us, or we die.

Flame to Ash

walking in drizzle on Parks Mill soil

comforts me so deeply I have no need

to write about it, no need to think

at all — this jonquil, this clump of

Leucojum, this fungal testicle stemmed

to a slit in a tree, this shallow swirling rippling

creek with rocks, & stones, & trees —

beside the creek a narrow channel, once

the race that spun the turbine, drove the rods

& ground the grain — the little red hen

would have shouldered her wheat here

her flour home again to bake her loaves —

across the road a dam, what for?

the creek overflows it, such short falls

a kayak might shoot & not capsize

imagine the ride, canoes would have to be

portaged — so many must have come in May

to gawk at Hymenocallis coronaria

now it’s late February, not a trace

of this largest spider lily, the bank of the creek

littered with quartz, moss, timber, needles

& miniscule nearly flowering plants —

Antennaria neglecta, velvet gray

called pussytoes, & Erythronium

americanum, pointed leaves trout

spotted, tight petals rimmed with yellow

ready to open & curl, flame to ash

To the Embalmers

G. C. Waldrep

i.m. Mahmoud Darwish

I went into the desert for the velvet flesh of two white fish.

And when the heat of the desert was withdrawn from me

I settled my chair by my heart’s black flame. A shepherd

taught me the echo of the stars’ exquisite math which sounds

in the night like a mesquite blossom. Small and golden

I approached the bridge I had left inside the unfinished book

where my faith lay dammed. Dip your finger in the rods

and cones of the desert’s perfect eye, all who could not die

were singing up to me. There is no “final rose,” I replied,

only a succession of beds on which the clouds take their blue

rest. In the arroyos a trickle of honey gathered in search

of the bees that had chained it to a prayer. I gazed into it

and saw my name spelled again in the worn boards

of a pine floor, a stitched cloth over which the brass gears

of my father’s war presided. My father went into the desert

for a new flag to drape over the sleeping body of my mother,

who had rubbed salt and cumin into the twin clefs

of her neck and shoulders after she, impoverished, received

the emperor’s summons. Now I ask the moon to testify

to my body’s chill, the unaccompanied music that bandages

the return of the dead. I have no patience and the almond

cake is bitter on my tongue. What am I to call you

when I see you freshly clothed in the catenaries of swallows?

I who chose exile from the land’s sleep-script, its strange

harvest borne upward by a wind from deep inside the earth.

If I go there now I will find another poet in my house

from which my Christ has wandered, a shadow falling clean

across the sea’s torn hem. I will follow Him into the smallest

wilderness. There is no Babylon like the soul’s Babylon,

its hanging garden wreathed in the voices of created things.

Strike the pen from my hand if I have misunderstood how

the dust returns to us, through the smallest dances.

In the coasts of my adoption I grow colder, I cross my chest

with a map of all the sun has denied. The temples lie

behind me now as the bodies of women. Breathe on me,

my childhood in the lost city of love. Let me be the only

casualty, the waking wound towards which the forest

of my fading heat is climbing. This is the basket I have plaited

for you, from strips torn out of the oldest monographs,

with the ocotillo’s passion. Beneath me, buried in rubble,

a silver is waiting to be born into such commerce as belief

may lend. You may name it for my body when you

meet it by day at the judgment seat, by night on the narrow

road that sheathes my brother-song, green with pine

boughs I have stolen from death and death’s trine passage.