by James Welsh
We can only see periods as beautiful ends, like gun-powdered barrels.
So as the syllables rise and fall, carved like mountains,
we see the path ahead is gnarled and twisted –
rotted sticks live from the ground, their pencil tips sharpened.
You know, if this isn’t real life, it would make great cartoons.
But this has to be real life, not the laughing cartoons
we wish for – instead this is really us, warring with words,
sounds alive with death on their breath and teeth sharpened.
We paint our pens black and aim them like gun barrels
at each other, and, with smiles grown twisted,
we made sure they would hear this on the mountains.
And, with hands bloodied by syllables, we shake the mountains,
watching them sway unnatural like cartoons.
We spit our words until they’re meaningless, twisting
the other’s words to serve our purpose. Our words
are blood painted on the canvas with gun barrels
by an artist wanting to be famous, blade to his throat sharpened.
On the bedrock of our love, the teeth are sharpened,
us breathing harder as we climb our mountains,
lugging our past behind us in sherpa barrels.
We wish we could fight and not hurt like those cartoons
but even best intentions drown in the worst words.
Sometimes, like dandelions in the wind’s roar, love gets twisted
and twisted and twisted. We find dimension
in those twisted words
like vampires find broken hearts in sharpened sticks –
like lawyers find a circus in words –
like hunters find their souls in the mountains –
like elders find youth in dusted-off cartoons.
That’s how we feel, looking deep into each other’s barrels.
But as we look into each other’s barrels,
we don’t see bullets but instead our twisted
souls, drawing blood like cartoons –
the artist with brush sharpened
by the rocks atop the highest mountains.
And they say sticks and stones hurt more than words.
Essay on Evening
Let him that would move the world first move himself.
-Socrates
I.
The years snow through her hair –
the pier shows itself at the end
of her eyes, a pier that slips
into a lake long since died and
dried. She used to move
with springs dug into
grooves that would echo sound across
the bottoms of her shoes.
But now, she walks with
shuffles, digging canals
as she walks as if her
shoes are shovels. She
forgot – and I forgot –
that we can make
gravity surrender
just by raising our
little finger as our
hands are pressed against
the table – we run our
dinners cold as we try
to read our lives into
the yellowed pages of
English fables – fold the
page, love; I can’t forget
where I stopped for the evening.
We used to move
the way a lemonade
stand would stand
through the Julys –
we used to make the
phoenix sleep and
keep the whole world
in the shadows and
as we walked, a league of mysteries
kept our footsteps
warm for when
we got lost and
needed to follow our tracks back.
II.
I used to know how to skip –
but now I’ve become
nothing more than
limps and walking sticks –
I’m slowly becoming
factories, my nerves
and joints are now
no more than
cords and screws and
bolts and knees that
are steel and steal away
my right to say that I am
man. When they
bury me, I’ll more likely
rust than turn to dust –
but machines are born
to know not to be afraid.
At least, that’s what the instructions say.
III.
I’ve lived a life through
stories I’ve drawn
on a canvas until
the ink stained my
hands blue and storms
rained through the
hole in my roof
I never got around
to fixing. I’ve watched
the ink mixing together
and my neat little
words slide down the
paper as I said,
“If my legacy can’t
outlive me, then
my love for her
cannot live forever.”
And at that, I was afraid.
Even The Sun Has to Hide
It seemed that the way the clouds were layered
(because I’ve never seen puffs twist like a staircase
until that pipe-dusk, painted rust, came)
made it seem the sun was gliding down the stairs.
I like to think she wanted to walk with mortals
even though she knew she’d be betrayed by our souls
that would turn on her to get lost in the night,
flicking off the sun in all her glory and fight.
And of course people would later ask the sun
if she wouldn’t mind killing the night with her hum.
Everyone’s afraid of the crush the thick night brings.
It would seem that people are afraid of almost everything.
No wonder the sun would never walk among us.
I would never trust us either if I was a sun.
