Against objects, lost habits,
Knowledge grows
But it has to be connected to things.
And that connection is usually best achieved
So they say
Through perceiving similarities. No way!
Winds blow in a giant circle and set up resistance to anyone going the other way.
Still it came about that the ban was lifted
Suddenly one fall
And I went to sea after all
And shaped a course away from the trees that framed the seascape
Beyond my mother’s house, incandescent birches and fiery maples as well as forbidding clouds of hemlock and pine,
A forest that was like a terrestrial sky
But is much less so now in memory. I don’t remember why
It was said that a woman’s presence on a ship at sea would bring disaster down on everyone aboard, the gods of mythology seem to have liked us well enough
Or maybe they liked us too well, chasing us in animal form
With violent winds.
But mythology gave
Way to history
And now history is going
The way of bedtime stories. A path, bricks, innocents—they are additions, but odd
Additions to oddity.
Gullibility is an expression of enthusiasm
So great it makes decisions. But I am throwing off faith, bound to regard the sea
As a prison holding people whom their childhood friends cannot believe capable of crime.
It is midsummer and the sun is lost in the sun, visibility is accomplished. Can credibility
Be far behind?
But I won’t pretend
To be an historian, how could I, when I have no idea of today’s date
And though I know we embarked one morning early in May
I have no idea how long ago that was
And I don’t care. I breathe, I twist my hair.
I watch the sea. At times it resembles an eye but it isn’t watching me.
Some days ago a “native kayak” appeared and then disappeared, winding through a lead in the ice.
The first mate kept close watch for several hours after the kayak, following a shimmering band of water west, disappeared
Or, as the first mate put it, “withdrew”—the mate insisting that the occupant might be a pirate
Or some other type with hostile intent
Emboldened by the ice
Approaching
In broad daylight. A strange expression. Soon there will be no more than a band of pink against the darkness,
Narrow daylight
As at the beginning or end
Of a day in the habitable latitudes,
Where breadth is what is assumed of days
As it is of the sea even when mist closes in around the ship. She is called the Distance.
We go where she goes
And arrive willy-nilly at times and places of whose existence we’d known nothing before
And which therefore, though we come upon them inevitably (there being always somewhere and always in or at it something—whether material or musical—that establishes its “somewhereness”), we reach involuntarily,
It’s to these that we hope to go and from these that we hope to return.
But beset by such hopefulness (cold,
Ominous, and calm) we’re getting nowhere
And tempers are short.
I’ve grown hard of hearing, the first mate said this morning in a tone dripping with sarcasm.
Did you ask for a hard-boiled egg?
Jean-Pierre is no longer included in the games the other children are playing, soon he’ll be an adolescent, already he’s hovering over the figurehead,
A woman holding a telescope to her left eye.
For the most part it is trained on the horizon.
She is establishing herself.
According to the Greeks metamorphoses have to be complete
And are impossible. Things may change
But nothing can become the opposite
Of what it is. The sea cannot
Be not the sea. Yet
I can see it
Both ways.
Then yet again I hardly remember who it was I was instead of this back when I longed to go to sea and couldn’t.
I gazed up through branches tossing in the wind at the blue planes of the sky and felt rooted, even at an early age,
Perhaps to gods but if so my deities were streaming
Or grinding like a boat being hauled out of the waves over stony
ground. The sound
Gives me pleasure still though it is fugitive. Pleasures are synonymous with power (and with powers
Though these are very different things),
And lest they become dangerous they must be fugitive.
How strangely our course approaches forks, how variously we decide which tack to take. We ourselves are fugitives,
The world is strange. It appears to last and appears so as to last,
In the dark of night or of storms, into which it disappears to last as well. We have come in the dark
Upon landforms, shores, islands without knowing what to expect. On some
One may enter into friendship, on others into endless complaint.
But there must be more to friendship than a placid acceptance of misunderstandings.
And interruptions, though these have the effect of inevitabilities
We encounter constantly.
Someone remarks “there’s something over there” or, more urgently, “there’s something ahead!”
The boat tacks—I say that though the engines are running.
We have no destination. One can’t foretell
What may or may not be pointless.
The boat arches, bends, turns—it is shaping itself. Sometimes I climb into a lifeboat to think
And there I dream confusedly that we’ve “varied” and come to an island
Which can be approached only through one of forty doors,
At each one of which sits a perched bird that can disclose the mysteries of logic to me in an ancient language which I will understand.
