The Slow Going v.2

8/4/2019 The Slow Going v.2

http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/the-slow-going-v2 1/36

! LANDSCAPE

! The Wind at my Face! Panther Mountain! Science Times! Paumanok Pastoral! Occasional Verse! Tadoussac! The Love of History! Out Back

! ADDRESS! The Body’s Water! Frostiana! Winging It! Sapphic! Mirror Talk ! Letter to a Stranger! Ruins! February Song! Diogenal! Bethany! Sirens

! SPLEEN! Speak ! An Inheritance! Meteorology! Savasana! Stone! Depression! Benedictus! Our Bodies! Jamais Vu

! A Certain! Avram



!

! “the ten thousand acts which encumber! and engross all the days between,! we will read every page of it,! for if the ancestors have pressed! a love-flower for us, it will lie! between pages of the slow going,

! where only those who adore the story

! can find it.”



Landscape



! THE WIND AT MY FACE

You say I

remind you of a bear

but do you know

how the bones of a bear

and the gut of itrot beneath the leaf fall,

the vast topography of snow

and throughout it the pines,

that if you came close

I would tear you limb

from limb



! PANTHER MOUNTAIN

We tried to fuck in the tent

the night before, were visited

instead by the footfalls

of invisible predators. Made it

to the morning, and when I opened

the tent and left it wind

met my wet skin. Engulfed by trees, before the ashes

of yesterday’s fire, there is not a soul

but me in the woods.

From the fire pit, a trail

leads northward to the edge

of the ridge, small and brambled.

The stones here are older even

than they are deep. I perch on the hottest,

as at the base of the cliff a skunk rummagesthrough the moss and dead leaves.This shadow of a leaf on my hand cannot be

the shadow of the cloud

on the face across the valley.



! SCIENCE TIMES

The paper told

what the scholars now knew,

how the sun will die

once it runs out

of breath. Like a storm

without wind, the crushing

fluctuation presaging a chill.

What could my father

say to his child’s panic? Only

that this future was not ours. I must

have known then and still the train raced

trembling toward the towers and their city.

It took fifteen years

or so for my body to learn

what I inferred: my cells bulged and shrunk to invisible tides:my borders ceased to be borders.

Now I feel it

in my skin and beneath, through

to the flickering organs.

Now it all comes together, how a vessel

is thrown and the body fired, how the inside

and the outside birth each other. How it carries

the borderless to your lips. Why when humpback whales converge from continental wanderings

they race to each others’ skin and stay.



! PAUMANOK PASTORAL

In the orange sulfur streetlight the slug

rolls left, offers his slick stomach,

and then back right, and slowly so

pushes toward my foot across the stone.

! This damp night the lawn, warm sod —! across here — slow summer wind

! along skin, tickling bulbs.

And then this morning squirrels, along the fence

tips, the electrical wires, the bare branches:

chirping and cooing.!! Winter morning winter morning! greedy air.



! OCCASIONAL VERSE

Around back is the garden

Ben had gone on about

after your bad trip but before

the whole house slid

into filth and factions.

A year after and it ismostly choked by the white

geodes of dandelion

which only the mint and a

tangle of parsley survived.



! TADOUSSAC

Halfway in

stand of black birch

flecked red, pale mitts of leaf.

Battered stones

of a ruined cistern, field

that once was tilled.

Then the drop

toward water, transformation

of path to plank,

a whirlpool down to shore.

Wooden turret

in an ocean of air.

God the water.

Rippling prairieof glass — the wind, the wind.A world birthed by glaciers.

Distant white hides, scarred,

break surface: an arch

a swell of whaleskin.

Below water, out

of ears’ reach a fierce

moan of call.

The dipping into air

lung full of ocean —mist: exhale — mingling

of sky and sea,

the insatiable darkness of the firs.



! THE LOVE OF HISTORY

Now the second month:

it is time to resettle

in homes and in love. Snow slides

from the branches, pulp having caught

your shouts, having resonated. Allow

me to route them back through your bones.

! New York reached

! yesterday, the most snow

! in a century. My father’s gut! sister’s knee mother’s back ! don’t work and so I spent! daylight digging among! the fresh mountains.

Our white pine has lost

a limb at least for eachyear I’ve lived. Notches climblike vines up the trunk.

