Points of Light

The ever-present calculation, am I going to die today?
to which is added, for the first time in years, the smell of skunk.
I thought they were extinct already in these parts, or nearly.
The inundating wave of gratefulness.

For us, the skyline cast like jewels along the river.
The audience stands in the aisles of the local bus
as it wends its way though West New York, the last bus of the night,
what luck, for us and only for us.

I do not know how I come to my emotions.
Between moments of nuzzling his bundled hija’s face
a man is unreeling ropes of words I climb to laughter although
I am sure I do not speak the language of this complicated joke.

could use some help

is not the title of the poem but i've been slicing and dicing and smushing together bits on this one. Any advice is welcome, especially for the troubling last stanza.

Relocating to Colder Climates

The urgency of August has disappeared.
Gone are the towns of dust and spit and dung––
I’ve been sent looking under some other rock.

Here is where the city lines draw a mazed procession,
the mind rambles among cobbled edifices;
containers we’ve made to store books and chairs,
scribbled papers, and the little crooked cupboard of the heart.

The contrabass beyond this door and then another
plays a pebbled path bubbled, swerving.
The pin-pointed part of the self remains elusive.
It’s best to cling to things that can be molded by hand,
tugging on strings to fill this space with life-rumblings.

When it got very bad/they leapt into each other's eyes/and shut them firmly

From Adam Zagajewski’s Introduction to The Collected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert:

"Every great poet lives between two worlds. One of these is the real, tangible world of history, private for some and public for others. The other world is a dense layer of dreams, imagination, fantasms. . .

These two territories conduct complex negotiations, the result of which are poems. Poets strive for the first world, the real one, conscientiously trying to reach it, to reach the place where the minds of many people meet, but their efforts are hindered by the second world, just as the dreams and hallucinations of certain sick people prevent them from understanding and experiencing events in their waking hours. Except that in great poets these hindrances are rather a symptom of mental health, since the world is by nature dual, and poets pay tribute with their own duality to the true structure of reality, which is composed of day and night, sober intelligence and fleeting fantasies, desire and gratification.

There is no poetry without this duality, though the second, substitute world is different for each outstanding creative artist."

When I read this yesterday it seemed to be speaking to Elizabeth's poem, which derives its power (for me) from its surrealism. The actions unfolding are dignified as signs (because the context is a poem, because of the underlying repetitive structure of the words and sounds) yet the meaning of these signs is baffling. The poem insinuates with its matter-of-fact tone that we should be able to figure out its meaning, but remains elusive, giving the eerie sensation that it is the reader that is strange and out of place; the world of the poem is solid; the two worlds that Zagajewski describes are inverted.

PS: Have any of you read Herbert's poems? This book is blowing me away . . .

Name Day

We’ve broken all the windows in the attic
again with our singing games. The seventy-six
doves found the seeds we left for them,
and now they are all sleeping in the middle
of the day, their heads tucked under their wings.
We found the orchard full of plums and now
we’re all sleeping in the middle of the day,
with our heads tucked under our wings.

Yesterday a great wind or a ghost or god sent the wheelbarrows
all rolling downhill towards the dark water.

A man showed up, saying he could read
the furrows their stiff legs had dragged through the earth,
saying they spell his name, his story,
that it now belongs to us.

We baked the delicate bread in his honor,
the braided wedding bread with rosewater,
because he is the only one who can
tell us how divine came to be
a verb, and what language water
speaks beneath the earth.

Because, you see, we have no precedent
for celebrations of this kind.

a Metaphor for our lifves [sic] as they stand

It felt like we had been driving forever through a forest of trees of which we couldn’t see the tops. It was becoming dark when, suddenly on our right, we saw lights. Yes, they were feeble, but I clutched your arm in excitement. They were the first glow we’d seen in miles and miles.

The road writhed a little and you read, spelled out on an arrow, surrounded by old fashioned chaser lights, “You Are Here.”

“That’s not what it says,” I objected. “The sign says Are You Here.”

The windshield was sparkling clear because of the rain. We pulled into the parking lot. The glass bulbs which made up the sign looked delicate.

There was an old Shell pump of indistinguishable color beside a narrow building made of wood. It had a sharply pitched roofline, shutters, dormers. The front steps were steep.

“I would like my stories to be made of real places, real events—these are the things from which I’d like to make narratives, find meaning,” I said.

“Lets go inside,” you said, getting out of the car.

Another, smaller, wooden sign said, The Inn Between.

Return To Form

Following the curvature of the earth, an orange circuitboard of light

as we circle the John Fitzgerald Kennedy Memorial Airport for reasons dark to me: once, twice, thrice.

Some of these networks congeal as streets, others coagulate into towns.

Bad neighborhoods, court districts, voting precincts are impossible to identify, looking down.

Twinklings hint of other systems, here arrayed in time: redlight, greenlight, traffic surges,

store hours, schedules, seasons, ways of moving, the clear as day but invisible causes of hidden wants, urges.

What I've come here for is the homes, those shells we each sculpt around our own life

to shut out the cold and to protect against the bone-grey trees, stunted balconies, satellites, sights

which root above, wrought iron and water tower, in sky-plots long ago

staked out for nobler purpose by our hearts.

bumper sticker

"Metaphors be with you."

I saw this on a bumper sticker in California this week, and it made me giggle. I want one.