Second Childhood: Poems Read online

  I would lose my luggage from the twentieth century

  (though its particles and buckles were forged in eternity)

  and make my private vows to the creator

  in every theater we entered.

  Together we traveled in a boat as it filled with night-water

  from the bottom up.

  By night-water one means fear.

  So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.

  Living naked

  still leaves you covered

  by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.

  Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin

  over the ears where the thief can get in.

  It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.

  Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted

  and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream

  on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.

  There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey

  and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.

  Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin

  and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.

  No more rush of notes as if a window is open inside.

  Only if you are insane or asleep

  and the gods and animals

  pound their way in

  on a divine night wind.

  Second Childhood

  I have a fairy rosary called Silver who answers questions when I dangle her in the sun at the window.

  So I’ve asked her if I have a big ego and she swings from side to side to say no.

  We have other children for friends.

  We don’t understand why we are here in the world with horrible grown-ups or what the lessons are that we’re supposed to learn.

  It’s not helpful for us to hear ourselves described in religious, geriatric or psychological terms, because we don’t remember what they mean.

  One cruel female said, “Don’t laugh so much. You’re not a child.”

  My cheeks burned and my eyes grew hot.

  I decided to stop becoming an adult. That day I chose to blur facts, fail at tests, and slouch under a hood.

  School was my first testing ground. I misunderstood lessons, assignments, meanings of poems and stories, and misinterpreted the gestures of characters in novels. I was awestruck by geology but mixed up the ages of rocks. I stared and giggled, and refused to take orders and was punished.

  Throughout my life I have remained vague and have accepted the humiliation it brought, almost as if stupefaction were a gift. I willfully repeat my mistakes over and over and never learn from experience.

  Every day has been a threat to this attitude so I avoid obligations.

  For example, last night I dreamed I was on an airplane that was open to the sky and a storm was coming from a hive of stars, and I wanted to sit beside my daughter to watch the wind as we strapped ourselves tight to the invisible seats and stayed awake in the air.

  If we had been grown-ups, we wouldn’t have been able to see the stars or the storm. We would have perished.

  So my commitment to childhood has once again been affirmed.

  Read the signs, not the authorities.

  You might think I am just old but I have finally decided to make the decision to never grow up, and remain under my hood.

  We are like tiny egos inside a great mountain of air.

  Pressed upon by the weight of ether, we can barely breathe.

  One ego is like a spider clutched to a web of its own making.

  It turns to enamel and hardens on fulfillment.

  Many egos fill up the whole body, every part to the tiniest hair.

  Some egos are like fingernails that have been stifled by brittle paint.

  All egos have something impersonal about them. They live deep inside like viruses and unlike gods who play in outer air.

  But this ego covered my face with spider-dust as I lay in my bassinet.

  Today I keep seeing gauze of a crystal kind, another kind of web of a type that doesn’t harden but swings and shimmers.

  It’s the web-hood of a lost spirit.

  At birth a baby failure is unconscious of the shadow that covers her face: it’s from the success leaning over her crèche smudging out the color in her cheeks.

  The failure is born to measure the shadow of success. This is the failure’s mission.

  The secret hood around her face indicates her vocation.

  The success arrives in triumph, and is instantly obsolescent, while the failures keep trying, failing and reproducing until another success is born. It could be centuries from their lifetime.

  It’s NOT ironical but logical that the failure is the one who recognizes success and identifies its potential in her enemies.

  She it is who keeps their egos alive with her tears.

  She is their harshest critic, she who can separate the fraud from the living, the cold from the lukewarm.

  She is still a failure, a tiny ego who can’t quite rise to the occasion of being. She is driven by longing.

  And she has crazy rules: “If your whole body can’t breathe the air, your prayers are incomplete. No nail polish!”

  I think the gods and goddesses were the last good grown-ups on earth. Once I saw them walking to a party along a beach and I could make out their shadows like a line of pines in an ocean breeze. They were laughing and calling to each other. Still they were always aware of their mortal children’s prayers and answered them, sometimes in the form of mist, sometimes with needles of sunlight.

  The gods existed outside the ego-world though they were certainly jealous and angry. Now some of them are pots and pans and wax and marbles, balls and kettles, rope and puddles. They emit a crackling sound when lightning hits the ground, and give people shingles. Other gods have chosen to break out to heaven where they blend into pastel and ride comets once a year. Sometimes it’s hard to walk with so many gods bouncing around so I use a broom, rosary or cane to wave them away.

