The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.
I knew a guy, he said, who told me it’s better to know one big thing than a lot of little things.
Because he believed my identity could be found in the thousand or more books in my house,
where he and his brother, at their mother’s bidding, had been willing
to work at less than scale to uncover our hardwood floor,
I offered without him asking what Archilochus said, adding that he was a Greek in case the by-now several others listening wanted to go beyond Tolstoy
and Dostoyevsky
and Isaiah Berlin,
and apply it to their own endeavors, carpentry and plumbing, drinking and fucking, and
don’t forget fighting and, my lost friend from Fall River
always added, gambling. You could breathe through War and Peace, I said,
it was as easy as horses with saddles.
You had to listen to The Brothers Karamazov, a sound of voices
clashing in conversation overheard in the room of the mind.
Afterward, I went home to look up the saying to be sure I had recalled it accurately.
There were too many journeyman/apprentice Tolstoys, too many greatly sinning Dostoyevskys,
and then the hoodlum-priest Dantes, the versatile-without-measure Shakespeares
. . . how well could anyone know what was worthy of memory in a mere lifetime?
Went to the cages and found Grushenka, or was she Natasha? She was only six weeks old.
She was already looking for a brother or two or three.
My preference was Grushenka, hers Natasha. This matter I did not broach at the gathering
where I mentioned Archilochus. They had children, the children had children,
children whose forebears were dying every day and in their own bewildered presence.
Like Andre on the bridge, looking up at the sky and thinking for the first time he was alive
and the next time would die slowly but knowing that he had truly lived.
Like Pierre on the forced march wherein the old serf told him what he knew that he had learned
not then but had salvaged from his long past, before his captivity, before his dying.
Like Levin who went to scythe with the serfs harvesting his fields
and in the city found one woman whose heart he craved, with whom he shared their family.
Dostoyevsky was Christian,
not John Bunyan’s pilgrim but equally steadfast despite his gambling, his singleminded drama
of the priest Alyosha, the intellectual Ivan, and the wildman Dmitri
who danced with the gypsy Grushenka, as Andre and Pierre danced with the beloved Natasha,
as Levin in marriage learned the dance of solitude in love with life.
Isaiah Berlin, Anna Akhmatova’s loyal friend during the years Stalin made her poetry a crime,
tutored Henry Grosshans at Oxford
and Henry tutored others during extended coffee breaks twice a day seven years
during the sixties. Don’t tell me
the sixties were not magnificent years, when others learned more and learned more quickly
what they needed to begin to know for the years ahead if they survived,
and here I was attempting to tell another
something he would know now
even if he had no need to remember.
And these were years whose innocence would no longer offer consolation.
Thus the Greeks lived in a state of grace all their own, and the Russian masters learned
from them and from Henry, who knew Russian, his mother Czech, his father German,
others learned a language of knowing and transformed it into the feeling
that lay behind the words–what I, for example, may have been unable to convey
to a carpenter, a plumber, a drinker, a lover, a fighter, a gambler
for him to tell his children, and all the children listening could tell theirs,
and no one would know more thoroughly the distance traveled in a mere lifetime,
cartographers whose maps of desire and will could reveal what the years to come might mean.
(18 July 2010)
copyright 2010 by Floyce Alexander
[posted 4 January 2011]
Tuesday, January 4, 2011
Monday, January 3, 2011
After
"As their time together drew to a close,
she [his Russian-language tutor at Oxford,
the sister of Boris Pasternak] suggested
they observe a Russian custom in which
those who must part sit without speaking
for a while. Then the one who is leaving
rises, walks in silence to the door, crosses
the threshold, and is gone."–G. & A. G.
After it was over he sat with the poet’s sister
who introduced him to the custom of sitting
wordlessly until the one who was leaving
arose and left the room forever.
May God tell him welcome among the scribes,
among whom he shall be treasured always.
May God give me, a poet but far from the one
whose sister bid him goodbye–give me courage
in these days of loss not only among men
but slicing through the spines of nations
whose balance goes askew and legs fold
under the body politic and the crashing begins.
May God tell the scribe to say hello to brother
Boris Pasternak and sit with him as long
as the two of you wish, discussing his gentle sister,
your two generations, and sharing your books,
those no one writes here who did not write books
down there, on the earth partitioned by oceans
and assailed not by winds only but by blackguards
and thieves whose fortune mounts in this drear year.
