I am told that tights aren't pants, but the girl

I am told that tights aren't pants, but the girl

at the next table over looks thoughtful to me

in style. She purses her beautiful lips

like petals: a red just this sweet side

of pink, of the sort one imagines appeals

to bees -- as if, like us, they bother

with the colors of what they drink. And skin

the proverbial cream. She is also wearing

what seems to be a new man's button-down:

a pale, morning-glory blue (or morning-after?),

shades lighter than the darker blue of her eyes

(cornflower); the sleeves, pushed up, slip down

the length of her arms, like water down off-white

stems; and the collar, folded open, shows just

enough throat to signal her defiance of the winter.

(She quickly removed her coat.) Her style

belongs to the spring. I am, meanwhile,

torn between thinking these sorts of things

and noticing that, when she eats, and I 

have seen this, now, many times, she almost

invariably manages to slime in tendrils

of her own hair, not very long -- it is naturally

salsify blonde -- in with bites of sandwich,

and then spends time extracting the hair

with pesto'd fingers and cleaning it of masticated

food and her own saliva; the ends

are now tinted green. I am counting the bites.

This is a good deal less appealing than pants that are tights.

(Composed 12 February 2012, on the first cold day of a winter that has been unusually warm and dry, such that certain things have been unseasonably in bloom.)

Fragments from an unknown epic poem

Presented here are the surviving thirteen fragments from an unknown epic poem in at least six books, plus four fragments of what is for metrical reasons a clearly different text and may be from a commentary that has become confused with the epic in the manuscript tradition. Although the structure and content cannot be known completely, the surviving material suggests that a model was at least the first six books of Virgil's Aeneid (c. 19 BCE). The fragments have been arranged with that model in mind, while their original ordering in the manuscript is indicated via bracketed numbers.

The title and the author of the poem are unknown. Internal references suggest a date in the late 20th- or early-21st-century, although somewhat earlier or later cannot be excluded.

attributable to Book 1 [1]

 … the edge in their quickening smells of native sage and skin

in the dark as it cools, the tap of her second-hand heels like the color

of oiling a hide, of counting down the remaining time,

the straps of her bra showing through like ink in a practiced hand,

the margins ribboning black on the flawless book of her back,

the pages the pale white curves of her shoulders and blades, her eyes

and their almost glower -- he reads -- how they crinkle and narrow with laughter

and mean, she is laughing now …

attributable to Book 2 [3]

 … a night in the long-ago South, this night

in the West, the feeling that a drive will eventually end, and with it

the feeling of her fingers curving over his shoulders from behind, he keeps

both hands on the wheel, his eyes on the rearview mirror, he tries

not to angle it down as he drives. "I think you're cute, professor."

(He is not a professor; it's what she likes to ...

attributable to Book 2 [5]

 … her lover and the man had gone back, her partner,

they had left already then circled around, they had fallen, and the women --

both blonde, they had bonded while lying improbably together on the floor

underneath the dining-room table, shielded from the light and aglow,

both at that moment like honey when the sun is first let into the comb.

Only who is the honey, with its collagen flow, its gloss and gleam

like a moan in the vulpine, cornering glean of the sun? And who

the firm and pliant chambers of the comb? …

attributable to Book 4, of some uncertainty in ordering relative to each other [8]

[8a] He walked her home, after bad but earnest blues music, middle-aged,

and flavorless beer, and even there she had gotten herself

gently stoned. They were perfectly arm in arm, just the right heights,

and to passing cars she called out "Chivalry!" It was the middle of the night.

[8b] Later, while he brushed his teeth in the kitchen, her flaxen hair

in the chrome and silvery dark: she had done it up loosely with long black

pins, and strands curved down to those curving shoulders of hers.

He traced them with his …

[8c] He watches her wash the concert blush from her face and the green,

that cometous green, from under the slate rainshower of her eyes.

attributable to Book 4, but possibly corrupted by marginalia, as the diction does not completely match that of other fragments; it is not certain whether all or part of this passage is direct speech [7]

 … it's bones, eye-sockets, it's the way it would fit,

and the delicate rhythm of ears, their shadows, as hair is brushed back

like a kiss [plucked up by the roots], only once, just once and again,

one's way, it's a loss of one's way to the tick of the clock of her second-hand

heels, those too-swift boots, her strut, he is looking -- he knows

he should not be looking -- at the curve of her <butt> in fashionable black,

he is looking at the round of her <ass>, and now not a [snatch] of any hair

but a kiss, just one, only once, her … dusky like smoke,

 … her skin … powdered

attributable to Book 6 [2]

