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FOR RESTON
more rough, less blue, more lit, and patternless
COURTSHIP
—Both things, I think. But less the hesitation of many hands
touching the stunned dethronement of the master’s body, than
their way of touching it again; again. Each time, more surely.
SWIMMING
Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
Why not stay awhile, usually that hour when
the coyotes roam the streets as if they’ve always
owned the place and had come back inspecting now
for damage. But what hasn’t been damaged? History
here means a history of storms rushing the trees
for so long, their bowed shapes seem a kind of star—
worth trusting, I mean, as in how the helmsman,
steering home, knows what star to lean on. Do
people, anymore, even say helmsman? Everything
in waves, or at least wave-like, as when another’s
suffering, being greater, displaces our own, or
I understand it should, which is meant to be
different, I’m sure of it, from that pleasure
Lucretius speaks of, in witnessing from land
a ship foundering at sea, though more and more
it all seems related. I love the nights here. I love
the jetty’s black ghost-finger, how it calms
the harbor, how the fog hanging stranded just
above the water is fog, finally, not the left-behind
parts of those questions from which I half wish
I could school my mind, desperate cargo,
to keep a little distance. An old map from when
this place was first settled shows monsters
everywhere, once the shore gives out—it can still
feel like that: I dive in, and they rise like faithfulness
itself, watery pallbearers heading seaward, and
I the raft they steady. It seems there’s no turning back.
BROTHERS IN ARMS
The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,
something got crossed, or didn’t. Who’s to say, about
happiness? Whatever country, I mean, where inconceivable
was a word like any other lies far behind me now. I’ve
learned to spare what’s failing, if it can keep what’s living
alive still, maybe just
a while longer. Ghost bamboo that
the birds nest in, for example, not noticing the leaves, color
of surrender, color of poverty as I used to imagine it when
I myself was poor but had no idea of it. I’ve always thought
gratitude’s the one correct response to having been made,
however painfully, to see this life more up close. The higher
gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser
do the best they can—so a friend I somewhere along the way
lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before
passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must
surely, by now, be dead. There’s a rumored
humbling effect
to loss that I bear no trace of. It’s not loss that humbles me.
What used to look like memory—clouds for hours breaking,
gathering, then breaking up again—lately seems instead
like a dance, one of those slower, too-complicated numbers
I never had much time for. Not knowing exactly what it’s
come to is so much different from understanding that it’s come
to nothing. Why is it, then, each day, they feel more the same?
MEDITATION: ON BEING A MYSTERY TO ONESELF
The oars of the ship called Late Forgiveness lift,
then fall. The slaves at the oars
have done singing—it’s pure work, now.
The galley master stands as always, whip in hand,
but for the moment
in idleness. They say when discipline
dreams, it’s just the one dream: hands
breaking from stillness, like hands of course, but like
hands when, having lost a thing entirely, they move
entirely by definition. The ship
moves slowly. It’s a ship. It’s a storm-beclouded
stronghold
in the dark, receding. They say discipline’s flag
is blue—three deer in flight; three stars
barely show, above them.
MUSCULATURE
The last dog I owned, or—more humanely put, so
I’m told—that I used to live with, she’d follow me
everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down’s
more the truth. It is the truth. And now
this dog—that
I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty,
like fascination, can be overrated, and for how long it’s
taken me, just to half understand that. Pretty much my
whole life. Mortality seemed an ignorable wilderness
like any other; the past seemed what, occasionally, it
still does, a version of luck when luck, as if inevitably,
gets stripped away: What hope, otherwise, for suffering?
When did honesty become so hard to step into and stay
inside of, I’m not saying
forever, I could last a fair time
on a small while. Sovereignty sleeps hard beside me. I
pass my hands down the full length of him, like a loose
command through a summer garden. Let those plants
that can do so lean away on their stems, toward the sun.
GIVINGLY
—So here we are again, one-handedly fingering
the puckered edges of the exit wounds
memory leaves behind, he said, and he tossed
his leash made of stars, then tightened it,
around the antlers it seems I forget, always,
about having. Smell of nightfall when it
hasn’t settled yet. Insatiability and
whatever else hidden behind the parts
that hide it. Surely any victim—sacrificial
or not—deserves better, I thought, him leading me
meanwhile toward the usual place, the branches
grow more givingly apart there, as if to say
Let pass. The wind was clean. The wind
was a good thing, in his hair, and across our faces.
THE DISTANCE AND THE SPOILS
Half a life; a life … So much turns out to have
been neither history nor memory, that mirage
of history, in which I want you came at least
briefly close. Sometimes
disclosure’s a pretty
flower, and that’s the end of it. S
ay he lifted
himself slow, rose unsteadily up, sleep-or-
dream-staggered out into black of night, non-
choiring of crickets with their sounds that we
call song, fall or don’t, speed—for a change—of
not falling, what became
of that? Sometimes
we want a thing more than we can admit we
want that thing. Invisible leaves toss like water;
the eyes shut, or they turn away, as from the four
bright points of a constellation missed earlier,
and just now seen clearly: pain; indifference;
torn trust; permission. Rest. Lean against me.
NOT THE WAVES AS THEY MAKE THEIR WAY FORWARD
Like Virgil, Marcus Aurelius died believing that his triumphs,
when pitched against his failures, had come to very little.
I don’t know. Given the messiness of most lives (humble,
legendary, all the rest in between)—their interiors,
I mean—it’s hard to say he was wrong. Black night. Black
train. Freight of worries. Things that stay
the same. Having reached that point that even
the luckiest sometimes never get close to, where
desire at last offers nothing more—nor less—than
what restraint can, Marcus Aurelius wrote down
some thoughts meant apparently only for himself, though
they became Meditations, a book without which, by now,
he’d pretty much be forgotten. It begins with gratitude.
