How We Were Happy

Watching the wound pass, play and pass,
is Tuesday, is the way an evening

can turn into something
like a birthday candle. No,

like a birthday candle
in an ordinary piece of cake.

Or maybe the cake itself
lit up by the candle.

This is how we were,
this is how we were happy.

All the perfect rhymes
then the additional

word, imperfecting
the perfect, letting the world,

those who are in it,
breath, blow out

candles. Forgiving, even,
the clever, the twice clever,

the habits we can't, won't
suppress. Oh our days

are ordinary and blind
and love is nothing short

of a little bread, a little wine.
What adds up, what stays

is maybe not the planned for miraculous.
Listen up, I am quietly singing

it says
in a hush.

A Great Thing that Happened

Or maybe it's still
happening, still
water. My poem, these days,
is very little more than family. It inks out
in ankles and smiles, the sometimes spilled
milk of a morning, a lark. I'm speaking less
metaphorically than I ever have, this poem.
It does that too
to the man who writes it. Once
I would have called it a metaphysics,
but that would have been a name
slapped on a thing
from a position of naivety. Slugging it
in
or on, a bad badge.

So what does this have to do
with Frank O'Hara and Wisława Szymborska
and Mary Oliver? Only that
I went out looking for people,
poets really, who try like hell
to give the right names to things.
Who don't gussy things up.
Who, sure, organize them
and spin them through poetic organs.
Whatever, and regardless, they

get me back to the -- I'm
so out of practice I don't
really know how to say it --
grace of all stuttured light

that,
in lifting me up,
made me feel like I was
falling. What a wrong,
truly wrong
way to claim
feeling. Forget
feeling, then, a feeling
I keep
coming back to:
the quality of time,
the quality of time,
oh the quality of one's time.

Whether familying or
quite alone, keep telling myself,
reach out for the forks and spoons,
the edges of bookshelves, the
tiny hands, the large hands,
and stop being so consumed
with controlling the narrative.

Try this: you are a single strand
of golden thread,
or something like that,
in the garment on which
they rest their head.

Or this: each moment is fire
and its opposite. Each moment
is unconquerable
by metaphor. Try thanking,
thanking, thanking, thanking
goodness.

Gangrene Graham Grammar Green

"I always say I'd be a good priest because stories come in one ear and go out the other. The power to forget is part of the created thing too. It comes back from the unconscious in another form. It's a difference in a way between the job of a reporter, and that of a novelist. It's yours to remember, mine to forget. In a way what one forgets becomes the unrecognised memory of the future."

Third Base Coach to the Stars

Sexy Saxman

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Zen Illness by James Thurber

I never quite know when I’m not writing. Sometimes my wife comes up to me at a party and says, “Dammit, Thurber, stop writing.” She usually catches me in the middle of a paragraph. Or my daughter will look up from the dinner table and ask, “Is he sick?” “No,” my wife says, “he’s writing something.”

Ray Bradbury's Microphone Check

"If you don’t have a sense of humor, you don’t have a marriage."

Jack, Rose, Coffee

You had a tiny, silent
plate for a pear. Clean-white
as if from a tooth
at sea, dried in salt and sunlight.

Then you sliced the sweetest
one you kept in darkness
days
on days.
For only yourself you would have
bit too soon,
told yourself that ripeness
was not all.
But you could hold it from another,
almost hurtful
in witholding,
to serve a better fruit to a beloved.

Funny, love. It's a blending
of sources. Indeed
the throat can swallow
fire, the skin give way
to a noise of metal.
Both whisper away at the
sculpture of pure relation.
It is finally taking shape.

You, waiting,
waiting now as if born this way,
for the footsteps to appear.
Admit you might hear them first
and turn and spill yourself
into eyes, saving nothing,
even less
if you can.

Four Portraits

Not true—time will not tell. It has no mouth, no language center of the brain. No brain, either. What do these locals of the human array, these Weaklings of a World to Come, mistake for the linear progression of their flesh through velocity and space, if not a gradual blooming of their enigmatic core?

Make a fist. Enclose around that fist the other hand. Now ask—which makes a better self-portrait?

*

Kosha repeated the word again to sample its buffet of syllables: “schlimmbesserung.” It had begun that way. A man in New York had e-mailed a woman in Chicago, who had CC’d her into the spreading fractal chain of their complaints. Some horrible event, the burning of a building and its inhabitants, a meth addict laying his head in an oven, the friend of a friend drinking to disfigure the child in her womb, had made its way toward her across the ever flattening plain of uninformed innocence—that she had eaten a fine dinner last night, enjoying the kale, the Siracha tofu, had slept as if atop a carefree summit, and had the next morning, eager in her flesh, woken in a ball of warmth and dry rest, only to be snapped back into a blameless link of vividness.

Schlimmbesserung. Time will tell. But what will you ask it, she asks—not of herself, nor the earlier addresses in the e-mail, but of the air itself—about such things, what would cause it to evolve so well?

*

He was striding across Lucera Ave., Charybdisian traffic around him, was ticking off in split lightning instances things to be seen. A digital ticker advertisement in a sandwich shop window. A man feeding a dog a banana peel from a public waste basket. The well-tanned left profile of some girl’s lucky, heavy cleavage. When, with the suddenness of aneurysm, something unnaturally still stilled the speed, caffeine, the frantically multiplying branches of overdubbed conversations in his brain, and for a second he stopped short of the next step he was taking—two-thirds beyond the slice of on-coming traffic—and heard a word, a last name, Russian? Greek? Gentile? Jewish? unite the buried drifts of his day.

Yuodzukinas. What a wonder. One word over another makes a name.

*

Can you hear him? He’s barely breathing. When he speaks, it’s a whisper, a whisper that shifts side to side and doesn’t stick, like two kinds of dust rubbed together.

This is the sage, the last weathered blade of grass growing outside the kingdom’s gate. Armies have crossed the plains only to stamp him flat. Herd animals have wiped rump and shit on him. Dream-headed country daughters have fallen on their backs in the fresh reach of so much free grass and spied young men's genitals in the shapes of clouds overhead. The sage is and was always there; an accident himself, by nature he accepts accidents. The trajectories they plot from nothing so much as one hour expanding and expanding, like a drop of ink in white cloth, as one sits and stares, are more necessary than acceptable: by these invitations and ruptures, lives and whole cultures rise and crumble. In the end, giving spine to yet another strong, earth-wrestling blade of grass.

The wind is on his back like a past love. Like a demon pattern spanned and reflected in a fugitive speck of dew. This is how the ancient amnesiacs speak, wielding more poise from the future than they have invested in it.

Time will tell. But first, say everything you can to it. As it makes its way towards you, what it forgets it sacrifices, the Grass Master says, to appease a failed fulfillment.

Creative Strategist Richard Feynman

"When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don't get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come.

Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

Paymaster Celine

"You don't do anything for free. You've got to pay. A story you make up, that isn't worth anything. The only story that counts is the one you pay for. When it's paid for, then you've got the right to transform it. Otherwise it's lousy..."