Poems – Page 32 – Poetry Out Loud

A noiseless patient spider,
I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect 
    them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,—
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
“I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!”
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,—

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?

When I was in the Secret Service I would talk to my wrist. It was
part of my job and I was very good at it. I said Breaker breaker. I said
The Jackal is on the move. During the day, I kept everyone safe. At
night, I dreamed of standing very quietly next to doors. To work
at the White House one must be sophisticated and intense. One
must be dedicated to turning the knobs and lifting the pens that
make the laws. One must anticipate, relentlessly, the unanticipated.
Sometimes, to avoid suspicion, I would pretend to be a robot and
I would sing—like this: Beep boop. An impeccable camouflage.
Once, in a submarine, at the end of a long shift, in the terrible dark
beneath a terrible storm, in the blub and swell of it, sunk and fast-
stuck in a trench and far from home, cold-soaked and lost in the
plush of a velvet suit—an octopus costume, elaborately constructed,
with droopy arms spangled with buttons for suckers—I escaped
discovery several times. If I was undercover now I wouldn’t say.
Until tomorrow. I tell you this because I love you. I might be doing
it all wrong.

As we drove back, crossing the hill,
The house still
Hidden in the trees, I always thought—
A fool’s fear—that it might have caught
Fire, someone could have broken in.
As if things must have been
Too good here. Still, we always found
It locked tight, safe and sound.

I mentioned that, once, as a joke;
No doubt we spoke
Of the absurdity
To fear some dour god’s jealousy
Of our good fortune. From the farm
Next door, our neighbors saw no harm
Came to the things we cared for here.
What did we have to fear?

Maybe I should have thought: all
Such things rot, fall—
Barns, houses, furniture.
We two are stronger than we were
Apart; we’ve grown
Together. Everything we own
Can burn; we know what counts—some such
Idea. We said as much.

We’d watched friends driven to betray;
Felt that love drained away
Some self they need.
We’d said love, like a growth, can feed
On hate we turn in and disguise;
We warned ourselves. That you might despise
Me—hate all we both loved best—
None of us ever guessed.

The house still stands, locked, as it stood
Untouched a good
Two years after you went.
Some things passed in the settlement;
Some things slipped away. Enough’s left
That I come back sometimes. The theft
And vandalism were our own.
Maybe we should have known.

Dropping napkins, corks, and non-compostables
into the trash, I see that friends have mistaken
my everyday chopsticks for disposables,

helpfully discarding them alongside inedibles:
pork bones, shrimp shells, bitter melon.
Among napkins and corks, they do look compostable:

off-white, wooden, warped from continual
washing — no lacquer, no ornament. But anyone
who thinks these chopsticks are disposable

doesn’t live with chopsticks in the comfortable
way of a favorite robe, oversized, a bit broken.
Thin paper napkins, plastic forks, and non-compostable

takeout boxes constitute the chopstick’s natural
habitat to many I hold dear. With family or alone,
I’ll maintain that chopsticks aren’t disposable,

but if I can make peace with the loss of utensils
when breaking bao with guests, I’ll be one of them,
not digging in the napkins and corks. Compostable
chopsticks are the answer: everyday and disposable.

A woman moves through a Cloud Hands position,
                         holding and rotating

an invisible globe—thud, shattering glass, moan,
                         horn blast—so many

worlds to this world—two men dipnet
                         sockeye salmon

at the mouth of a river—from a rooftop, a seagull
                         squawks and cries;

a woman moves through Grasp the Bird’s Tail—
                         someone on a stretcher

is wheeled past glass doors—a desert fivespot
                         rises in a wash—

and, pressing her tongue to the roof
                         of her mouth,

she focuses, in the near distance, on the music
                         of sycamore leaves.

I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips

of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each

tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side

of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,

forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,

her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.

In these barracks, night speaks another dialect.
No longer does he fall asleep to the smell
of boiling milk or his brother breathing
cigarettes in the dark. He doesn’t yet know
the ways his body will change for a war
that doesn’t happen in this country
he will soon leave. From now on he will grow
like sharpening. Tonight he is too eager and
cannot sleep, this last moment before they strip him
of childhood, have him believe the true war
is inside him. Tonight, he is still a boy of sixteen
who dreams of being a pilot, not to flight
but to soar, titanium wings fluttering
through the blameless air. He brushes the blanket,
this fleshy creature with no edges, not yet bruised
into the solemn duty of manhood.

           when a branch pulls at my sleeve
like a child's tug, or the fog, reticent & thick,
lifts – & strands of it hang like spun sugar
in branches & twigs, or when a phoebe
trills from the hackberry,
                                        I believe such luck
is meant for me. Does this happen to you?
Do you believe at times that a moment
chooses you to remember it & tell about it—
so that it may live again?

This could be a good day. It starts
without you, as usual; you haven’t seen
dawn in years. By noon it hits half-
boiling & the air breaks down. After lunch
even the fans turn lazy, not moving you
or wind. Is it the Negro in you that gets
in the car & just starts driving, keeps
the windows down, the music
bouncing off station wagons, power
windows? Whatever you want

to call it, it makes you feel you own
everything, even the creeping heat. Spin
the radio looking for summer, for love
songs with someone somewhere worse
off than you. Why doesn’t anyone
advertise for rain? Instead the personalities
keep talking to prove they are indoors,
cool. By seven the temperature outsails
the price of gas, the movies are all sold out
& you can’t get cool for the heavens.
So peel away, head for the edge
of town where the roads turn thin & alone,
speeding to prove you can summon death
like tortoises cracked open in the road
up ahead, the water stored in their shells
running free. Keep on trying to out-race
heat’s red siren until radio sings out

Come home, come on home black boy
to your chimney full of birds, to this house
of flame. Evening, the heat holds you
with its aching, unavoidable fingers;
you sleep naked, dreamless to heat.
Windows thrown open as mouths, fan on,
it still feels like a ghost is baking sweet
potato pies through the night. Your favorite.