2 poems
Breathing
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
And then my cat added, mrgnow.
Which is a quote from great classic of Irish literature.
And everything he said after that
felt a little political. Classical.
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
When the answer cannot be put in words, neither can the question be put in words.
And so I asked,
How does that melody go?
The song
where the brother
holds the receiver to the father’s mouth
and I am far away
and say something awkward
about how I feel, and I hear him breathing
into the phone
as if he carried some great burden, some message,
he is hoping to lay down.
*
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,
said the silence.
And then the whole sentence unraveled
into music.
And the silence was a part.
The part where the singer breathes.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence,
—————
Look at me.
My dreams say in the morning.
But when I answer,
I am dead to them.
My voice sounds more and more
like my father’s.
My silence less and less.
*
The passports of the tombstones
have all been dated, stamped,
abandoned. The rain shivers through. The sky goes clear.
Flowers, if there are flowers,
fresh-cut as the names they lie on,
they last a week or two
before they join the clippings of the morning.
The stone angels have all gone blind,
and those who talk to them speak of regret, reunion, something
in the news.
Those whose hearts are stones that listen.
When I was a boy, I played alone
with matches in the garden,
and the little souls of the ants were at my mercy.
I was more afraid than I knew
of solitude and worse. Its absence. I was cruel.
And then more sweetly miserable.
I was powerless
to stop. I thought. Better to say I was a stranger
to my power. I was the abandoned field
in a pastoral.
And I stared transfixed into the fire.
*
As a child I learned and forgot and learned again
everything
has a name, save one.
G-d, the nameless, made them so.
Every man with his face in the warm cloud above his cup.
And I know: everything
is
a name already
and so bereft of its nameless home.
Among the many, there is one who drinks my dollar
and the one who does not,
and one who in her cold flesh wakes
to the dream of a republic.
God loved me as a child.
Every dawn I cast my shadow to the shadows.
And, bidden or unbidden, my silhouette returns.
Like a child, it clings.
As the day grows old.
*
Bidden or unbidden, God abideth. So says the tomb
of a Swiss in the Latin of a Dutchman,
cribbed in turn
from an unnamed Greek.
Bidden or unbidden,
the mist above the Allegheny
rises through the fathoms and just keeps rising.
One man’s comfort is another’s paranoia.
One man’s God, a sheriff. Or another, a nurse.
One man’s forsaken conscience
returns, and he knows
his drinking is a problem, and so he drinks.
And bidden or unbidden,
the Allegheny in the rainy season tears a tree from shore.
The dead are talking under us, the water falling.
We know they are not talking really, and so they talk.
And the wheel of the rose cart crackles
through the leaves.
*
Bidden or unbidden, dream visits the sleepless man,
and so he wakes.
And so he wakes again.
And when he looks at you, he sees a mist
and the river with its branches borne downstream.
The dead are talking over him.
Named or nameless, they are flashing through the water,
as water,
somewhere, flashes through the form it takes.
The Allegheny and the rain and the ache of mist
in the morning, they fall across threshold
into the dream that leaves,
and why.
Form flashes through form as hunger flashes through a brain
Wine through the laughter.
Laughter through the blood.
Light flashes through the ice it breaks.
I swear.
And the oceans rise.
The Lost Language 6-10
These days, the town lies restless, old,
and busy getting older, getting there.
The wrecking ball makes an ecstasy
of brick, the dust rises, the smoke subsides.
It’s here I looked down at my body
and found it was not mine after all,
but more a house I rented, the beaten-down
palace of my youth, alive with ghosts
of old lovers, friends. If you touch this,
it tremors still. It shivers back to life
like a bird inside a sorcerer’s pocket.
She was my first. And I moaned God
or Sandy, without thinking. In the moment
of our union, I was broken in two.
*
When ashes fall, the word for ashes falls
a little later. Little, I say, in deference
to a moment whose margins are enormous.
The measure of an arrow at the speed
of light is not its end. I confine myself
to earth, however deadly here, because
the skies are lovely. They breathe. Every time
I speak the word breadth, it comes out
breath. So much of love is obvious:
spouse, cats, the colors of our particular dawn
fading in the sea. Somewhere are the names
my mother taught me, though I cannot tell
you whose are whose. She is in there, I say,
alone, afraid. Blue, black, phosphorescent.
*
Light falls from the sky to glass to table,
and we call it one light, across the faces,
one blaze that has no face. I have heard
that music is a language. It is. It is not.
The more specific I am the more music
I lose. The more general I am, likewise.
Music is a language in the way the cries
of wolves are, and not, and cannot be
torn from their occasion. Instinct makes
their voices general, their pain specific,
their echo large. I think therefore I am
standing before a canyon. I am small.
The cant of two in one is everywhere,
the blade of is that cuts the bread of light.
*
When I first saw Earth from a distance,
I was told the marble stood for one
world, and I was standing on an icon,
although I could not see it without help.
It must have been the dark around it
that made this little lamp so priceless,
as eyes are, and the skies they gather,
the black in them that dwindles to a star.
My mother told me once, do not worry.
You are young. You have a long life
ahead. No need for a child to dwell
on such things. It helped. And then it didn’t.
It taught me. When children ask about
death, they must be speaking of their own.
*
Our first world, before we realized it,
as first, or ours, or there to wander
and explain—it never left completely,
never abandoned what we think about
and how, although it feels far away,
nameless, as rivers meeting oceans are,
or particles waves, a child the lion
of homes on fire, bereft of words to meet them.
Our first world is there, as silence is
in the invitation to speak, abstention
in the glass through which the daylight falls.
Our word mother materialized through
a hole in the air that was motherless,
although her absence calls to us as ours.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-five books including, most recently, Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, SIU Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse, 2018), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at the University of North Texas.