  Progress

  I have never arrived

  into a new life yet.

  Have you?

  Do you find the squeak

  of boots on snow

  excruciating?

  Have you heard people

  say, It wasn’t me,

  when they accomplished

  a great feat?

  I have, often.

  But rarely.

  Possibility

  is one of the elements.

  It keeps things going.

  The ferry

  with its ratty engine

  and exactitude at chugging

  into blocks and chains.

  Returning as ever

  to mother’s house

  under a salty rain.

  Slave up, slave down.

  I want to leave this place

  a postulant.

  The gas stove is leaking

  and the door of the refrigerator

  stained with rust.

  The mugs are ugly

  and there are only two forks.

  The walls are black

  and soft, the bed a balloon

  of night-clothing.

  The stairwell sloped

  to a dragger’s pace.

  There are big windows

  with blind-slats dusty

  and gray. Street life

  goes all night and at dawn

  freedmen shout and

  laugh outside the kitchen.

  Where does life begin?

  In the lamb or in its threads?

  If a man is numb

  beat him.

  If mute, shout

  Say my name!

  If he’s still wearing

  that coat, scream

  Mercy, mercy!

  and stroke it.

  We drop the shadows where they are then

  return to them

  when the light has grown heavy.

 
; You’ll take your time lugging the weight into our room

  or stand over there in the shade.

  We’ve never been too sure that we exist as the earth does.

  We’re most at home in water

  that soaks up the letters in our brains.

  It could be we’ve been dry too long.

  A spirit is a mess when excess spoils it.

  I see them through the slats

  and crack of the open window.

  A cold rain. Leaves flipped

  and palsied.

  The river is brown near

  the sand, loose banks and twigs

  stick at the edge and a lilac’s

  silhouette of a dog.

  How in the dark hole can I hide

  if I can’t get outside?

  Then I won’t remember

  what I did to deserve it.

  That arch and bridge

  will form a shape of repentance.

  If I’m hanging,

  then judgment has been passed.

  And I am hanging

  upside-down

  head swinging towards the moon.

  Years of inversion.

  A face in a mirror displaced

  by its position outside silver.

  And so?

  Next will come muscle,

  a little grief but no shoulder.

  You’re learning how to be a unit

  with an infinite in its attic.

  It’s not difficult.

  Light is the last message.

  Then white streaks like oil paint

  are the first to appear along the wet railing.

  The ghost was soaked

  and swelled into a human being

  so close to resurrection

  I could see the genius

  of institutional religion.

  Examine your conscience

  until you are a postulant

  who has only one sin to offer God.

  Soon you’ll wash that thing off

  (scented by its parallel past) and pause.

  What were your feet thinking in their hurry

  to connect the parts?

  Get the children to the other side!

  What children? You were the one running.

  There was never any other.

  Now the sun is like a yolk that broke

  into the corridor.

  Sleepwalk through its gold

  and you will see the original glitter

  that lit our move to the lounge.

  “I’m looking for a restaurant

  with a baby spoon and knife.”

  “May I consult my psychic?”

  A long shadow will mean your back’s to the sun

  and you can’t empty the space you occupy anymore

  expecting to see another opening.

  The moods of strangers

  determine your day.

  Will the driver be kind?

  Please God let him be.

  This is poverty, not just

  second childhood

  in a divided city.

  But my thanks to the soul-heat

  of the one who works the register

  and shakes the bag.

  Infinite nesting pushes all matter

  towards emptiness:

  child-nodes,

  tree-droppings

  with a root element of null.

  None is always included

  in every cluster

  of children.

  Nothing in nothing

  prepares us.

  Yet a fresh light was shed

  on immortality

  for me climbing the stairs

  firm foot first.

  Everything was in the banister:

  crows on branches, crickets,

  architects, handsaws and democrats.

  Red moon at 3 a.m.

  Why Did I Dream

  Why did I dream of Mohammed today?

  Through the folding sheets he expressed his relief

  that his words reached no modern critics.

  He was, he said, only a poet.

  I think I know what he meant

  like the Uzbek scenes

  that make up that whole trilogy by Ali Khamraev.