! I was not delivered! here but sprouted among! the raspberries and rhododendrons.



! OUT BACK

They have learned how to live

between us, the squirrel the possum

and the owl, crossing

the street as we turn away,

sleeping in our yards.

This is the first dayof winter the last of fall:

across the street the yellow leaves

crowd the gutter, creep

over the curb and up

toward the lawn – breaking

there into the circle of red dropped

suddenly at noon.

! The birds knew

it was still safe when they cameweeks ago, at once in a morning: jays, robins, swallows, orioles

in every bush and canopy

of the yard, calling. Shrieks from every

direction in the early fog.



Address



! THE BODY’S WATER

Say: your father washed the wine

glass by hand by night,

but say: he held me

through, and hefts you now,

say: he has buried his mother,

say: these tall aspens

their silent leaves,

say: his body riddled with quarries

they fill and they drain out,

say: the pages he knew have gone.



! FROSTIANA

! 1.

How a log pile actually

lives in winter:

home for chipmunks and squirrels

you see, when you take off the tarp

the husked berries, clustered

in the cracks between logs.

! 2.

Under them bring a match

to the newspaper and needles.

Blue geysers of fireroll from the crevassesof the blackening wood.

Like the ghost of moss.

Flash of flame at the edge.



! WINGING IT

Rosemary — was it

how it seemed? When we

walked out from the trees

into the glowing sumac saplings! (cilia lit like filaments)

didn’t you think too for

a moment of divinity? Didn’tyou too feel a little in love?

The sudden geese above us,

and the freezing marsh.

The field with us in it

was not as we’d seen

from the road, but it was

the one we’d hoped to breach.



! SAPPHIC

Aphrodite, lady of mis

communication, never

allow me to avoid this! humiliation.

You who have made

me mute, please keepmy words. If they were to return

! I would go blind.

! ! Her skin’s

keratin filings tear mine

from mine. Her opal eyes.

! Lady, you will show me

one day how to make flowers,

to make trees of my pooruninhibited mouth, teethlodged throughout the trunk.

! And though by then my eyes

will have melted, been eaten by ants,

they will have seen the strange

est sounds and scents.



! MIRROR TALK

You cannot keep needing

the touch of every passerby. This is

actually how it goes: now. You will

not be reborn.! This body

now begins to flicker on

occasion: a gust catches your coatand at once everything is yellow.

Your arm’s a foreign body, ligament

and dark hairs.

Find them now,

the ones you want to love.



! LETTER TO A STRANGER

! 1.

That night I dreamt a tree

bare summer branches

stood in the yard where in daylight

I buried the old mango, unwilling

to watch it rot.

! 2.

Some early year, still too young to know,

I walked through the apocalyptic

light of summer, past the tangle

of honeysuckle beside the trash cans

and onto the grass. Long buried creatures

pried themselves there from the earth

and clambered across my bare feet, wings

squirming at this new kind of heat.

! 3.The porch light is on but beyond it

cicadas buzz in the canopies.

The crimped grasses are dying

out where in another darkness

a raccoon smelled the fruit underground

and tore through the soil.



! RUINS

It is about

time we forgave ourselves:

you for failing to hold

what you’d gathered, me

for failing always to keep what I should.For the world around us,

the crumbling buildings and burning fields.

These are my fears and roadsigns,

and your themes, your needs, but oh

I want them ours.! I want to call you

my kite — ribboned, taloned,

turning in the wind.



! FEBRUARY SONG

Alone, alone, alone.

You could own me and still

be so.! Please, read

through these lenses, go gray,

grow old. Your inelastic skin

will still hold in! the cold.

All told, all known. I willgo elsewhere now.



! DIOGENAL

A wax bead slips

over the lid and half-

way down the candle,

in the sunlight revealed

clear as pine sap.

The warm air freezesit again, back

into the body. And the trunk burns

carefully down, again approaching.



! BETHANY

Locks the door behind

her, pushes some thing

against it. Her room,

sealed - a hive

of the unearthly.

A lowhum, then, and some

Olympian crash.

A river

willow's slow creak:

overtones like comb

bristles.

This is the scene

as told, at least, by the living room

I know

it is different -

Do you sit centered

on the floor, or

twitching in a corner?