How it ends is painful, if I’m remembering right. But it isn’t pain.
GOLD LEAF
To lift, without ever asking what animal exactly it once belonged to,
the socketed helmet that what’s left of the skull equals
up to your face, to hold it there, mask-like, to look through it until
looking through means looking back, back through the skull,
into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be,
that—depending—fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming,
to know utterly what you’ll never be, to understand in doing so
what you are, and say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair.
SEVERAL BIRDS IN HAND BUT THE REST GO FREE
Hiking the restored prairie was more than lovely enough—
I could appreciate the good signage; got a chance to forget,
for a change, to respect fear … Were they happy in any
real way, whatever real is, those first
pioneers? The happiest
people I know are those whose main strategy has
always been detachment. I’ve been working on that. Not so
long ago, for example, a sentence like “The skin where you
burned me last week with your cigarette has almost healed
completely”
was so much harder to say. Progress. The way
bluestem, mallow, purple globes of clover, when said
together, make a kind of music, though they’re nothing alike,
pale colors in a tall field—
all a prairie comes to. True pity,
as in deeply felt—I save mine, what’s left of it, for
the wounded animals, the ones not yet dead. Already I don’t
mean, anymore, the soft dark violent rustling wilderness
inside the bright one that I was before, when I say wilderness.
STRAY
When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more
than terms—how they can matter, suddenly—I can tell
he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like
when it’s just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy
likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I’m doomed
to fail—that the body is—keeps me almost steady, if
steadiness is what a gift for a while brings—feathers, burst-
at-last pods of milkweed, October—before it all fades away.
Before the drugs and the loud music, before tears and
restraining orders and the eventual Go fuck yourself get your
ass out of here don’t go, the apartments across the street
were a boys’ grammar school—before that, a convent,
the only remains of which, ornamenting the far parking lot,
is a marble pedestal with some Latin on it that translates as
“Heart of Jesus, have mercy,” as if that much, at least, still
remained relevant, or should. If it’s true that secrets resist
always the act of telling, how come secrets, more often than
not, seem the entire story? Caladium, cleome—how delicate,
this holding of certain words in the mouth, the all-but-lost
trick of lifting for salvage the last windfalls as, across them,
the bees make their slow-muscled, stunned, moving scab …
REVOLVER
His face was a festival. Inside it,
as if helplessness remained
one of the few things left worth
fretting for, making some kind of
show of, whatever lies
half between, he turned,
kept turning … Above him, leaves
swam the air—so it couldn’t have been
past November. Most animals, smelling
death on another, back away,
as if repulsed, or frightened; the rest
come closer. It was
like that, then less so. His face
was a festival, within which—just as
tenderness is only sometimes
weakness, or how what we were
can become unrecognizable to what we are,
or think we are—leaves swam the air.
THE DARK NO SOFTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE
How I say it happened
may not be how it happened. In that slum
that the mind lately feels like, I’m walking as if
forever toward where the chestnut trees flanking
the brokenly lit boulevard—what’s
left of it—come now to a point, now
to the never-to-be-reached conclusion I suspect
they’ve meant all along. It’s a slum, but the sea
hugs it as it does so many places prettier, emptier
of such distractions as fear and at least the more
galvanizing varieties of sorrow, hence the not-so-muffled
crashing of waves not far from here: blue dart,
shattered crossbow … Keeping it all somehow differently alive,
and close, that’s the point, someone told me once—
who? and the point of what? The less I understand myself,
the more I understand others, which I used to think wasn’t
saying much, but there are nights it can seem as good a road as any
maybe toward compassion, even if half
washed away—the road, I mean; not compassion. I don’t know
how the better parts between two people become the first forgotten.
FROM A BONFIRE
There’s plenty I miss, still, that I wouldn’t want back—
which I’m beginning to think might be all regret’s ever had
to mean, and there’s maybe no shame, then, in having
known some and, all these years, I’ve pretty much
been wrong. Not that being wrong means wasting time,
exactly. What hasn’t been useful? Having grown up with
bonfires each October, having equated them with fall,
the communion especially of leaves falling, fire as
what both defined the dark—easily taken for granted—
and kept the dark at bay, surely that’s been worth
something, for it stays with me; in that way, it even now
marks a difference between who I was and wha
t I’ve
since become: a kind of bonfire myself—unattached,
though, to any time of year in particular, instead
a season of the mind entirely, as unpredictable
in occurrence as in intensity, cracked, blue,
forever half done departing, not so different
after all, maybe, from the darkness against which
I’m at once more apparent and somehow more
betrayed. What has restlessness been for, the darkness
asks, as if that were the question, when the darkness
itself is its own question, the most honest one left,
as far as I can see, that’s worth asking, that I keep
meaning to ask, then faltering, not at all out of fear,
I think—I don’t think I’m afraid—but being fire, and restless.
AND LOVE YOU TOO
When he describes a spear passing
through the throat of some otherwise
bronze-protected warrior, part of what Homer
means is death, and there’s a piece that isn’t,
the way black can resemble more a brightness
sometimes, or how wind can vacillate
between being a force bearing down
on a field and what, for a time at least, from
beneath, gives
or seems to give to the field
some agency … For the gods in Homer, there’s an
at once lovely and less-than-lovely
patterning to the brutality that, even as
they wield it, is only theirs to borrow; Fate
stakes the final claim, as if forever breaking
ground for an imagined city from which
the idea is that a vast empire like a fist opening
fans out
eventually across all things divine
and mortal. Just as softly as the face,
when the body’s sleeping, returns to childhood,
Closer, deeper, says the hole in history
we call the mouth of Homer because it
helps, to name. Not the song that fog-muffled
bells make, after storm. Nothing winged and lost,