Post by MoonyLuna on Jan 30, 2009 13:17:23 GMT -5
Too far—he said—and this tin can
will rattle to scrap. The path is good
for goats but the right rear wheel loathes it.
I came here every summer as a boy
with my father, give his soul peace
now that his body has it, to carry firewood
down to the winter house, but not on wheels.
Those faggots jabbed the leather pad on my back,
every step when they rubbed together they sang like crickets
in the panic of autumn. Pass me that bugle,
I need to hail the lonely ghost of Kyría Elpída—
the house is through those thorns. Ask me about her
when I'm drunk. That son of a whore
tire wants to blow like a dead seal.
My father if he heard a pup crying at night
he'd pull on his trousers, go find the yard
and sit with it an hour or till daylight,
but he drove his brother clean out of business.
Up there, that cliff the sun's picked out
with the fort wall up top like a drop of honey,
a bastard of a low cave creeps in and in,
the soldiers used it. It stinks of sheep
most of the year. The flesh has its uses,
they used to say, and some of them make sense.
When my bones shake like this thing
they can shovel me into that patch there,
under the olive terrace, where water runs
after a big rain and the next day,
the very next, flowers by the yellow million.
I will now say—he said—what I like:
I like the way the light changes over the bay
too slowly for a movie camera, nearly too fast
to see, any time you look up it's new again
dawn to dark. Up here too, but the wind
flowing down the mountain has greater influence,
turning leaves over and over. Anywhere
no shortage of vagaries. Well
our hands teach us attention and our bowels patience
—if you don't think out the door is an adventure
you never had this clutch—but nobody learns
how to live a thousand years and like it.
There—he said—I said it would go,
flat as an old scrotum. There is another.
When my uncle's house undercut in a flash flood
we used a jack like this, bigger, to raise the corner
till she stood straight or nearly, like my aunt,
and shoved rocks under, a mouthful of rocks.
After, we should have shored with baulks
but the jack stayed for seven years.
One day another deluge took the proximal side
and the whole house fell in a bone-heap
so my aunt tipped off the sill and broke the other leg.
She went home to her village, so my uncle died.
This tree has watched that valley since the Plagues.
From the hill over the bay you see waves break
and the sound of them flows up so that you hear one
while you see the next—you'd never know
if you didn't climb up and down—because sound
must wander up through the grass and thistles.
Aristotle explained that noumena praise phenomena
and stones teach us, he said, by seeking earth.
Now we will go on. Here is the rule
of pistachios, you eat till the hand
is full of shells. Later that season
we decamped to the sea and became its citizens.
By the bay my fourteenth name-day,
my mother's thirty-fifth and last, the day
after the spider-sack of the white sky split and spilled
Germans, or like milkweed, or spicules in the eye.
Yesterday into my nephew's place wandered a German
couple, two children squeezed from a pastry nozzle.
Enough. That hill resembling a closed fist, knuckles down
on the tabletop, by the wrist a spring flows
for two villages, so they used to fight.
Nobody fires a pistol into the rafters any more
at weddings. Even the priest did, late.
I think—he said—I am getting old, though
I don't think I smell like an old man yet.
Those girls in the variety store. In Cairo once on leave
I saw the Zoo, even though diminished
they said by shortages from submarines,
and the earth dumbfounded me again for strangeness,
like a traveling peddlar with his wonder bag.
Hand me that what do you call him cellular,
I will arrange dinner. No. What good is what
can talk if not over mountains,
like the megaphone trucks selling trees and fish
slow-trawling down the village street.
My father built a proper shop, bought from the boats,
sold to the mothers every morning. This finger-end
I lost to learning to clean them. I love the hour
of evening, cats on patrol, swallows diving mad
—preposterous expenditures, and after giving up
one ovary and the bones' cores, but who wouldn't envy them—
and the headland going gold then iron then lapis,
before they made one in town that was our cinema.
Polaris stood still over the one peak, or nearly,
we never saw them both at the same time. Look over,
the young olive within an inch of her precipice,
the field sloping below like a laced bodice. Now the right
front complains like a pack of jack-dogs
and there is no other, the creator has given up
on this machine, who knows it. It was my father's
mother's cousin the Turks took after a raid,
they cut his head off and shoved a stick in it,
then wedged it upright and practiced marksmanship
from ten yards, for an hour, so there was nothing
much to gather and bury with the rest. I'll tell you though
—he said—we hardly ever killed a German
anywhere near the homes we yearned most to cleanse
since whoever did they burned his village
down to the stones and shot the family.
Enough. That bird is karakaxa,
the one saying his name again and again, a thief
and clever as a pig at it. Smell here. A mocker
dances without a tambourine. I commend that goat
contemplating beneath the low vault of his horns
his shadow and the shadow of his beard. A good day, and
a good thing. Pouring honey in the dark
is a waste of joy. And there—
I knew it would. From here we go on foot.
copyright
Charles O. Hartman
will rattle to scrap. The path is good
for goats but the right rear wheel loathes it.
