Runaway Odysseus: Collected Poems 2008-2012

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, 2010r />
  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,