The gist of what occurs according to the birds is unlikeliness.
We are all so busy it seems sometimes that the only time we can appreciate being
Is when we are at sea
Subject to capriciousness
Though we sleep slung in binding hammocks
Like spiders or netted fish
Or like trapeze artists bouncing to ground level at the end of their act. Tonight the sea
Has twisted in turbulence. Observing the effects I’ve grown vertiginously
Calm. How odd it is to be out.
At best one can know only the knowledge of this time. When one reaches the limit of that
One must make way for those who know in and for the time next
To this.
In and for I say hospitably.
Between ourselves we speak the language of these parts.
The communications are never concise.
Whatever we say is best understood if contextualized, so contexts are what we say, and they too are best understood if contextualized
And so it goes, sometimes inward and sometimes outward bound
Not round and round but as if over the bridge
From top to toe
Or pegbox to tailpiece
Of a vast violin—strung—
What we speak is strung
And we cling to it as to a shroud.
The wind sweeps across the sea but cannot enter it. Both are variable. It is always safe to predict
Variability. Great cumulous clouds hang overhead one moment
And terns another. The sun on my face is cold
And yet I often feel heat. Perhaps we are all small suns.
The sunflower in its pot on deck doesn’t think so. It turns
Frantically
But not to us
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As the Distance rides the sea and sends the sun sliding violently into all the compass corners.
Am I compassionate? Or is it merely out of enthusiasm
That I give a thumbs up
As the Distance slows so as to pass gently through a flock of floating seabirds?
Their kind must be persistent
And have been here long before the first human flutterings
Whose own persistence brought us here
To no end
Unless what and when we turn can be termed an end.
If one undertakes when outward bound to sail to the ends of the earth, one must hope also ultimately to come inward bound
From them again.
How hospitable circumstances can be!
The earth seems young—raucous, ravenous, quick. The earth exists
With gusto. Things fall to it and stick, things are rooted in it
And rise. This cannot be said of the sea. It’s impossible to clear the way and come within sight of my subject.
Obscure emotions cling to it—obscuring emotions, I mean. The analytical imagination
Naturally undertakes analysis of the imagination
While the emotional imagination does what, emote? I’ve tried to give emotions
The slip
By attributing them to other people—
An iffy strategy at best. Not everyone’s motives are my own.
Emotions stem from belief,
And motives are meant to establish what’s believed.
William is afraid of ghosts
Which he says live in and on the ice
More and more of which we’ve been seeing
Day and night passing us as we pass
If indeed we are passing. At times it seems as if we are simply riding a gentle swell
Washing the edges of the habitable world. A glance into the distance
Raises these doubts and I take them as signs of aesthetic wellness.
One thing I’ve discovered is that nothing that’s experienced is allegorical—
There is no moral. Nothing is contained. Sure one can say that the woman who sets sail
Will cross reefs
Or that science is the practice of unknowing
Or that given enough time every circumstance will betray what it promised
To guarantee
But these are, as I see it, unbound, uninhibited, nonsuccinct
Observations—things that take time and space to develop
Into whatever truth or truths they offer. All in all
There is very little containment in the universe
Except what’s temporarily contained in the bodies of things as presence or in animate bodies as life.
The sea though not silent subjects one to silence—that’s the only name I know for the distance
Though it has noisy spans.
They cascade and splash. I know these words
But my thoughts of things go on without them.
NIGHTS
Ooooh, oooooh, ooooh, says the voice of a girl:
“I’ve been attacked by owls,
by owls with towels,
I’ve been attacked
by snakes with rakes.
It is just this kind of ridiculous language, banal but lacking even banality’s pretense at relevance and sense, that I hear in my sleep; I wake, feeling irritable and depressed.
*
The sadness! the injustice!
It’s true I want to know, I want to look
But what is it?
*
The fingers leave their owls in a calm
Sleep figures the features
Sleep speaks for the bird, the animal
For the round and the residual
Sleep soaks from experience
But why and what?
*
Suddenly I remember having rescued a spider from the bathtub in the morning. I imagined that I had established rapport with my environment. I observed the spider eerily. I was in harmony with life and my times. Not only will things go on but this going on will repeat.
After all, I can vow kindness in relation to something I cannot know.
The spider, when it appears within “a range of alternatives,” will be rescued—dished out of the nicked and polished porcelain tub and knocked onto the shrubbery just outside the open window.