Fieldhands
I sprouted the flower from out of
my hands, clenched fists
to mimic the sun’s blanket,
flicking my wrists for the wind.
Can it be that my hot blood
now envies with green, the
veins intertwined with all of the vines,
its roots now mistaken for mine?
We breathe our air back and forth,
pass it off as conversation.
I am its basement,
it’s now my roof
that shades me,
graying out the thick sunrise daily.
I hold it up to the sun, the buttercups
collecting grease until it sloshes
over and glistens on my skin, trying,
just trying to find its way into me.
Floodlight
In the lampshade’s floodlights I dream my
real because outside, the sidewalk graves the
curdled buttercups. Time turtles
to a starved standstill – all things paused in
the wide-eyed wake that life left behind, death
foaming in its raft of teeth. See, only
smiles can motion here, the past Sunday
evening dinners shimmering in their sliding silk
milked from memories buried in this
earl gray matter that tries to wake up
morning with a liquid vortex so vivid
you cannot help but to forget its limits
and let it in for an early lunch.
Fluttering Gold Standard
Everything grows golder with time,
the seconds bricking up from dust
until all is berlined up into either
west morning dew or
east afternoon rust.
Of course, people still look regifted horses
in the mouth for any runny crumbs.
But lunging strums of bass guitars
are carved out of the
wino red, sheet music
lines bled of life and dried into
sunyellow statues that rhyme.
Everything’s golder with age –
just like a sun that doesn’t set
but rest with the bed bugs in
your August hammock,
stuck between the strings
that drink in heat and rest
in dreams. Dreams that fall
between the bedsheets
and you and me.
But even with the
walls of golden standards,
it’s so easy to confuse this
cream comfort with a
sick green and that with a
tanned gold. Or so I’m told.
September 5, 2010
For Autumn
Leaves in the autumn
trees are dying beautifully,
their greens turning to
bee yellow and
some of its fellow colors, whether
as calliope reds from a circus
or the slow urgency of orange or
the yellow of the spent sun
in the early evening, running
before the night’s fury hurries
down with its cloak soaked
with some squid’s ink,
darker than the long blink of an eyelid.
For Sylvia
“These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.”
-Sylvia Plath’s “Stillborn”
Sylvia –
when I read your biography, I like
to read it backwards – the funeral
your birth, the oven the womb –
the countless wounds that gas
cut in your lungs, watch each
bruise get soaked up (each and
every one) – the friends, the
family gather, their mothwings
beating drums against
the lantern, each of them
in awe of the lady born
on a deathbed made on
a kitchen floor that will survive
two wars, two poets –
I understand Yeats will
want to buy the flat
many years before,
watching in awe as the flat
repairs itself – the crackled paint
wetting on the ceiling, the old
floorboards no longer creaking.
But as I watch an affair become
a breakup that led Ted Hughes to
you, I see the poems that you have
written, the ink for each disappearing like
some cheap magic trick. Gone are
“Lady Lazarus”, “The Arrival of the Bee
Box”, “Tulips”, and “Colossus”.
So as you forget Ted, go to college,
and vanish away into the comforting
obscure of some corner of Boston,
I wonder if it’s time I read your
story from page one, this time
reading forward.
From Where I Sit
From where I sit, the world refracts
inside me like logs turning into
eels in the water. I’m the waters
you dump your failures in, stinging
my pacific, thinking that no one
would see your abandon.
Drowning a drowning is a trick
I only wish I could pick up
from the magicians.
From where I sit, crescent moons
fall on their backs all of the time
but shout their pain into bitter
reflections into the zodiac above.
It’s in that crowded pain
that I have found the proof
that everything – even the sky –
is alive and biting with
icy teeth – teeth that hail
with old age, crumbling
and snowing all around me.
In the field near the farm,
there’s a pail we forgot
to pick up after the harvest.
I know it’s there, gathering
up those shivering teeth,
I know it. And one day
soon, that bite will evaporate
back into horizon as dentures.
