From 6.00 to 6.45 A.M.
after a painting by Ross Bleckner
the moon coming down
how morning looks from a day’s wrong end
If I really died, you said,
I’m sure you’d find some brilliance in it
fingertips pressed to shut eyelids
I have the dreams, but I don’t make them
in this prologue to a trillion particles
we are shadowless as we imagined
peering toward a layer of universe behind the stars,
the breathing twilight just a backdrop,
a curtain to be lifted
Feel for your bad fall how could I fail,
poor Paul, who had it so good.
I can offer you only: this world like a knife.
Yet you’ll get to know your mother
and, humourless as you do look, you will laugh
and all the others
will not be fierce to you, and loverhood
will swing your soul like a broken bell
deep in a forsaken wood, poor Paul,
whose wild bad father loves you well.
-John Berryman
*
how many things do you want to return to?
cities
apartments
loves
for a long time I wanted every place I had lived
to disappear
too many memories
re-folded
into someone else’s
like paper
we saw a whole building pulled skyward
one night
waves of phosphorescence
pulsing
flames are just versions
of falling water
sucked backwards
versions of light
I had never seen a house on fire
the kids who did it
hadn’t either
but they wanted to
I was invited to read this poem today at the grand re-opening of the UM Museum of Art. Written for a reading of all ekphrastic poetry, it was inspired by a slightly-wonkier (but even more beautiful, in my opinion) version of THIS scultpure by Louise Bourgeois (which is currently on display at the Detroit Institute of Arts), and from which the poem takes its title.
The Blind Leading the Blind
Fingers stretched and pointed
like the stilled needles of compasses
how we tip through the surface of the world.
Like boatsmen summoning sea legs
or children
we muster balance
then stop briefly
to rest on one another
before moving steadily on.
I don’t know where we’re going
or how to imagine a straight line.
Sometimes I think this so loudly
that I believe
I can feel you hearing me.
I once belived in hidden forces,
in the grim curses of Furies
who did not want us to exist.
A struggle halted half-way through
that made us irreconcilable
like this.
In missteps,
sharp edges
wound each other
and ourselves,
but we have learned:
there is no better direction.
So what should we be
besides
obstinate?
As for pity
or grief over the ever-unexperienced—
I want to tell you
There are so many ways of apprehending.
I want to tell you
that there is something incredible here
and we cannot describe or explain it
even to ourselves—
an unending wonderment,
questions innumerable as the impossible stars
whose pale hues
we will never encounter,
not even in dreams.
I don’t know what time of day it is now,
or what they mean when they say
the color of love
There are so many facets
of this embellished world
that I know nothing about.
Still, let us remain like this,
unfinished,
caught in a passing symmetry,
a momentary order
in which we judge our proximity to fire
by the intensity of heat,
the fullness of vessels
by a liquid’s sound
and the nearness of bodies by how air moves
through the illimitable dark.