I who have had so many teachers–you are second
to die, Roethke before you, only Wagoner, Roethke’s
student, and McCord, my brother as well as teacher–
remain to help me say farewell to the scholar.
May your father’s Germany, your mother’s
Czechoslovakia–the one before the wall fell–
and the steppes of Russia, their lovely people
who are as common as you, may you all thrive
together in Paradise where now you may apply
formally for the vaunted position you always had
on earth, in which you took no pride because
you were never ordained God’s amanuensis
and wanted only to be of use.
May wonder and love remain your pole stars.
May I never forget you and you remember me
once we meet with our burdens no longer a weight.
R.I.P., Henry Grosshans, 1921-2010
(3 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
she [his Russian-language tutor at Oxford,
the sister of Boris Pasternak] suggested
they observe a Russian custom in which
those who must part sit without speaking
for a while. Then the one who is leaving
rises, walks in silence to the door, crosses
the threshold, and is gone."–G. & A. G.
After it was over he sat with the poet’s sister
who introduced him to the custom of sitting
wordlessly until the one who was leaving
arose and left the room forever.
May God tell him welcome among the scribes,
among whom he shall be treasured always.
May God give me, a poet but far from the one
whose sister bid him goodbye–give me courage
in these days of loss not only among men
but slicing through the spines of nations
whose balance goes askew and legs fold
under the body politic and the crashing begins.
May God tell the scribe to say hello to brother
Boris Pasternak and sit with him as long
as the two of you wish, discussing his gentle sister,
your two generations, and sharing your books,
those no one writes here who did not write books
down there, on the earth partitioned by oceans
and assailed not by winds only but by blackguards
and thieves whose fortune mounts in this drear year.
I who have had so many teachers–you are second
to die, Roethke before you, only Wagoner, Roethke’s
student, and McCord, my brother as well as teacher–
remain to help me say farewell to the scholar.
May your father’s Germany, your mother’s
Czechoslovakia–the one before the wall fell–
and the steppes of Russia, their lovely people
who are as common as you, may you all thrive
together in Paradise where now you may apply
formally for the vaunted position you always had
on earth, in which you took no pride because
you were never ordained God’s amanuensis
and wanted only to be of use.
May wonder and love remain your pole stars.
May I never forget you and you remember me
once we meet with our burdens no longer a weight.
R.I.P., Henry Grosshans, 1921-2010
(3 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Blue Monday
apologies to Fats Domino & Cassandra Wilson
Nobody cares, they have troubles their own,
Nobody cares, you never gave them a dime,
The institution of poetry is like prostitution
as a profession, you should have a union card
and serve an apprenticeship, be a journeyman
or woman before settling down to do poetics
and charge the highest prices you can get
on the market, the art never having paid well
for any but the venerable, rare, quickly aging
who are dying daily from such scarcity of love
Somebody has a jones for the deep voice in folds
over Cassandra’s body moving under her blues
Somebody looks around can see upside down
and overdose trying to turn it all right side up
Nobody cares most of the time but sometimes
they start caring and never stop and go mad
Nobody knows about the secrets of the heart,
it’s hard to sit through a sermon before you eat
just to qualify to be a master of the next level,
singing until waiting for the music to begin
(3 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Nobody cares, they have troubles their own,
Nobody cares, you never gave them a dime,
The institution of poetry is like prostitution
as a profession, you should have a union card
and serve an apprenticeship, be a journeyman
or woman before settling down to do poetics
and charge the highest prices you can get
on the market, the art never having paid well
for any but the venerable, rare, quickly aging
who are dying daily from such scarcity of love
Somebody has a jones for the deep voice in folds
over Cassandra’s body moving under her blues
Somebody looks around can see upside down
and overdose trying to turn it all right side up
Nobody cares most of the time but sometimes
they start caring and never stop and go mad
Nobody knows about the secrets of the heart,
it’s hard to sit through a sermon before you eat
just to qualify to be a master of the next level,
singing until waiting for the music to begin
(3 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Sunday, January 2, 2011
Angela Home to London for Christmas
A despair set in upon waking, the rest of a day
devoted to the climb. The climb is still steep,
shale in some places slides under one foot,
sometimes both. Good thing you were born
under the sign of a mountain goat . . .