 … and gesturing now with his hands to show branchings of possible lives --

he is sketching the four dimensions in three -- he is sealing their corner

away from the raucous air quietly; the table in-laid

with jostling tiles and glazed with ice mopped only haphazardly

up from the frozen margarita she spilled, as the one tilts further

away from the other: not the two, they lean closer together like lovers:

two …

attributable to Book 6 [8d: in the manuscript, immediately after [8c], but more likely a reflection in book 6 on an episode not completely narrated in book 4]

" … how short you seemed, next to me, in your white undershirt, your white

unbooted feet. How small. And sudden the thought came to me

that here we could be as if already old: after years had passed

but not taken any four copper coins as their toll; as if we had somehow

managed to hold on to something of a life as it rose like a dream,

rose, as they say, through one or the other of the gates of ivory

and bone, looking up and seeing light. With a groan it breathed itself

away. We had never even kissed. It was as if we had managed to miss

all the usual paltry aggressions and fears, those few minutes only

alone in the noise of a few dingy bars over so many years,

a few minutes only in rented cars and a van, one night, after you had made a point

of singing off-mic, and one morning after that had stretched into early

afternoon, while we shared a catfish lunch (we had both been slightly

drunk and had no taste for … "

attributable to Book 6, evidently near to his final words to her [9]

[9a] "I repeat myself in case -- it is not a hope: in the properly futureless feeling,

a sideways motion like sharing that drink from the faucet after brushing,

when our heads had to turn so far on their sides -- I can see you remembering --

that our glasses fell in, both of us laughing and seeing what could,

had it all only been otherwise, have been such a lovely quiet

and life. You won't face me. But I can see you tracing, in your mind,

the tracks of that ancient flame. I repeat myself from far back,

from far enough back: the right moment, that might … and its backwards

motion and drive, its backwards curve, in my mind I reach back

for your fingers curving over my shoulder from behind. … "

[9b] "At [the time], I kept both hands on the wheel."

[9c] "I offer to carry your bags, I can see … you refuse"

[9d] "In my [dreams] I keep both hands on … "

Commentary [4: the reference to 'this poem' and what seems to be a quotation, albeit from a section lost to us, would seem to make this identification certain]

[4a] … this poem the momentum imparted by life,

this life as it leaves, that drive as it drops

her off at her hotel, that curve -- "No, really:

those curves" -- as it gains in speed as it always …

[4b] … turning so straightly away. Now only

in the mind ...

Commentary? [10: the level diction and clarity of syntax would seem to make this identification rather certain, despite the metaphor]

Whether or not we have had to leave

Creusa behind, we stand to run

aground on Dido's shores and leave

again.

Commentary? [6: whether this is the poet's or the commentator's is impossible to decide, despite the difference in meter; if the poet's, it is possible that this belongs to a different poem, although it develops a related image of a similar theme]

 … and it's not the hair like bales in springtime

sun, it is not so long, this is no

fairy tale, that urges to try

to climb away from an evident life:

like a bowl its sides are thinner than air

and slower-than-lightly curving, light

as the lives we might have lived flash, gloss

in the table, lens flare, and loss of childhood

fables away …

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves

The wind, tonight, like the roar of the waves, the

waves white-capped by the moon. The creak of the

pines, their sway as if in a dream of

limbering up their roots and timbering

ships: as if they dream, to a tree, of

wanting to fall, that clasp of brackish

water about their curving forms, the

viscous slip together of their own sticky

saps with blackening pitch. But the ragged

canyon below is only tricklingly

streamed, and the valley beyond has long since

watched, in the light of countless rising

suns, its steaming waters recede, in-

deed forgotten the march, as if in

search of the suns' last place of sleep, of

staunch and prizing glaciers. The rocks sink

low to the hill and ballast the creaking

trees. The wind drops brown and verdant

needles on mosses of impossibly soft sea-

green, a soft and unmoving sea-foam. These

colors, tonight, like the white just edging the

darkening craters of the moon: this windswept

life like nothing so much as the light on the

airless surface of the moon.

(Begun 18 January 2012, edited 24 January 2012, "in the kind of chill that the working brain / foolishly thinks it can evade by keeping still." I tried to evoke the sort of sense-perceptual experience of a place that, repeated over years, becomes infused with the feeling of time passing: the particular experience of the place seeming to capture both the surprise and the familiarity of 'it all'. With shades, probably, of some of the 20th- and 21st-century British fiction I read over the winter.)

A natural light through the leaves

Because of formatting, this poem is available for download as a two-page .pdf here.

