I finally dug up the Calla lilies, the Rosemary and the Rue
that had gone crazy in the garden since you left.
Today I planted succulents and river stones.
I baked the figs and bought some peaches,
the first stone fruit.
Every summer I remember you as a boy,
naming the flowers as we walked out of the city.
You savored the new English words in your mouth:
“That unmatch’d form …blasted with ecstasy…”
I still see you as that boy sometimes, fifteen or so and smiling.
City Mouse you’ve called yourself, “my best friends are flaneurs.”
But most of your poems were set outside–
Hardly anything mechanical– the odd clock, the closed up house,
wells and snow, beech trees forests,
Faux Wolfsbane in the peated moor—– that yellow flower.
Landscapes from The Bible.
Barely covered rocks and stones in upturned earth.
You examine them as if they are encrypted.
You hold them like sea shells to your ear.
Years later when we met again you said,
“It was time for the stones to open up
and bloom beyond mere rumors.”
I keep one of your stones under my tongue,
when I walk the town some evenings, as if I know we’ll meet.
I would pass it to you, mouth to mouth in the unbaled dark,
like an almond or a fig.
You would pass it back to me: “it isn’t sealed.
Read it now, just read it.
I have tried and tried to tell you,
They have been talking to us for years.”
Empty Sleeve People: After Listening to the News From Ruwanda
and Then Reading a book of Postmodern Poetry
“A systematic disordering of the senses…the sufferings are enormous,
but one has to be strong to be a poet…”
–Rimbaud
A fierce and courageous rupturing of language,…
the reviewer on your book flap said.
fresh and dangerous possibilities,
as you map “The Everlasting No,”
the slippage of signifiers, and the collapse of meaning.
You say your words have gone transparent,
the way they work against themselves,
the way they all implode,
that there’s no “history” to speak of,
just the stories we tell ourselves, before we fall asleep.
You shake your head.
and you have no use for metaphors.
Meanwhile, the Empty Sleeve People carry around stones
that they roll in their mouths,
memories in their flapping sleeves,
of the windowless rooms where it all came out so clean.
In another room, packed and waiting for the future
words rise from the pages, shrouded like crows.
They yearn to be the footprints of vanished feet,
friends who memorized poems
that they carried under their tongues
about the pleasures of the shared and common corn,
passwords in the whisper and touch of contusion.
Then again, maybe you’re right.
A “systematic disordering of the senses.”
If they melt in your mouth or have gone transparent,
words can never join bone back to bone.
So I hope your tattoos never fade,
that the corks all come out clean,
you and your companions stay bright eyed and slender
and your desires hard as stones,
that your words slip their layered moorings and drift away
wherever your words drift away to,
that your poems stay fierce and fresh and clean.