  The robot that Nebuchadnezzar owned

  was hard to pull apart or analyze without ruining

  each click.

  A series of scenes that could never take place

  might drive people to theorize.

  I tried the night after

  but woke up struggling with machines

  a helpless elder with fingers too weak to bend the bits around the neck.

  Flame-Light

  In Anatolia (where I’ve never been) the saffron hills seem to border

  an ocean and the orange car lights mime the same in the sky.

  A hospital and autopsy room and the body are being ripped apart without respect:

  A heart slapped in a bucket: dirt in the trachea and lungs.

  A hospital worker was better than a physician to the body.

  Good with her hands in a bucket

  like a worker at the till in a supermarket.

  She said we have everything in reverse.

  As an example a red corpuscle flew from the corpse

  onto the collar of the detective

  who could name the properties in a drop of blood

  and this way prove there is no God.

  The Cloisters

  You stand with the rest of the children holding hands.

  Your little aunt with a fox-skin on her shoulder is showing you

  unicorns in a tapestry and the words:

  “Please wash and love me.”

  Did she go to heaven when the membranes

  of The Book were flipped

  by the wind on the hospital roof?

  She wanted to, and not.

  Smoke from the vent gray sheets on which some days are written

  flew apart in entropy’s tendency towards a disorder seemingly insane.

  Angelopoulos

  Pulpy islands streak the fog and unify the effect of gray.

  Even electric lights have contours of shade

  because there’s too much stuff from the recent past,

  a gray glassiness behind every lens.

  Silver is always weak.

  Three church spires in one little city pebbles of rain.

  Again, the electric lights: in a strand like citrine.

  Globs of errors open for the two

  gay guys railing markers over wet piers.

  A sick flag buffers in air. Why is the boy dancing?

  He’s white and seems to want attention.

  But it’s the fatherless children the father follows.

  Sometimes

  Sometimes a twinkle

  gets in my eyes.

  It’s like a rhinestone

  on a prom dress.

  It shoots light

  so bright I can’t blink

  without tears.

  If I pump my temples

  with my fists

  and close my eyes

  it reddens in blood.

  This is only one possibility

  besides the metaphysical.

  Sometimes it’s

  a prick of sweat

  or a word or a prophet

  sweating at a bus stop.

  There are gangs

  who would kill to know what to name

  such a gem because there is none.

  A Child in Old Age

  Every room is still a mansion to you:

  you who wants to live in an Irish hotel!

  To sit in a lobby beside the fire with your feet in a chair.

  To stare at the other children seeking asylum.

  Your brain is a baby.

  And all the ancients are in it still.

  Your heart is a channel

  and a crib for them.

  They rarely come down

  or out in the light


  but steer you awkwardly with their cries.

  Your brain is still becoming

  an independent being

  while your heart always needs air.

  I had an infant who was an orphan who lived between my ears.

  Its sobs could only be heard

  when it circled the pump.

  How it hurt!

  Another infant lived like an octopus fully exposed

  with a skull like a bottle cap inside its thought.

  It was the arms of my heart.

  A heart is a mind that’s only trying

  to think without an unconscious.

  The tentacle is a brain too.

  And its adaptable jelly’s

  just as intelligent as human blood.

  Sometimes you look into a baby’s eyes.

  “Bless her,” you suggest to passersby

  yourself being old and unnecessary.

  But no one does.

  Please, you beg. The tears of an infant can be bottled and hidden

  for special occasions.

  One drop on your tongue and you won’t ask for more.

  You’ve thought this somewhere before.

  Born Below

  Born below a second time.

  The shade of the first cast across and down.

  Never shakes it off.

  Her mouth.

  “Don’t smile. It’s ugly. You’ll get lines.”

  The shade symbolizes an object in front of the sun:

  a blotted person

  and subversion.

  Her hand over her eyes indicates she herself is blocking the light.

  Never the best.

  The best has good taste and self-preservation, pride in property.

  What will we do with the others?

  She grows very little without light but stays weak

  (and hangs at the apartment window

  lacking attention doesn’t adapt).

  She’s a midget in a mighty nation.

  An eclipse of the face.

  What could be the value of being shaded

  in broad daylight.

  Of being aged in the night.

  Of learning the secular rule of life.