Of course, it will not be the same spider each time but a sequence of spiders.
*
The 23rd night was very dark.
It was cold.
My eyes were drawn to the window.
I thought I saw a turtledove nesting on a waffle
Then I saw it was a rat doing something awful
But anarchy doesn’t bother me now any more than it used to
I thought I saw a woman writing verses on a bottle
Then I saw it was a foot stepping on the throttle
But naturally freedom can be understood in many different ways
I thought I saw a fireman hosing down some straw
Then I saw it was a horse grazing in a draw
But it’s always the case that in their struggle to survive, animate objects must be aided
I thought I saw a rhubarb pie sitting on the stove
Then I saw it was the tide receding from a cove
But although I have strong emotions when I watch a movie, jealousy is never one of them.
I thought I saw a bicyclist racing down the road
Then I saw it was a note, a message still in code
But sense is always either being raised to or lowered from the sky
*
A voice says, The ambered bed flag fills.
A voice says, This is voltage island.
A voice says, The wall past which girls wander flicks is built of baffled face bricks.
*
I saw a juxtaposition
It happened to be between an acrobat and a sense of obligation
Pure poetry
Of course there is a great difference between withering and a napping man
And flailing in relation to fossils in a stone is different from a set of dominoes
Still I don’t worry less about the same old worries
*
I’m of a mule age, I dare like a log.
I live where I live, and I’ll bulk graciously
—to zero.
*
But the worst of speaking in the dark is that the sounds we emit are strange and hollow.
*
The moon was solemnly full.
Jim Trotmeyer assertively declared, Emotions can’t be governed by rules.
Millie Corcoran politely requested, Don’t overwhelm me.
To this Jim Trotmeyer delightfully responded, But the azures of spring truly rush.
Millie Corcoran remarked astutely, Azures rush, yes, but composedly.
Jim Trotmeyer mused pensively, The clouds do indeed puzzle.
Millie Corcoran said sociably, They appear above the crowd.
Oswald Proskaniewicz interrupted furiously, You, Jim Trotmeyer, are not the radical you say you are.
*
As for me, I want to be Banambitan
and leave kind ships vitalities by art.
I am untouchable.
Siege Document
Myung Mi Kim
a graduated effort
r s
bandage pulled back is blood gone mud
p eu hand hewn
freedom from commerce was a cry
filterdoubt . locution . string and pelter .
attached to pillars and saltbeds
wracked as imperfect lot
*
Sleep took the eye muscle and severed it
In the vernacular ate stirred swept
At the periphery garbage pigs
: sandscroll :
After a long last
I learn my story
My mother had restaurant
she made noodle soup
&
nbsp; It was famous soup
She suffer so much
For so much her life
It burn skin to bone
Scar tissue on top of nerve ending
Ugly power of military
I scream too hot too hot
Naked where clothes were a second before
*
signs and symptoms
crossing veins of lettuce and a miner’s light
whose bones therefore appear short or thin relative to dental age
anemia recorded as porosity of the eye orbits
some by excess, some by defect
others by affliction
others by time for animals to be gathered together, time when water is drawn
(to) provide for days when hunting is poor or many are sick
*
The rest buried him by striking him with fir trees
When the armament was in
Having consumed the eight sparrows in the nest
The wounded were washed in hot waters
Now the twentieth year since she quitted her native land
Exposure and desertion
: Many of the residents who have died of heat exhaustion were
elderly men and women reluctant to use air
conditioning because they worried about expensive utility bills
Houseless heads and unfed sides
*
skilter head . lifts up and tells simple mother stories
everyday to spout
everyday to alight
everyday to bring one end to the other, close
a pick a pack a frightening fund
*
that. wants a biscuit
I am assured that the global buying frenzy
I am assured that there is a global buying frenzy
drain in a prophylactic sense
in plain sight cusp of flesh and action
that said: the cost
that said: brittle off the bone and perjure
Constant Reverential Face
Please allow that
Place of feet and water
Please allow that
The oil and seeds
What is the call to call out
*
laughter visited us early and left
moving around a sequence of debts
there would be the occasion of reaching for a foreign object in the eye
Speaker: She got shot. She did. I saw her.
limbs of pines rope around the waist
neither slaves nor freemen, but who have become part of the soil
upon which they work
like so many cows and the trees
the schools had been burned down
American Poetry Page 2
