I Cannot See the North but Know the Needle Can

You have to begin somewhere.

Here is the hardest trick question on the geography quiz:
how do you carry yourself from plain to mountain
to desert to ocean without leaving anything behind? 

Think: time everything to currents of lapse, of gathering.
Clouds foregather closely as dervishes
after whirling.  (Don’t ask for meaning only expecting one).

How finished the pattern of each unfolding moment
affixes me: if water is to boy what boy is to bird
then swim in the air, the fable might go.

I turn to walk the needle home crazing the mind’s compass to imagine.
Listening to it has the feeling of being home.
Spring is on the other side of the sky

cold lines becoming painful to breathe because
it makes me taste the winter more. 
A bruised psalm of alms giving, of living words lost

in the window in sounds of last summer swimming dimmer. 
Shimmering there, a stone wrinkles across acres of water.
Subtler and subtler.  Cut the surface of water and sky evaporates.

Maybe I ought to have tried harder. 
Maybe I could have listened more.
Lines I strived towards but could not achieve. 

Could weep here.
Could sleep here.
Caught in the sweep of filthy wind. 

Stranded by the shore on the verge of saying
Let this stand in for something else, the word pure,
an opening, a light I, in my silence, renounced.  And twirled.

At the border of light I pull poems
from the rain and pretend the sky stands in
for my religious belief: that we’ve all been borne aloft. 

How aware, I wrote down, of each other are the catastrophes waiting so patiently
to engulf us?  An email draft expresses the awkward silence at our inability to love
my voice in what you say.

I trade the sapphire ocean for one thousand moon
shards breaking into flight above a rosy edge
of want, the long pleasing silver ocean shot

of sunset spilling out in knots, the hollow
of California’s yester glow.  Memory is
the pull of its huge center.  A partition

of desire, a tired antique God trying to communicate
as if to say: what of it, as I set out singing stuff about
the nimbus of a life-lived direct.

Singing with my earned body in the same way the winter
comes to stone, the universe blows through me yielding
as it passes through.  Under a woven sky I hopped

the fence, spindled my body to it as if to say:
I am rapt with the silence’s voice inherited
with its constituent ah. 

Ever oaks should stand among the broken
vowels, what lingers in the sound: loss or the found?
Then I sing in debt light be paid.

Echelon grains of twilight washing over woven ocean
fraying my denim catching the chain link’s knuckle-
light spills out a red streak of blood disfigures my knee

in the language of prayer, of capital.  The lack
which I am and thinking Yes I can below Heaven clamors
twilight-licked and stunned.

A changing of direction.  I’m onto page two of my life. 
Who knows what kind of being I’ll become. 
When I left, the wind was wailing against itself without stopping.

My locks filled with dew, my head wet with the drops
of night.  I reach for the last star there.
There is some snow becoming rain too.  This much is true.
Let me bring it to you.

A Note on the Text

            In Memory of Frank Paul; After Peter Gizzi

Real men defy confession
with their heart stammering voice

This is how a winter
warms the boy

Don’t say wintry say the winter
say a family member

Say it is in grunts that poetry became 
the family, the work, a note that rose

and sank in
seasoned face cords of honey locust stacked in

This place of grunting
When I said work

and meant lyric
Here is my song

the one I have been afraid to show you, the only recourse
of the valley’s smallest syllable falling in snow

can be wrought from the hand
it is in an embrace the sun abides

the arms of one syllable fastened
from my uncle lowering the axe

two sides to the ground
like its bit glinting

the last of the light
there is one

inward and
breaking.

Watching

The lack I am.  I talk and talk yet accomplish little. 
The pigeons purr from the palapa rafters as a bedlam
of adoring fans.  God bless them for not judging me.

Just as well, I’ve nothing to tell you. 
Threaded somehow each to each, fishes
manage to breathe and surface at sudden notice, alive
and teeming and going with what takes them. 

I paddle out sick with wanting. 
I want to stay with them and paddle back and stare and still
I won’t.  I won’t lie on this ocean forever where pelicans glide
before each wave swallowing  the last of the light. 

But it’s the sight of wings swirling to a delicate halt of many
disembodied caps at the height of my sweat-laden shoulder, the place
you’d lean your mouth into as if through a membrane of gravity, as if a flame
could lose its way towards one vanishing point.

As if you were here and might, without breathing, fly alongside their living flesh. 
But instead, my mithraic memories keep strobing the none-star sky.  I keep looking
at sea stars, semen stars, the grasses of Hesperus hair. 
I conjure your mistress’s name.  A week and a decade.

Every day I wear sunglasses.  I’ve led a horse to water, carried a machete
with purpose.  So much of me is unfinished.  You wouldn’t recognize me back home,
my eyes lost in everything as two undeceived tools I’ve retired
from their life of watching you.

Lazy Acres

Right beneath us wasps are drawing up their plans for a nest.  So many of our guests do not remove their shoes.  Though we lie in unbroken half embrace, we are uncomforted.  We ignore the apparitions as the high sun plays the same tune on the accordion of light knitting the meadow together in webs of spider silk.  An absurd detail intrudes while swallows snarl the chainlink needling metaphor deeper into the heat’s lyric work of summer. 
           Us, as usual, between the narrative of water wearing nothing but courage.  We do not much of anything.  We are too tired to praise anything. 
           We are brief in the indifferent yards’ border between what is ours and what is nature’s.
           Another wet dawn and light knifes beauty. 
The crick has stopped keeping time.  We reconnoiter on the porch.
           We brush our teeth with garden hose water.  We do not much of anything and call it romance, as if this wilding were intentional.  If there are fruit blossoms in the knotted limbs, I tell myself the neighbor’s yard work is to thank. 
           It is halfway to dusk and the crickets are drawing symphonic moons around themselves before dissolving all over the caustic lawn. 
           In the morning I place my hand on your heart.  We need so much protection, needed by the body.  We stand barefoot in yet another dew watching the wasps creep through the warped boards the weather broke loose as if trying to lift the porch.  No one even cares. 
           The summer rain takes its first dip through the leaves.  It’s so late in the season and you turtle into me explaining water is only one way to apprehend the air, that our body’s water once was only storm. 
           The drinkable rain parts like a path of escape.  Wading mouth-deep into love, you tell me that you can’t step into the same mouth twice. 
           The late summer got lost in the season’s momentum.  You, sunburnt, cast the hunger out that caused you to sin, the singed taste, into my mouth.  A shattering of affect across a reflective surface: your hair tangled by a cluster of instinctive river twigs torn from the bramble’s nest that house this water, this cooing thing, and chance.  The equinox sizzles there behind you.  We’ve held space for this stagnancy.  A romantic stagnancy we call water.

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