When we entered the room,
I thought someone said “composition.”
My eye lit on a dog-eared legal pad
in the roll-top desk, and a Parker
fountain pen still in its velvet-backed case.
They all came from a time lit
by a different glow: not the blue light
from a monitor screen, but the warm
yellow lozenge cast by a Banker’s lamp.
We changed the bulb and pulled on the chain
several times to our satisfaction.
In one of the drawers I found
a lace doily with a coffee stain,
several small padlocks with rusted keys.
In none of the papers bundled with rubber
bands or twine could we find anything
resembling a will. There was one
savings passbook; there were no blank
or canceled checks. You can read
in the rubber-stamped ledgers tiny
numbers in purple ink showing
how nothing was overdrawn.
Dreamtime
Up by three o’clock this morning, and rode to Cambridge, and was there by seven o’clock, where, after I was trimmed, I went to Christ College, and found my brother John at eight o’clock in bed, which vexed me. Then to King’s College chappell, where I found the scholars in their surplices at the service with the organs, which is a strange sight to what it used in my time to be here. Then with Dr. Fairbrother (whom I met there) to the Rose tavern, and called for some wine, and there met fortunately with Mr. Turner of our office, and sent for his wife, and were very merry (they being come to settle their son here), and sent also for Mr. Sanchy, of Magdalen, with whom and other gentlemen, friends of his, we were very merry, and I treated them as well as I could, and so at noon took horse again, having taken leave of my cozen Angier, and rode to Impington, where I found my old uncle sitting all alone, like a man out of the world: he can hardly see; but all things else he do pretty lively. Then with Dr. John Pepys and him, I read over the will, and had their advice therein, who, as to the sufficiency thereof confirmed me, and advised me as to the other parts thereof.
Having done there, I rode to Gravely with much ado to inquire for a surrender of my uncle’s in some of the copyholders’ hands there, but I can hear of none, which puts me into very great trouble of mind, and so with a sad heart rode home to Brampton, but made myself as cheerful as I could to my father, and so to bed.
Clock by clock, a strange time
called me out of the world.
I live in a sufficiency of parts:
old hands, ear,
heart as cheerful as a bed.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 15 July 1661
.
I too come from
(after Mahmoud Darwish)
I too come from there, this place of few surviving photographs.
I have some unused stamps, I have some books of yellowed paper
and a map, somewhere, whose windows are all creased.
I have a secret that is not so secret
to those who know, and siblings
where you would not think to find them.
I used to have a house in the elbow
of an alley shaped like the letter L.
Mine is the subtrahend devised of distant hills,
and the background noise of trains after midnight.
Mine is a pair of ghost
magnolia trees, and a woman dressed in white
eternally trying to hitch a ride.
And the smell of dough in the morning,
and the invisible grain of eggshells in the coffee.
How amazed I am to think that once,
at the age of nine, I packed a paper bag with a cloth
handkerchief and a toothbrush, and attempted to run away.
I too come from there, where the sky scribes its name
with the monsoon’s hundred thousand letters.
But even when it rains I know its underlying body is sunflowers,
is made of cypress and old pine.
I know it lights the tapers during power outages.
I know it burns to ash the lottery tickets that did not win.
Halo
spun of thinnest
crystal, by the bell-
ringing cricket.
[poem removed by author]
In response to Via Negativa: Paper Trouble.
Farmer
(Lord’s day). At home, and Robert Barnwell with us, and dined, and in the evening my father and I walked round Portholme and viewed all the fields, which was very pleasant. Thence to Hinchingbroke, which is now all in dirt, because of my Lord’s building, which will make it very magnificent. Back to Brampton, and to supper and to bed.
Home and barn in the evening.
I walk the fields, now all in dirt—
a magnificent supper.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 14th July 1661
.
Last Things
“…ash provides the most elegant
last transport imaginable.” ~ Amy Gerstler
She picked up a nest blown out of the trees in the storm. No traces of its former inhabitants, not one feather or hair.
*
A limo passed them on the highway one day in summer: from the black-tinted window rolled down, a bare leg; toes dangling a lit cigarette.
*
On a canvas pallet, amid the rubble of the fallen hospital, his slight frame shook from the effort to exhale. It was early in the monsoon season, and a fine spray of rain made outlines of every form.
*
He’d written in his will that he wanted his ashes mixed with hers, in one of the old bee-boxes from their farm.
*
Imagine the hive at night: cellular structure of breathing, each minute papered with amber, riven with unfiltered sweet.
*
In the end, the papery husk falls away from the clove. The shorn head lies in the lap of the wind, the face newly washed buries itself in the arms of elusive scent.
In response to Via Negativa: Horticultured.
Paper trouble
I fell to work, and my father to look over my uncle’s papers and clothes, and continued all this week upon that business, much troubled with my aunt’s base, ugly humours. We had news of Tom Trice’s putting in a caveat against us, in behalf of his mother, to whom my uncle hath not given anything, and for good reason therein expressed, which troubled us also. But above all, our trouble is to find that his estate appears nothing as we expected, and all the world believes; nor his papers so well sorted as I would have had them, but all in confusion, that break my brains to understand them. We missed also the surrenders of his copyhold land, without which the land would not come to us, but to the heir at law, so that what with this, and the badness of the drink and the ill opinion I have of the meat, and the biting of the gnats by night and my disappointment in getting home this week, and the trouble of sorting all the papers, I am almost out of my wits with trouble, only I appear the more contented, because I would not have my father troubled.
The latter end of the week Mr. Philips comes home from London, and so we advised with him and have the best counsel he could give us, but for all that we were not quiet in our minds.
A paper on trouble
troubled us: our trouble
is a paper trouble,
I paper my wits with trouble
because I would not
have trouble.
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th July 1661.
Why do I love the mismatched fragments, why do I love the shy?
Punch down a lump of dough and break up all the little houses of air. Roll them out flat, then gather them back to the center and they rise again, higher than the rim of the bowl.
After the dark, bitter green of herbs, here are lemons to pucker the mouth, pomegranate seeds to sweeten the fingers, sprigs of mint to freshen the breath.
A wooden block, dried buckwheat for a pillow; a cup of beans to fill a little sack. Every last one streaked with its secret name.
Was any of it enough, was it too little? Why should it be difficult to open the heart wider and give thanks to the open sky?
Year after year, the shoemaker shapes the same kind of sole. After he dies, the only blueprints that remain are those that rain and wind will not have erased from the dirt.
Pass/ports
O with what effort everyone pushes with all they have toward the unseen— Before the plane taxies for takeoff, the girl in 5A touching her forehead to her prayer book, adjusting her veil. The man muttering curses under his breath, the child biting back his tears. Two rows back, the girl with a long-stemmed rose, the girl with a tattoo in Edwardian script. That girl swapping her boots with five-inch heels for platforms with a vampy toe. But O, the world’s oblivious to our plans. Beyond the gently bucking seats, beyond the porthole-sized windows: lakes of clouds with no visible bodies swimming in them. Render: which can mean some action to make offering, or one of a few procedures a skillful hand employs to bring fat to the surface. Mother, my thoughts turn to you like a dog paddling furiously through floodwaters. There in the mountains you grow older by the day, but appear ageless in my dreams.