How lovely to have lived, feet upon the earth.
My seed time. If asked what did I do in the war:
"I sat on top of the mountain and like Pierre
on the hill, more a knoll, it was that low,
I watched and listened and wrote down
what I saw and filled a scroll with drawings"
and returned the favor: What did you do today?
and thought I saw the earth open and the shit-
poison smeared punji stakes splitting a body
where it had no reason to be. Or the big ball
swinging down into a face spiked forevermore
. . . they too died from the many-th way to kill
boys sent by their fathers to defend a nation
that could not last. Who would envy Andre
for lying wounded on his back on a bridge
looking up at a sky saying this was what it was
to be alive, to not be dead, to see what was there
and the first wound was the best, he learned,
why he died in a bed alone later with the war
still going on, getting worse for our boys, women
dying the same as girls, the young, the old men
walking the fields when the chopper went over
and Tolstoy would never have understood
a damned thing about why a country invades
another country that wants to be left alone,
unless it was France, Napoleon, the old general
in his Russian tent, planning the attack next day
as though there were ways to be sure to win.
This is not Tolstoy sitting here. It’s a cipher
called a human being. He is about to go back
to the streets. His head makes sense, not his body.
Was that me? I could say only I was what I saw,
alive to stay, my surrogate brothers asking how
it was in Korea. I could not speak for a moment.
That was how I had aged at thirty-three. Vietnam
had murdered souls, I had no way of knowing why
except by observing the men who were my friends
and leaned against the bar and stood up by the bar
and worked the bars and met weekly to talk over
what needed to be done. I said to Patrick Johansen,
I wasn’t old enough, besides I was glad I was young,
forgetting I still was, and Paul Stevens liked to grunt
when Terry O’Hara walked over to say he was ready
to take Lance for a beer if I wanted, you gentlemen
come along if you so desire, everybody by the book
in this room, and being in LRRP had given Lance
views of jungles I would never have, not after Mexico.
No one in New England knew why I wrote all night
and tore it to shreds the same way I ripped my mind
apart to make it cohere with the way my world went
out the door, across the sycamore, around Mill River
to the stairs I called The Grand Piano and climbed
listening to the etudes, the way music found a color
no sky ever resembled, and next the walk to town
where I could fight for my country my own way.
Somebody said, Floyce, sit down, let me buy a beer
to get you started. I told him stories of New Orleans,
Mexico City, Cuetzalan, the San Francisco Bay,
but never talked about her, Irene Castenada, I loved
in my hometown. In Seattle my heart broke down.
She left town for somewhere she could have children.
I keep writing about her the closer I come to death.
Natasha of my soul. But not then. She was my own
forever. No fate could take her away from me. Oh I
often wondered–even now–why I loved her and she
loved me and stayed home. Come to Seattle to live
with me. She said, Soon. Always. Where is she now?
In the bar on the edge of town O’Hara’s one eye
caught the girl who stayed each night he asked her.
Her name was Mary. She was black and lean. Terry
said very little to her when she came to be with him.
I learned not to tell myself how I would love Irene,
present tense, till the day I died, too old to go on.
The war. The women. The booze. The absences . . .
Stevens looked around for money on the floor.
Johansen was a bouncer in the Quicksilver Bar.
Lance looked down at the table when he talked.
He never liked to talk, he said, it might bore me,
and smiled. O’Hara in the Drake took up position
against crazy Chuck with his stash of anything
you wanted, John Malloy out to double up, fine
if he got his cut and Chuck swung his shillelagh.
And one night they kicked Paul’s head bloody,
scars that wouldn’t heal for years, though he did,
he died. And O’Hara behind my back took Malloy
outside, returned alone, picked up Mary and took
me home. Mary was like Irene: full of fun and love
and young–but Mary like me, no children please.
I could have lived the rest of one life, with family.
No need to speak espanol when Senorita Castenada
asks everything in anglais that you need to know . . .
Mary loved life too much to give O’Hara everything.
That was why Terry’s Paula came around to stay
and give this ex-marine captain with one eye gone
R & R, cook for him and share with him love’s food.
