When I Was a Poet

For Phillip and for Marwa

Featuring Robert Frost, William Cullen Bryant, and Alice Notley

Now darkness was not upon but was

the deep’s complete face

and then was roof on the valley that

that which is not valley knocks.

In darkness, mine was not a linear condition.

Mine was the express mission of uncountable spirits

reaching in ceaselessly to relink their fingers.

I was architected like a multidimensional radial hemorrhage.

I dilated on all axes like a dahlia

and was a field of this.

And then fell the fallacy that the dirt

I worked and from which I ate

and into which I was delivered

to be devoured could not possibly

vibrate the notes of my brute living;

so spoke the beast out of the void

in its god costume. In its compass

there was hematite. In my ears

the blood murmured.

The protracted aftermath

expanded as the universe expands—

from all coordinates, from the atomic core.

Among what I abandoned: the belief

that there would ever again be

postwar poetry, or a poet born other

-wise than in the time of war, or an alibi

for where I was if not brutally living

in and off of war. I was impelled

to create in an era of adept destruction.

I had to begin by deconstructing

my creation. I saw the waiting peaks.

I knew what the snow was: overblown,

footloose, excessive, feckless,

not white but a predilection for reflecting

—absolutely—all light,

obsessed with possessing spectrum

but impervious to access, and pitifully janused;

occupation was its solitary ache.

I was a poet then. I lamented the lyric’s

optimism for a sympathetic ear.

I tried to puzzle the ear, to jigsaw apart

for the snow the sound of snow, its one tenor

of wind and its monuments to static—

but the ear merely clotted its wax.

Darkness dampened there in the valley bottom.

I had to maculate the gleam in my eye.

On either slope, sheer and utter eroded under

meters of endless nonce determined to condense

a form even blue giants must derive from

but cut it out. I cut a cut of ear and ate of my form

which was not mine but a fashion called humanity.

The poem’s pursuit was apparently to humanize

and the poet’s to petition this universal experience.

I saw the universe. It was black and unbothered.

I smudged the blue from the snow

and the blues from my beautiful jaw,

their need to coax a cheek left to turn.

Cut it out.

Eventide was over. I had chosen

lunar glamour’s ruptured pantoum

as occasion to observe the world

sleeping in the dust of its birth.

Its angsts and clattered growths combing

the trillion distant distant happenings

that spilled into this bone-quiet basin in unison

hummed. One tongue slid along another.

The glimpse of galaxy between the rocky shelves

was the scintilla of a velvet pocket pleasuring itself.

I came to place my voyeurism under black gaze.

How could I stand the pastoral, standing

on stolen land, propped like a rifle?

The idyll was a metropole of violence. Verses from

the vantage point of frost were purely blank, not free.

Suddenly the valley was disaster, every chasm

unconsenting. I could not recover a peace to rest in.

When I was delivered into the dirt from which I ate

I did not lie down with kings nor wise nor good of ages past.

I went down like the quarry-slave at night

and got up like the quarry-slave at night

and, curved as the birch a boy swings,

raided the patriarchs’ rooms for tongues

to put in my head, which was all jaw and beautiful.

When I was the snake I spake in subterfuge.

I rolled out the higher register. It had a trapdoor.

I lined the stanzas of sestinas in trip wire and slippage

but lying fanged on the break

and in the envoi bore no fruit:

I was “a black” “snake. I had” “black sibilance.”

“I was” “built” “like a loco” “motive of” “blackackackackack.”

As long as I shed a legible treasure trail of sufferings

my camouflaged linear contortions were of no concern.

I returned to the valley on my belly, earless,

darkness divining the paper-slit chutes of my pupils

on its way to stake me in the ground.

I coiled around it, asclepic. Ill with trusting

nothing—neither what I had inherited nor

what I had imposed—I inhaled my tail

and devolved into a helix of volta, a Möbius

beast, holding my inertia by the throat.

It was easy to see from there how madness

could afflict the unwitting witnesses of jazz.

What could pause emptily in the core

of this pressing omnipresence and resist

and not be pulverized? Once,

when I was human, I hovered

my pinhead eardrum within tipping range

of a speaker the breadth of two silverback gorillas

and have listened to the will-less

rustle of dead leaves ever since.

I felt it getting in, frenzied as the tremolo

sinuating Coltrane Quartet’s “Inch Worm.”

So receptive was this life and that

of a mite on the back of a rat in an alley

while the planet barreled down

its cosmic corridor, its futured birth canal

—though because theirs simply were not

I had thought mine could not be.

I hissed. I lifted the lock in the neck

to speak the name of my only in and of,

to be named myself:

low highness of sky,

wholly night,

palette Polydectes,

have-it-all,

Black.

Here was the form: a preponderance

of intersecting improvisation, in each

bereft moment a bequest, every shovel

in my back a new spade head.

I had slithered hungrily after the end of me

to learn that all I’m made of is beginnings.

I am the hydra of I

and soon I will be the next thing.

I was bred in an animal condition.

I am criminal by nation.

I come rabidly available to cannibalize

the traditions of the kings and the wise and good

citizens. Asylum never rested in the lyric.

It is midnight in the bottom and the winter

is an embolism. Coverlets of frigid civility.

I carry the seeds in my beautiful jaws

for the milkweed of malcontent.

There will be no lily here, only venom.

I will sow the music.

Its trumpets, they will ramify.

When I arrive I will be always arriving.

Source: Poetry (December 2019)