My sweet,
I was speaking to Natasha yesterday over tea
and she asked me, What keeps you breathing?
Funny to inquire about what we’ve never
presided over. I considered this question as one
about stillness and answered your name.
From the heavens, nothing on earth
is in motion. Be well until I’m there
to ensure it.
All my love,
Sylvain
“We are what is missing from the world.” –Fernando Pessoa
Some questions have no answer.
Raised, they hang there in the mind
like open mouths, full of something missing,
The great Portuguese poet, Pessoa,
said that the idea of happiness
is what makes men permanently sad.
The body, imagining the soul,
looks ugly to itself.
A man hears a word, and the world
becomes a place that he misunderstands.
So he climbs high into his life,
ashamed of all he doesn’t know,
and refuses to come down.
If you could coax him out again,
you could tell him, say,
that anything can be explained.
The shape of apples, for example,
by their love of travel.
Or that the sky is blue because
it’s an easy color on the eyes.
Even the dog, chasing its tail,
has, temporarily, a center.
Even the bird, disappearing into its hole
knows that the world goes on without it.
And Pessoa, that eminently healthy many,
that artist, wore a blue wool hat
even on the hottest summer days.
Simply to toss at strangers on the street.
He liked to see them catch it,
and grow immediately less strange.
Boy, teach me
how to guru
how to blow
on through
the rest of these
young XY’s
with lines attached.
I see you (boy)
firstborn of a wild
acorn morn
where the willows
caw their hip
misnomers. Miss
Homer’s what
they call me
at the bar you
saw me swillin’ in
my ankles brushed
up along some
damn nice flooring
the microphone in
my lady hand
I demand
of you I demand
you call me other
-wise call me wise
call me by my given name
at the very least boy call
your momma
It’s God’s shirt that is burning or, if you like it any better, his beard.
Fires in a fireplace are more and more infrequent, at least where we are, and for that reason too they are all the more precious to us.
At one time or another, there is always a friend or relative who can take advantage of a fire to visit us or sound off.
Wood fires always have something to tell us. The one giving me my excuse now for a flight of poetic fancy speaks to me of the past, of war, of the Resistance.
It insists on my not forgetting the Haute-Savoie, Vercors, Mont Mouchet, where fires of logs and dead leaves strengthened and warmed our will to keep fighting on to victory.
Fires in a fireplace always lead us back to the essential, their warmth has nothing in common with the warmth produced by electric power. God sometimes speaks above a small candle-flame, but rarely in light from an electric bulb.
Let’s leave it at that.
In today’s straw hat
I think of your photographs.
Heat heats up the brim.
I’m raking leaves and singing in my off-key voice
a mangled version of Madonna’s “Like a Virgin,”
a song I thought I hated;
that’s how it goes when your head and heart
are in different time zones—
you often don’t find out till tomorrow
what you felt today.
I know I do not understand the principles
of leaf removal; I pile them up
in glowing heaps of cadmium and orange,
but I identify so much more
with the entropic gusts of wind
that knock them all apart again.
Is it natural to be scattered?
When I look into the sky I am often dreaming
of a television program that I saw some months ago;
when I walk into a dinner party
I am thinking of the book I mean to read
when I get home—you might say
my here is disconnected from my now,
so never am I entirely anywhere,
or anyone. But I won’t speak cruelly
of myself: this dividedness is just what
makes our species great: possible for Darwin
to figure out his theory of selection
while playing five-card stud,
for surgeon Keats to find a perfect rhyme
wrist-deep in the disorder
of an open abdomen.
For example, it is autumn here.
The defoliated leaves look frightened
at the edge of town,
as if the train they missed
had taken all their clothes.
The whole world in unison is turning
toward a zone of nakedness and cold.
But me, I have this strange conviction
that I am going to be born.
Baby, you make
me want
to burn up all
my pies
to give over
an apple to fire
or lose track
of time & send
a large pecan
smokeward, or
sink some peach
cobbler. See, to me
you are a Canada
someplace north
I have been, for years,
headed & not
known it,
If only I’d read
the moss on the tree!
instead of shaking
it for fruit—
you are a found
fallen thing—
a freedom—not this red
bloodhound ground—
Veronica,
For whatever reason of all the things here
the wild blackberries in bushes lining the lakes
and roads remind me of you the most.
There are two miniature Jerusalem donkeys,
so they are Jewish it seems. There are three
horses and grasshoppers and dragonflies everywhere.
I am told there are also rattlesnakes and bears
and mountain lions but I haven’t been able to confirm that.
There are trees, so many trees it’s hard to believe.
I have nothing especially solid to say since
it’s been too long since I spoke to you in the flesh.
I will be so glad to see you when I return.
With love and an edge of fire,
Sylvain
This is what your dying looks like.
You believe in the sun. You believe
I don’t love you. Always be closing,
Said our favorite professor before
He let the gun go off in his mouth.
I turned 29 the way any man turns
In his sleep, unaware of the earth
Moving beneath him, its plates in
Their places, a dated disagreement.
Let’s fight about it, baby. You have
Only so long left. A man turns
In his sleep, so I take a picture.
He won’t look at it, of course. It’s
His bad side, his Mr. Hyde, the hole
In a husband’s head, the O
Of his wife’s mouth. Every night,
I take a pill. Miss one, and I’m gone.
Miss two, and we’re through. Hotels
Bore me, unless I get a mountain view,
A room in which my cell won’t work,
And there’s nothing to do but see
The sun go down into the ground
That cradles us as any coffin can.
Jacob was sharpening the hemlines of his ice skating costumes. The fast-blooming weeds of the world were preparing their seedpods for the morning’s breathy swoop. The ice skating costumes pouted, mourning the lengths of their adolescence. Outside the window, the Olympic judges cut pints of okra into stars.
panache, perhaps 