Three mountain songs

1. There is empty, where a mountain used to be

and there is only the sound, as up from a well,

of people, a hole in the passive ground,

in the massive earth: a hole in the impassive

earth--they are echoing forth, in the light

like a plastered wall, they are thick like branching

cracks, as a house: it settles over time,

in seasons of chill and slackening heat,

and we their spiraling leaves.

They shake in the light, and we--with a mind

to speak like a child will sparkle its voice

through the vanes of a fan, such an enervating hum,

because he feels that all is not as

it is said to seem to sound, as if

electricity will never give out--

he touched a coin to a socket, and the burn

flat black, a spark and scorched new kitchen

veneer--as if the body will never

give out in the mind, lie down in the light

that is clear and is like no fire.

And there is empty, where people used to be,

and trees that were never blown down or away:

there is only the shadow, and only the things

that shine.

As a mountain must one day go, and in

the hollow, the moss, its ply and drunken

sapling green, its strong and watery being.

All this a memory of seeing.

And the loss, sky-black, below.

2. In the mountains, there you feel free

if your living is elsewhere, but your living is there

and not for so long that the height has flattened out,

but later, for any earlier insight

is a terrible perversion, monstrous, prodigious,

like a stillness resolved--it is the aversion

of the fixated eye, looking at and looking out--

into a choice, and the product of a choice:

a child who is surely alive, although

his heart is stillborn, a rouged and brazen

body box, skin fresh, for the ash made gummy

and molded like modeling putty.

The bodies are plump and soft; his heart

is made to pump blood, and when he breathes,

there is a sound like leaves that, dead, still rattle

over the asphalt like tin.

But in the mountains, you may wish for him to die

and, laying him out for animals, on the moss,

sky-black, to find, you may prefer to say why.

3. Not quite all around the mountain, the road,

and on it leaves, a rattle like tin

that is not elemental but machined of the earth,

filled once with a fluid of vegetables, salted,

machined of the clear-cut mountaintop, ziggurat-

truncated flat, or meat for the man

or woman who is tired all day to reheat--

as well as all night--and eat until 'deeply' and,

however impossibly, 'filled':

The impossibility being that oceanic

feeling when one, whether man or woman,

is the shore and the other--or child--becalmed:

when the land has locked the people under and in.

And something warmed over.

There is empty, where a glacier used to be,

its great indifference to the living--in passing

tones they hiss like steam, their swift

and inaudible being, their groans--and its glide

like window-glass over time to the bottom

of the frame.

How many more hammerings flat or

thin? How many more leaves that sound

like tin, and are heard--so rarely are they gold--

in the stillness that holds, on the surface, between
two sky-black waves of the sea?

(Edited 28 August 2011, begun 18 August 2011. These three together draw for their central image on Wang Wei's "Lu Zhai", a poem that does wonderfully much more than it says, and for their central theme, if there is one, on Plato's suggestion--more haunting when removed from the context of his elaborated metaphysics--that we may remember more than we have experienced. With thanks to students and colleagues in the Language & Thinking program at Bard College.)

A setting of "Getful of apple"

I'm honored to note that "Getful of apple" has recently been set for mixed chorus. A recording of the first live performance may be found here. The composer is Kari Francis, vocal percussionist for Musae, known from such videos as this.

The look that a woman or girl

The look that a woman or girl reserves

for a prettier woman or girl. It is

in part resentful, in part--her darting

eyes--full of pity and need, of a glancing

feeling of sympathy pains at pinched

toes, at arms and shoulders exposed

to the prickling air, of flush at pluck

of hair (her eyebrows and who knows?).

The one--as they say, as she may have been told--

is mousy and must seem dutiful: merely

dressed, not adorned, and dully colored,

she is used to standing out only when not so many

others are around. The other is strawberry

blonde and hungrily thin; she is clothed

much closer in, and shows much more

of her pale and prickling skin. She does not

wobble on her heels, however improbably

high. But she is not less dutiful.

The one is looking; the other is listening

in, to the thinned and darkened voice

of an older woman nearby: she used

to smoke, and still she wishes to smolder,

with makeup stark and clear. But it is

not bright: like her eyes--well past resentful--

and the heatworn russet of her hair, the color

of heatwoven corn. (And if you husked:

the stretched and restitched skin that barely

covers the skull, the cottony tufts

of the will, desire worn thin, rewashed,

and worn again.) The look that a woman

or girl reserves at what she feels is the end.

(Begun 28 April 2011, edited 2 May 2011. From life or what has been made, not asked, to pass for it.)