I came here every summer as a boy
with my father, give his soul peace
now that his body has it, to carry firewood
down to the winter house, but not on wheels.
Those faggots jabbed the leather pad on my back,
every step when they rubbed together they sang like crickets
in the panic of autumn. Pass me that bugle,
I need to hail the lonely ghost of Kyría Elpída—
the house is through those thorns. Ask me about her
when I'm drunk. That son of a whore
tire wants to blow like a dead seal.
My father if he heard a pup crying at night
he'd pull on his trousers, go find the yard
and sit with it an hour or till daylight,
but he drove his brother clean out of business.
Up there, that cliff the sun's picked out
with the fort wall up top like a drop of honey,
a bastard of a low cave creeps in and in,
the soldiers used it. It stinks of sheep
most of the year. The flesh has its uses,
they used to say, and some of them make sense.
When my bones shake like this thing
they can shovel me into that patch there,
under the olive terrace, where water runs
after a big rain and the next day,
the very next, flowers by the yellow million.
I will now say—he said—what I like:
I like the way the light changes over the bay
too slowly for a movie camera, nearly too fast
to see, any time you look up it's new again
dawn to dark. Up here too, but the wind
flowing down the mountain has greater influence,
turning leaves over and over. Anywhere
no shortage of vagaries. Well
our hands teach us attention and our bowels patience
—if you don't think out the door is an adventure
you never had this clutch—but nobody learns
how to live a thousand years and like it.
There—he said—I said it would go,
flat as an old scrotum. There is another.
When my uncle's house undercut in a flash flood
we used a jack like this, bigger, to raise the corner
till she stood straight or nearly, like my aunt,
and shoved rocks under, a mouthful of rocks.
After, we should have shored with baulks
but the jack stayed for seven years.
One day another deluge took the proximal side
and the whole house fell in a bone-heap
so my aunt tipped off the sill and broke the other leg.
She went home to her village, so my uncle died.
This tree has watched that valley since the Plagues.
From the hill over the bay you see waves break
and the sound of them flows up so that you hear one
while you see the next—you'd never know
if you didn't climb up and down—because sound
must wander up through the grass and thistles.
Aristotle explained that noumena praise phenomena
and stones teach us, he said, by seeking earth.
Now we will go on. Here is the rule
of pistachios, you eat till the hand
is full of shells. Later that season
we decamped to the sea and became its citizens.
By the bay my fourteenth name-day,
my mother's thirty-fifth and last, the day
after the spider-sack of the white sky split and spilled
Germans, or like milkweed, or spicules in the eye.
Yesterday into my nephew's place wandered a German
couple, two children squeezed from a pastry nozzle.
Enough. That hill resembling a closed fist, knuckles down
on the tabletop, by the wrist a spring flows
for two villages, so they used to fight.
Nobody fires a pistol into the rafters any more
at weddings. Even the priest did, late.
I think—he said—I am getting old, though
I don't think I smell like an old man yet.
Those girls in the variety store. In Cairo once on leave
I saw the Zoo, even though diminished
they said by shortages from submarines,
and the earth dumbfounded me again for strangeness,
like a traveling peddlar with his wonder bag.
Hand me that what do you call him cellular,
I will arrange dinner. No. What good is what
can talk if not over mountains,
like the megaphone trucks selling trees and fish
slow-trawling down the village street.
My father built a proper shop, bought from the boats,
sold to the mothers every morning. This finger-end
I lost to learning to clean them. I love the hour
of evening, cats on patrol, swallows diving mad
—preposterous expenditures, and after giving up
one ovary and the bones' cores, but who wouldn't envy them—
and the headland going gold then iron then lapis,
before they made one in town that was our cinema.
Polaris stood still over the one peak, or nearly,
we never saw them both at the same time. Look over,
the young olive within an inch of her precipice,
the field sloping below like a laced bodice. Now the right
front complains like a pack of jack-dogs
and there is no other, the creator has given up
on this machine, who knows it. It was my father's
mother's cousin the Turks took after a raid,
they cut his head off and shoved a stick in it,
then wedged it upright and practiced marksmanship
from ten yards, for an hour, so there was nothing
much to gather and bury with the rest. I'll tell you though
—he said—we hardly ever killed a German
anywhere near the homes we yearned most to cleanse
since whoever did they burned his village
down to the stones and shot the family.
Enough. That bird is karakaxa,
the one saying his name again and again, a thief
and clever as a pig at it. Smell here. A mocker
dances without a tambourine. I commend that goat
contemplating beneath the low vault of his horns
his shadow and the shadow of his beard. A good day, and
a good thing. Pouring honey in the dark
is a waste of joy. And there—
I knew it would. From here we go on foot.
copyright
Charles O. Hartman