Paula lived in Boston, they were engaged. Last time
we saw them both, the Mark Hopkins, San Francisco,
she said to him, Floyce stopped drinking, can’t you?
Cathleen was with me, she also having had her last.
Years together so to speak; marriage an afterthought.
She brought in the mail where the Sandias loomed
up close and the Manzanos to the east. A postcard
from Paris. O’Hara: Drinking here. You come see
the sights. I thought, quite naturally, of Hemingway.
Fitzgerald putting his manhood on the line nightly.
Stein’s salon filling up fast, Alice keeping the door
opening and closing. Joyce never anywhere here
because he preferred to say home, write and fuck
his wife who loved to have him between her legs:
all the life they would ever need after the Dublin
meeting. Now they were all gone and a long time
too, longer than any of us would care to survive,
O’Hara would say, not after what we went through.
He never took out his glass eyes, he was trained
by his Irish mother to be like his father, a gentleman.
Sure, we got around. Yes, I knew why I loved it so
and if I had not been so drunk in that East River
bar, I would never have offered Angela my lap
and O’Hara would never have been there to stop
the gawkers from swooping. I lifted her sweater,
unhooked her bra, kissed her nipples taut, loved
as though that was why she moved to Manhattan
to work as a cancer nurse, to go to P. J. Clarke’s,
then the Japanese restaurant whose name I knew
but never after that long spell I loved to lift her up
and sit her next to me in the cab, all the way home
kissing and caressing and she saying, I am very small
but I kissed her where I was too big, she too narrow,
Angela. She sometimes begged off. How I could love
Angela! She let me stay in her walk-up. Cathleen
was dancing disco in Springfield and I was happy
being naked when Angela was home and I was back
here from writing the war all afternoon, Manhattan
being so accommodating to an aspiring young writer
until the day she told me she was going home. London.
She’d be back, her long black hair down past shoulders
tiny and brittle and breasts so full I never knew why
I never went back. I was living again in Amherst.
If you could call it living, I would say self-consciously.
(2 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
devoted to the climb. The climb is still steep,
shale in some places slides under one foot,
sometimes both. Good thing you were born
under the sign of a mountain goat . . .
How lovely to have lived, feet upon the earth.
My seed time. If asked what did I do in the war:
"I sat on top of the mountain and like Pierre
on the hill, more a knoll, it was that low,
I watched and listened and wrote down
what I saw and filled a scroll with drawings"
and returned the favor: What did you do today?
and thought I saw the earth open and the shit-
poison smeared punji stakes splitting a body
where it had no reason to be. Or the big ball
swinging down into a face spiked forevermore
. . . they too died from the many-th way to kill
boys sent by their fathers to defend a nation
that could not last. Who would envy Andre
for lying wounded on his back on a bridge
looking up at a sky saying this was what it was
to be alive, to not be dead, to see what was there
and the first wound was the best, he learned,
why he died in a bed alone later with the war
still going on, getting worse for our boys, women
dying the same as girls, the young, the old men
walking the fields when the chopper went over
and Tolstoy would never have understood
a damned thing about why a country invades
another country that wants to be left alone,
unless it was France, Napoleon, the old general
in his Russian tent, planning the attack next day
as though there were ways to be sure to win.
This is not Tolstoy sitting here. It’s a cipher
called a human being. He is about to go back
to the streets. His head makes sense, not his body.
Was that me? I could say only I was what I saw,
alive to stay, my surrogate brothers asking how
it was in Korea. I could not speak for a moment.
That was how I had aged at thirty-three. Vietnam
had murdered souls, I had no way of knowing why
except by observing the men who were my friends
and leaned against the bar and stood up by the bar
and worked the bars and met weekly to talk over
what needed to be done. I said to Patrick Johansen,
I wasn’t old enough, besides I was glad I was young,
forgetting I still was, and Paul Stevens liked to grunt
when Terry O’Hara walked over to say he was ready
to take Lance for a beer if I wanted, you gentlemen
come along if you so desire, everybody by the book
in this room, and being in LRRP had given Lance
views of jungles I would never have, not after Mexico.
