You, Therefore

—for Robert Philen


You are like me, you will die too, but not today:
you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:
if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been
set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost
radio, may never be an oil painting or
Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are
a concordance of person, number, voice,
and place, strawberries spread through your name
as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me
of some spring, the waters as cool and clear
(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),
which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:
and you are a lily, and aster, white trillium
or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star
in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving
from its earthwards journeys, here where there is
no snow (I dreamed the snow was you,
where there was snow), you are my right,
have come to be my night (your body takes on
the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep
becomes you): and you fall from the sky
with several flowers, words spill from your mouth
in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees
and seas have flown away, I call it
loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,
a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,
and free of any eden we can name.
© Reginald Shepherd

Happy Birthday, Michael Jackson!

Mr. Jackson

Silences fill the air, the silence
of a jobless face. That of wings
as a bird flies off with a darner
in its beak, and in the mind's eye
the darner flees. Things that are silent
mean colour, feel, touch the language
again; say moth sounds an artist sees
with hands, on this tarred road
that feeds the city of Gary, Indiana, so quiet
only burnt carcasses remind us of the riot,
and freedoms we know are nearing.
A silence overwhelms the street, wearing
an afro and the white teeth of dissidence
or innocence, depending on which side
one is. A woman covers the distance
with vegetable hoopoes in a paper bag. Red
and dark green stalks sticking into the aftermath.
Sacks of potatoes and carrots at our feet.
And we dance, though what it is they seek
we do not know, why wherever we meet
they force us to disperse. The grand silence
has always been of course the first time
any body was able to walk in reverse.
_____

Michael Jackson - Rock With You Vidéo Michael_Jackson sélectionnée dans Musique

Alednam

To grow old is to know everything,
and so I'll hang here a moon
using the ring you gave me for Christmas;
to grow old is to be Moses, lifting his staff
to part the angry waters of our angry sea,
and in the end raising everything,
this long-stem glass nobody but us
could have filled with this bubbling sea;
to grow old  is to watch waters open
so we might reach the promised land.
To grow old together, all love notes
on tops of furniture we haven't dusted
since moving here, after the children's
arrival, tired photos taken under the eye
of the endless moon--growing old together
gives us each half a heart to keep, and
twice the things we would have known
if the moment had offered a face of love
to touch, instead of only fire and ice.

The House in the Woods

for Martha

The sky opens to this hour of morning
in Maryville, deep in a summer speckled
with southern names. Here we stop and bask
like these flowers defying man’s extremes.
The mountain breathing out, then in, blesses

our effort to add dawn to this new chapter,
at this university whose registrar gathers data
by perceiving lines at the corners of eyes,
seeing past heavy baggage into the heart in
the short time there is, registering more

than the names our small group has to offer,
faces eager, questions caught in our throats.
It is suddenly as if, falling, the leaf is from
some pages of a book that age put there to mark
the validity that this place with its message

teaches. And now she’s seated on a bench
in a clearing feeding birds. Life crawls
up her arm. She remains silent—will break
no oath and no vow until you and I both
have agreed to give in to matters of love.

Eve & Adam

This is a reading of this poem because
this poem yearns to be read. Read me,
it whispers to girls passing with clay-pots
on their heads, bangles on wrists. Monica read it
to Bill, pausing between lines for this poem
to breathe, the way Camilla kissed Charles
with her tongue when this poem revealed itself
to her. This poem was barred from Poems
on the Underground as a result. What's
more, it is read by women whose husbands
have fallen to cancer, their voices trailing the lines
like sound behind light, or mechanical waves
chasing photons, or the sound of an airplane
you can no longer see. Our neighbour
kept singing this poem every day,
till the moon of her mind moved and left
her window, and she lay in the arms
of a gentleman's kindness again. Eve read it
to Adam on the eve of their ban. Suddenly
aware of the lock and key structure of pussy
and cock, he recited this poem back to her,
spat in his hand and rubbed her crotch,
and hand in hand they laughed and left
the garden by the main gates, kissing.