This is a poem called "Gallery" that I
wrote when I graduated from NYU and was wandering
around New York City--
friendless, jobless, homeless, as sometimes
happens in New York.
This is a piece called "Carlisle."
It's from my book Bright Felon and this is the part that's
multi-genre or between genres.
It's either poetry or memoir, likely both or neither.
And the math in it is correct and the astronomy in it
is correct in case you were curious, and the history in it
is correct too.
In fact Carlisle is the town that I
lived in Central Pennsylvania.
"Because what I think is that this tender beast,
brown skinned animal, grotesque, and lustful
is me and my immortal soul besides.
In Carlisle, I have two writing desks
on opposite sides of the room.
Both of these I bought with money from my first real job
when I moved North of the city to Rhinebeck.
A part of the story I haven't gotten to yet,
although it was already years ago.
Always in the broken story, there is more to tell.
Mornings I rise in the cold and walk two blocks down
to the old colonial graveyard to read
history in the broken stones, names sometimes worn away.
The stories of first wives, second wives, dead infants,
unmarked who's.
The history of any place for me is simple.
A routes between my home on South Bedford Street
across the main intersection to the coffee shop
on the corner of Pitt and high street.
The other compass points are the independent bookstore,
the house on Hanover Street where Marianne Moore used
to live, and a strange park that was once
a graveyard on the North side of town.
A place where the land was broken and the bones disturbed.
Details on the display plaques in that
park are sketchy, and will lead me into shadowed places--
the town records, rooms I've never been.
But I don't discover this small park near the railroad tracks
with its distressing history until I've lived in the town
more than seven months.
In the body of a tree, I hear a resonance
while out in space, between planets
lie the cause of planets.
An iron fence grows through the heart of the tree.
I pass it every day on the morning when I walk.
You were saying something?
You hardly pass a night that winter
without sneaking out into the hallway
and turning up the thermostat four or five degrees.
What I learned is that each asteroid
is held in careful place by a partner in space,
and that if such a body didn't exist,
the orbital patterns of the same can
be extrapolated graphically.
A discovery which pleases me almost as much as the day I
learned that every cubic equation actually
has an associated modular form.
But is the reverse true?
And what has all this to do with Carlisle, Pennsylvania,
once a frontier town, but constructed
at the frontier with specific intent
to push the borders of Pennsylvania State
out to Cumberland paths.
I wrote an autobiography once in letters,
in which I found myself unable to actually say anything.
So I tried saying it in two or three or four
different versions, repeating the chapters
in different variations so I could speak out
of different sides of my mouth, not because I wanted to evade,
but because I didn't know what really happened.
To live in a frontier town at any rate or a town that
was built on what was supposed to be the frontier.
Later, all the promises were broken
and the settlements spread out into the territories.
It is always the broken that holds the universe in place.
That is what I would say about poetry and prayer
that God or audience, the intended
direction of both of these, we wish and wish are real.
In the mornings of the late fall when it is cold enough
to feel the winter beginning, I would leave the house
very early and walk South on Bedford
street into the old cemetery, the closest
place you come to in America, to a city piled on top of a city.
Not like that in Cairo, where the city sediment hid itself,
and we walk down the Greek streets,
saw churches hidden underground accessible only by otherwise
unmarked staircases and empty courtyards.
Through the cemetery, I read the fate
of the village, the deaths, the family trees,
the broken headstones, how we will all break.
When I speak about my body's life,
I know it is brothered and descended from, but do not
know if blood will descend from my blood.
Does a family break?
Or can they, like water, evaporate and condense?
And so will I then be a father in a million different ways?
Leaving the cemetery, I walk through the old districts
to the North side of town.
And after crossing the railroad tracks, find a park there,
which is really another cemetery or was,
the graves now all dug up replaced
by the small green square.
As I walk, I realized likely the bodies and bones remain
deep underground dissipating.
And you know without explanation whose graveyard
that was, that was torn up.
You must understand the color of their skin
that enabled their desecration, and what station
they occupied in this community while they lived.
Why should I spell out every little thing?
There are things about a person's body you do not know,
the things it craves and loves.
All the sordid things we could never tell, the cheap ones,
tawdry, paltry, Carlisle, where soldiers are
trained and Indians were brought to be forced to forget.
Never did I think when I arrived there
that it would be the place I would sort myself out and dare
actually to speak.
Nothing happened there but time.
Going in the morning to the coffee shop to read or write,
how ordinary the most important things are?
The green copper roofs of the buildings
against the steel blue gray of the Central Pennsylvania sky.
You could look at anything and understand.
In the sky, in the rain wet streets,
in the palm of your hand, is always what you promised.
What you promised is to understand.
I thought I wouldn't get there unless I spoke,
unless I told about the people I loved.
The picture I drew against the corner of the room.
I'm trying to tell you how ridiculously hard
it was to even try to open my mouth to make words,
let alone sentences, how fully silence can fill every space.
To drown in a river or to lift the water up
and let the drowning be your guide.
I trudge along the street unbaptized and criminal
according to some religious laws--
lonely brother, middle child, only son.
Is this written on your skin?
My friend asked.
Is that why you could never go to pilgrimage?
Never go to Mecca?
Why is it I would want to go to Mecca?
Because they're a stone fell from the sky?
Well, more importantly than that small thing,
that is where a mother refused to believe.
A mother refused to believe the obvious.
I am alone in the desert with my son.
His breath rattles in his throat.
We have been left here by the patriarch who
promised to return.
He left us, and we were promised by God to safety.
This is the question of faith on the frontier.
You were promised deliverance yet
there you are no water in sight.
Do you sit and wait for the angel
to either spell it out into your ears
or perhaps write it onto your skin?
Yet I think it is already written
on my face, written into every corner as many times
as I could say it.
There must be water around here somewhere,
yet it isn't panic to leave a baby even then
in the moment of dying.
Is it?
And that is how it happened.
God wouldn't spell it out.
Rather, the water came exactly where
she put the boy down after she risked it
all for the impossible water in the desert.
In the desert, the mother was left.
She had to decide, do you wait for God to tell you what to do
or do you panic?"