No one in New England knew why I wrote all night
and tore it to shreds the same way I ripped my mind
apart to make it cohere with the way my world went
out the door, across the sycamore, around Mill River
to the stairs I called The Grand Piano and climbed
listening to the etudes, the way music found a color
no sky ever resembled, and next the walk to town
where I could fight for my country my own way.
Somebody said, Floyce, sit down, let me buy a beer
to get you started. I told him stories of New Orleans,
Mexico City, Cuetzalan, the San Francisco Bay,
but never talked about her, Irene Castenada, I loved
in my hometown. In Seattle my heart broke down.
She left town for somewhere she could have children.
I keep writing about her the closer I come to death.
Natasha of my soul. But not then. She was my own
forever. No fate could take her away from me. Oh I
often wondered–even now–why I loved her and she
loved me and stayed home. Come to Seattle to live
with me. She said, Soon. Always. Where is she now?
In the bar on the edge of town O’Hara’s one eye
caught the girl who stayed each night he asked her.
Her name was Mary. She was black and lean. Terry
said very little to her when she came to be with him.
I learned not to tell myself how I would love Irene,
present tense, till the day I died, too old to go on.
The war. The women. The booze. The absences . . .
Stevens looked around for money on the floor.
Johansen was a bouncer in the Quicksilver Bar.
Lance looked down at the table when he talked.
He never liked to talk, he said, it might bore me,
and smiled. O’Hara in the Drake took up position
against crazy Chuck with his stash of anything
you wanted, John Malloy out to double up, fine
if he got his cut and Chuck swung his shillelagh.
And one night they kicked Paul’s head bloody,
scars that wouldn’t heal for years, though he did,
he died. And O’Hara behind my back took Malloy
outside, returned alone, picked up Mary and took
me home. Mary was like Irene: full of fun and love
and young–but Mary like me, no children please.
I could have lived the rest of one life, with family.
No need to speak espanol when Senorita Castenada
asks everything in anglais that you need to know . . .
Mary loved life too much to give O’Hara everything.
That was why Terry’s Paula came around to stay
and give this ex-marine captain with one eye gone
R & R, cook for him and share with him love’s food.
Paula lived in Boston, they were engaged. Last time
we saw them both, the Mark Hopkins, San Francisco,
she said to him, Floyce stopped drinking, can’t you?
Cathleen was with me, she also having had her last.
Years together so to speak; marriage an afterthought.
She brought in the mail where the Sandias loomed
up close and the Manzanos to the east. A postcard
from Paris. O’Hara: Drinking here. You come see
the sights. I thought, quite naturally, of Hemingway.
Fitzgerald putting his manhood on the line nightly.
Stein’s salon filling up fast, Alice keeping the door
opening and closing. Joyce never anywhere here
because he preferred to say home, write and fuck
his wife who loved to have him between her legs:
all the life they would ever need after the Dublin
meeting. Now they were all gone and a long time
too, longer than any of us would care to survive,
O’Hara would say, not after what we went through.
He never took out his glass eyes, he was trained
by his Irish mother to be like his father, a gentleman.
Sure, we got around. Yes, I knew why I loved it so
and if I had not been so drunk in that East River
bar, I would never have offered Angela my lap
and O’Hara would never have been there to stop
the gawkers from swooping. I lifted her sweater,
unhooked her bra, kissed her nipples taut, loved
as though that was why she moved to Manhattan
to work as a cancer nurse, to go to P. J. Clarke’s,
then the Japanese restaurant whose name I knew
but never after that long spell I loved to lift her up
and sit her next to me in the cab, all the way home
kissing and caressing and she saying, I am very small
but I kissed her where I was too big, she too narrow,
Angela. She sometimes begged off. How I could love
Angela! She let me stay in her walk-up. Cathleen
was dancing disco in Springfield and I was happy
being naked when Angela was home and I was back
here from writing the war all afternoon, Manhattan
being so accommodating to an aspiring young writer
until the day she told me she was going home. London.
She’d be back, her long black hair down past shoulders
tiny and brittle and breasts so full I never knew why
I never went back. I was living again in Amherst.
If you could call it living, I would say self-consciously.
(2 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Saturday, January 1, 2011
Wing, Grave, Island, City
The big wing is fluttering over the other,
beak nuzzling its chest feathers.
