4 poems
from Joyful Orphan
Legend
There are the old questions about animals on cave walls
and how words from blood and ochre
formed there, and the new questions about vanishing
species and how we will ever
speak then? How will we say, zebra,
when there are none. When it is now, we say about the future
collapsing. Then, in the past, sometimes we’d chew
on the grass, and the green
would cut our mouths—grass of the dead. Daylight keeps
surging from that one antler
on the French cave wall, and there’s a breeze
in the midnight grass, while above, that comet’s silver starburst mane
untangles time in space, fire to carbon, not unlike the waste
we make on earth, though the former writes a script
of light, the latter a book of darkness, and now we must eat
the book, even the glittering trash inside until we feel shadow
tide our blood, the buildings climb our faces and everything we see looks small.
La liberté libre
When I read Rimbaud’s letter, written at the age of 16, the one to Izambard
saying how much “ he loves free freedom”;
Rimbaud who had just arrived home, the one he would leave a hundred times;
Rimbaud ready to sell his watch for a ticket anywhere, Rimbaud quivering like a drawn
arrow, his cheeks flushed, “The Drunken Boat” already written with its roiled visions
on the open sea;
when I read this letter, I remember the hives in spring and how some bees would swarm,
leaving their hexagonal mansions of wax, leaving their brood
and powdered bee bread in the dusk-yellow
glow, leaving everything for a new place, with nothing, the way the poet did,
un-singing his Illuminations, the sillage of their imagination
spreading across France, Europe, while unlike the queen who always swarms
to a darker place, hollow log or tree trunk, he traveled
to brighter ones—Sumatra, Cyprus, Addis Ababa, Aden, Harar, Choa—trading coffee, spices,
hides, and camels, often walking 20 miles a day, a feral path,
unhooking places from their maps the way he once unhooked words
from the Latin, Greek, French;
Rimbaud the other, othering far, the force of his body through the fierce light.
Nearer
To keep arriving always, and the book we all want
will be written entirely in the present tense by someone
walking into the remaining green,
looking as into spring rain when sometimes
the dead appear as loose vowels or open
windows—yes—they
are summoning you just a little north of the present
where the puff of seconds sets stuff
in motion, as with
the aspirates and sibilants of certain words, and everything’s
so close, it’s invisible yet
thriving to be
seen, heard, smelled, felt, and licked into the whirling
May of revenants—tadpole, minnow, lacewings—
you can see
right thru. —Nearer us to them—as sun flames on ponds,
lakes. Nearer fire, blood,
phlegm. Nearer
waking, nearer,
sleep, and how sheer
their give or take.
Hungry
Green for a long time then purple before everything turned black, spectral.
—The spandrel within the word goodbye, and the yellow
frisbee climbing beyond the yard and the boy
reaching. His entire body. —The truck. The mother screaming, No,
no, and the way she scratched her
fingernails into the dirt, deeper, as if she could catch hold and climb somewhere
out of it, or pull the earth’s motion backward
till this didn’t occur in the blaring
silence and red near-dusk where the driver
stood above the body—brief
monument, and we saw in that mother’s
pouring grief the way memory
resists entropy
as she said, Aaron, Aaron—the sirens already tearing the name apart, she
remaining on all fours, resisting any hand, preferring
to be animal, staring at the grass, its thousand green lashes.
—Hungry, that night I dreamed
a bear had broken into the house and was ransacking
the fridge, but it was a cartoon bear and after a neighbor
ran over and shot twice, it slumped
on its haunches, leaning against the white enamel, bleeding,
laughing, groaning through the slow days
without dying. —Sniffing, our cats
approached, and it touched them with its giant pads, claws,
collecting sensory data from this world. There was
something so good as we approached with nothing but our hands.
Mark Irwin is the author of ten collections of poetry, including Shimmer (2020), A Passion According to Green (2017), American Urn: Selected Poems (1987-2014), and Bright Hunger (2004). Recognition for his work includes The Nation/Discovery Award, two Colorado Book Awards, four Pushcart Prizes, the James Wright Poetry Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and fellowships from the Fulbright, Lilly, and NEA.