Galatea
I’m her project. No, really.
She built me out from
summers of popsicle sticks
and that cheap glue that crunches
like autumn as it dries.
She lunches on a toothpick
sometimes when she’s working on me.
Shave the chin a bit…
maybe add some plaster over there.
Yes, I guess that would have to do.
She leans back in her chair at
the end of each day, waving the
cigarette smoke goodbye from
her face, looking at me
curiously, as if she’s waiting
for Aphrodite to breathe
me alive to set me free.
Get Lost to Get Home
I squeeze the decades into my
sleeping bag and head the
wrong way home, through the
citybright nights waltzing
at the tempo of spark.
Through the bear country, where
molten fur molds the tiding
grass…that is, before winter’s pull folds
all down into parchment cranes.
A gorgeous lush.
And dead and sunk except in wind.
So many routes to rout my way home,
my t-shirt puffed by the run,
fluttering like moon-drenched flags.
So many strings yet
all are cross-armed, pursed lips.
All the maps and their road names
are more us than us, their veins
recycling their papery blood. The
cycle is a muddy one – clinging
to my winging migration.
It will take me a day from now to
love this lost cartography, where
the sun and moon keep
trading places without meaning to.
October 1, 2010
Gettysburg
For William Iddings Mackey –
Private, 148th PA Volunteers Infantry
Sunstroke nearly erasered him
out, pulling his steps out tighter
than a hangman’s noose. Sleep
was his only eclipse from the sun,
and, at one point, that sleep was nearly
a long one. The light
of the noon ruined
him more than the Confederate
advance ever did. He watched
the Southern cavalry
slide like melted butter across
that pan of Pennsylvania.
The drums stretched taffy with
the heat until the cadence marched
backwards like the Army of
Northern Virginia’s retreating feet.
William forgot Bavaria for America,
loving himself into the fields of
Pennsylvania. And although Gettysburg
never buried him, it still
followed him into his decades, plaguing
at his heart, his brain. The sunlight
from that July was enough to rob
his mind and sight. His left leg since
went limp as well, melted lead still dripping
through the muscle. Before the war
he was a carpenter – after that, he
held a constant tremble in his hands
like the rifle he once had, the shake
whittling him down as a father, as
a husband, as a good man.
March 28, 2010
Ghosts in Subway Windows
“Yes, a pity…never to have studied history in
the weak calligraphy of songbirds’ cages”
-Elizabeth Bishop’s “Questions of Travel”
Between you lovers and the
madness – the train clicking
along in a drawn-out fall, tripping
on tracks that it never made –
the camera flash hangs, mirroring
your faces on the window ahead,
the faces dazed, confused, still
asleep in this midnight of an
afternoon. You bury your looks into
the glass, the window gasping
in the lights as anyone might,
turning the corner in a tunnel
one might mistake for a cave.
Between you lovers and the madness
shakes the sadness – the years now built up
around you in paper beams, all
waiting for its drug in strong
summer winds to bring it down –
paper beams once graffitied with
poetry. Now the paper beams are hugged
in measurements, the math hatching
in bills you’re only too thrilled to pay.
Years ago, it was his sideways
look that tumbled you. Now,
he’ll rather look sideways than at you.
Wipe your eyes, though, because the
camera flash has already grown past,
shadowed against the tracks,
still sparking at each touch against the rail.
March 28, 2010
Gold’s Fool
Ma’am, you’re little
more than gold’s fool, what
with your rings holding hands
together in a chainlink
fence to zoo you from the world
in which you live. You
turn your back, not knowing
that even in reverse, the sun
still rises east, stronger
than even alarm clock people
ever were or would.
You know, this is all larger
than your diamonds baptized
in Angolan blood. My muddy
eyes see a world beyond
the gemstone mines and it’s
gorgeous down to the
sandstone that imagined
the canyons – see, even the
wrinkles are beautiful.
Plains are boring.
And still you sit there,