The other’s big too. The bird’s a goner
but no wing ever works long
without a cleanup. You could guess what
was coming? Guess again. It was going
away. Little dot in the far sky, with rain
soaking feathers, making flying harder.
Someone came up and asked for a shovel.
Said there was a dead one behind here,
start the engine, it’s been here a while,
smells worse than death, got to get out
to keep my cookies, let me have a drink
to wash what it was all the way out . . .
there’s a flash of lightning in the night
sky, no moon, clouds swallowed up sky
already. Out to sea, there was an island
where the siblings met and played house
as though they were the mother, father,
and all the grains of sand along the beach
were children coming home to see death
in the face, and woke of a morning a city
under their weight, love like a north star,
the little soul a light, its little wing away,
circling, dying, being, you know how I
got here, shining my eyes, rubbing words
to set, seeing what I could, never on time
and not too late, the life being what it is,
a ridge along the crest slippery as grass
that never has grown here, the place is
cursed, the view a long way off, out there.
Moor the boat, shut the door, come on in.
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
beak nuzzling its chest feathers.
The other’s big too. The bird’s a goner
but no wing ever works long
without a cleanup. You could guess what
was coming? Guess again. It was going
away. Little dot in the far sky, with rain
soaking feathers, making flying harder.
Someone came up and asked for a shovel.
Said there was a dead one behind here,
start the engine, it’s been here a while,
smells worse than death, got to get out
to keep my cookies, let me have a drink
to wash what it was all the way out . . .
there’s a flash of lightning in the night
sky, no moon, clouds swallowed up sky
already. Out to sea, there was an island
where the siblings met and played house
as though they were the mother, father,
and all the grains of sand along the beach
were children coming home to see death
in the face, and woke of a morning a city
under their weight, love like a north star,
the little soul a light, its little wing away,
circling, dying, being, you know how I
got here, shining my eyes, rubbing words
to set, seeing what I could, never on time
and not too late, the life being what it is,
a ridge along the crest slippery as grass
that never has grown here, the place is
cursed, the view a long way off, out there.
Moor the boat, shut the door, come on in.
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
A Death a Day
A death a day keeps the doctor busy
bagging his way through the damage
all night too, how do you bear up under
what you carry with you, such a shade
appalling your sight, and not from sun
A death a day keeps the riverfront up
and running, stevedores busy, tourists
happy not being among them, not now
or here or ever, the fancy fellows hope
with their tiara’d ladies riding one arm
A death a day, a death a day, a death
a day, and that’s enough: put up and
shut up, let your heart do all the talk
and your legs carry you from here to
where she is, gamine, waiting for you
somewhere on Canal, she said she’d
be ready to go by the time you got there
and here you are, and there she is,
swinging one leg over the other and
"it’s all I can do to get to you in time"
to live, to stay alive, to be alive, and yes
I’d love to ride the paddlewheel upriver
and hold you close so the sandbars don’t
jar your sweet body’s balance when boat
happens to stop and we get truly started
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
bagging his way through the damage
all night too, how do you bear up under
what you carry with you, such a shade
appalling your sight, and not from sun
A death a day keeps the riverfront up
and running, stevedores busy, tourists
happy not being among them, not now
or here or ever, the fancy fellows hope
with their tiara’d ladies riding one arm
A death a day, a death a day, a death
a day, and that’s enough: put up and
shut up, let your heart do all the talk
and your legs carry you from here to
where she is, gamine, waiting for you
somewhere on Canal, she said she’d
be ready to go by the time you got there
and here you are, and there she is,
swinging one leg over the other and
"it’s all I can do to get to you in time"
to live, to stay alive, to be alive, and yes
I’d love to ride the paddlewheel upriver
and hold you close so the sandbars don’t
jar your sweet body’s balance when boat
happens to stop and we get truly started
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
Upriver
I will ride the boat as far upriver as it goes.
You come with me, my small beloved
with a heart the size of the known world.
I dally with hyperbole, I know, the winds
blow me nowhere, but here you are and go,
or do I lead the way? What would there be
without either of us holding the other . . .
Where would I be, where would you be, where
are the songbirds this time of year up here . . .
You wanted to hear the story of my friend
in a roadside bar and back on the road
smashed his life against Scylla and Carybdis.