The music, does it

flow from your pores?



! SIRENS

I cannot conceive it, really

how the body betrays us,

but I see it is happening to you.

It was this time

of year, when Rachel watched

grandma’s body finally die.

Your joints swell, slowly burning

through the kindling. Even sooner

than planned your body does

itself in.

! The wail of firetrucks was

designed to reach even the deaf —

oh but mother listen how

beautiful it is, passing in the night.



Spleen



! SPEAK

Say it as she did:

say the urges and aches

the am I more womanly

than other men? The motion

of flesh to lip, closed circuit.

I too want to be touched by too many warm-skinned women.

Too many hair-carriers, orgasm-

sharers, too many scarred bodies

to consume and inhabit in time.



! AN INHERITANCE

Follow the prints down

the driveway, try to be the dog.

Loose black face hair.

Creaking snow.

Twenty, sixty robins, eating berries

in small trees to my rightand across the road.

They glide and fall between branches

like the firing of neurons.

I stare. The birds chirp together

like the terrible breaking of a wave

out at sea.



! METEOROLOGY

Well figure it out

my mother would say,

but there is no reason

for a wind. Moods

pass through me like particles

sent by the sun. A few flare at a time,

somehow from sorrow to still: you arethe same as the flowers, the fire,

the flame.



! SAVASANA

Palms up. Not to receive

a coin or test for rain, only to keep

your fingers from the ground.



! STONE

North, beneath

a snow-covered lake

a slow parting begins.

Limestone fractures, granite

presses against shale.

At the lakeshore, a reed

twitches and the still water blinks in reply.

Our lips are not drawn

together, but are towed

through the other’s jaw

and leg down toward the floor,

where a grate exhales

the shattering of hooves.



! DEPRESSION

! stomach down

on a bed, I am beginning already

to decompose. Blueish bones,

flexible, as they were before

the hardening. They could not hold me

up against the wind.

! outdoors, the rain

falls on the sparrow, the feral dog.

The swallow cannot be without the barn.



! BENEDICTUS

This is a privilege the leaves do not get,

to peel their slick bellies

from the cobblestones and take again

to the wind.! And the steady trees

along the road, charred black

by rain can’t return

! to their rooting place:

this street seen so often that memories

cede to terrain. For them the place

has become the moment.! We are alone here

though there are so many of us.



! OUR BODIES

Before you were winked up out

of the marsh grass, you were jawless.

One must have been carved

from a cypress knee, or else been found floating

on the way up from the muck

for here it is – strapped to your skull,

grafted, like a maple grown aroundan iron stake, uncertain how it arrived.

I would like to believe

only we were built this way, you

who I have barely met yet seem

to have been born beside. Now the crowd

empties onto the platform, as much wave

as beasts. Follow them with me. We will leave,

when we leave, our jawbones behind.



! JAMAIS VU

My nose did not know you

that last night you called, came

and slipped again into my bed.

We fucked up fucking, and I

wept that I asked you to leave and you did.

Never seen: robbed likethe clearing among the tall trees

was as the mushrooms

squirmed through my blood.

Like your brown gaze frozen,

like her blue, her red. Like the

alien fauna aside the path, the wind

father bearing down.



! A CERTAIN

After the better

part of a decade I still

feel your hair on my cheek.

You were the passage rite,

with me sprouted

our remainders into limbs:

mottled sycamore arm, cardinalears, and jay. No lover

will ever know the body you loaned

or lived instead inside. Cool wet

on the basement bed.



! AVRAM

Shoveling I saw

the Bartels girl in her yard

atop a drift, learning the same

way I did about a world outside.

I am not, by any means

old. But already I am learninghow living goes. You are not

allowed to choose to take

that knife to your penis:

it is long since done.

To get down, when you

have gotten up about as far

as seems safe, you must back out.

You are taken to the mountain

and somehow spared.



NOTES & DEDICATIONS

Diogenal: Diogenes was an early Cynic philosopher who oncelooked with a lantern in daylight, “for an honest man”

Epigraph is from Galway Kinnell

Science Times: for my parents

Letter to a Stranger: for ADB

Ruins: for LCStone: for AS

A Certain: for AD

Documents

The Slow Going v.2