I stanch my tears, for I have wandered down
into the shades to walk among my Achilles,
too many for any Patroclus or Odysseus
to fathom. I thought upon waking of Troy
and how the men spilled with weapons raised
out of the horse’s belly and took what Hector
could not defend, even though his conqueror’s
heel opened even wider for the arrow that hit
Achilles where nothing, no one, no world
of time or space could prevent his mother’s hand
holding his heel washing her babe above flowing
water could have prevented the fates’ visit,
the furies’ chorus, the plummet below
where we walk, or rather ride the boat now,
upstream and on to our house, the one as small
as you, casa sin tragedia, where the great ones
dwell inside and our only devotion is to work alone
and yet with one another to gladden our lives
until we become the one life, body, presence
whose very appearance opposes absence,
even nullity, whose lure is so strong skies fall
when wind rises and the eight worlds send
from each direction a tiny breeze to fill
the eighty-four thousand holes of the body.
And so I have blundered upon the love of a life
time’s search, coming upon you unaware
that day I had found you and you saying now
you knew immediately, once I opened my pen
and wrote out what I call poetry, the penchant
of fools and salvation of doomsayers, the arch
enemy of nullity itself. And how long had passed
before we reached that place upriver you helped
me down to the soft clay and led me to your love’s
great heart, so much larger than all my hearts,
all my loves, whose courage was such as to include
my infidelities, but wish me the lifetime I held
in both hands, yours, mine, and not many years
where the dark sand runs and never stops for me
or you, and I have pondered what will become
of you when I am gone, and know you will go on,
Leila Shulamit, Maria Teresa, Rita / Livka’s
daughter, and I buried in a grave in Potter’s Field
unmarked but unsullied by the world you carry
beyond us both, I who loved you so you loved us
without tears, without regrets, without Rita / Livka
who wanted only that we each send her a sign
we understood why she goes beyond us. O where
is she now? What harbor, where, does she wait?
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
You come with me, my small beloved
with a heart the size of the known world.
I dally with hyperbole, I know, the winds
blow me nowhere, but here you are and go,
or do I lead the way? What would there be
without either of us holding the other . . .
Where would I be, where would you be, where
are the songbirds this time of year up here . . .
You wanted to hear the story of my friend
in a roadside bar and back on the road
smashed his life against Scylla and Carybdis.
I stanch my tears, for I have wandered down
into the shades to walk among my Achilles,
too many for any Patroclus or Odysseus
to fathom. I thought upon waking of Troy
and how the men spilled with weapons raised
out of the horse’s belly and took what Hector
could not defend, even though his conqueror’s
heel opened even wider for the arrow that hit
Achilles where nothing, no one, no world
of time or space could prevent his mother’s hand
holding his heel washing her babe above flowing
water could have prevented the fates’ visit,
the furies’ chorus, the plummet below
where we walk, or rather ride the boat now,
upstream and on to our house, the one as small
as you, casa sin tragedia, where the great ones
dwell inside and our only devotion is to work alone
and yet with one another to gladden our lives
until we become the one life, body, presence
whose very appearance opposes absence,
even nullity, whose lure is so strong skies fall
when wind rises and the eight worlds send
from each direction a tiny breeze to fill
the eighty-four thousand holes of the body.
And so I have blundered upon the love of a life
time’s search, coming upon you unaware
that day I had found you and you saying now
you knew immediately, once I opened my pen
and wrote out what I call poetry, the penchant
of fools and salvation of doomsayers, the arch
enemy of nullity itself. And how long had passed
before we reached that place upriver you helped
me down to the soft clay and led me to your love’s
great heart, so much larger than all my hearts,
all my loves, whose courage was such as to include
my infidelities, but wish me the lifetime I held
in both hands, yours, mine, and not many years
where the dark sand runs and never stops for me
or you, and I have pondered what will become
of you when I am gone, and know you will go on,
Leila Shulamit, Maria Teresa, Rita / Livka’s
daughter, and I buried in a grave in Potter’s Field
unmarked but unsullied by the world you carry
beyond us both, I who loved you so you loved us
without tears, without regrets, without Rita / Livka
who wanted only that we each send her a sign
we understood why she goes beyond us. O where
is she now? What harbor, where, does she wait?
(1 January 2011)
copyright 2011 by Floyce Alexander
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