I'm just going to read one more poem from this book,
and then a few that I've written since this manuscript was
finished.
This is also a 100 line poem in four sections,
and I'll pause between them.
It's called Poem at 30.
When you have your 30th birthday, for those of you who
haven't had it yet, maybe just mostly for men, but probably
for women also, it's a time when you
start to consider your life in a certain way,
and you can't kid yourself about not
having started to accomplish what you were sure you would.
This poem is a meditation of sorts.
Not really about accomplishments.
There were more important things than that, I think.
"Poem at 30."
"The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots.
Near me on the porch, wasps, jazz, old nesting tunes.
And don't get wild over human sweat.
This is the first summer of my middle life.
I ought to be content.
The mindless harsh process of history
with its diverse murders and starvations, its whippings,
humiliations, child, tyrants, and beasts,
I don't care for nor understand nor do
I understand restlessness that sometimes stops my sleep.
Waking those mornings is like being thrown from a train.
All you know comes to falling.
The body and its witless crooning for solidity
keeps heading for the ground.
There is no air, no sound, nothing but dumb insistence
of body weight coming down.
And there is no thought of love or passing time
or don't want to be alone.
Probably 100,000 impressions wrinkle the brain in a moment
like this.
But if you could think about it, you'd
admit the world goes on in any case, roars on, in fact,
without you on its endless iron track.
But most mornings, I ease awake.
Also a falling but delicate as an agile wing no one
may touch with hands, a transparent
wing like a distant moan arriving,
disembodied of pleasure or pain, a wing that
dissolves on the tongue, a wing that has never flown.
Because I've awakened like this, I
think I could love myself quietly and let
the world go on.
So today, I watched a pudgy neighbor edge her lawn
and heard the small blade whine.
I saw her husband, the briefcase man, whiz off in his Mercedes
without a glance.
I believe I'm beginning to understand that I don't
know what such things mean.
Stupid pain or pure tranquility, desire's
dull ache or conquering the body.
The need to say we and be known to someone
or what I see in myself as I sit here alone.
The sun glares most mornings like an executive's thick pinky
diamond.
And slowly, the dark backs off.
This is one reason this morning I awakened.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Some fine people I've known swirl to me in airy forms
like just so much hot dust.
They have all moved through in dreams.
A lover's smell, the gut laugh of a friend
become hard to recall as a particular wind.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Like the deep vacuum in sleep, nothing holds you up
or knocks you down.
Only it doesn't end in waking, but goes on and on.
The tangles of place, the floating in time,
you must accept gently like a favorite dream.
If you can't and you don't, the mind unlocks the mind.
Madness with his lewd grin always
waits outside the window, always wanting to come in.
I've gone out before both to slit his throat
and kiss his hand.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Watch tiny explosions as flowers break ground.
Hear the children giggle rapid and clean.
It's hard to care about ordinary things.
Doesn't pain expand from lack of change?
I can't grasp exactly the feelings of anyone.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
At 30, the body begins to slow down.
Does that make for the quiet on this porch
a chemical ability to relax and watch?
If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain link fence,
bounces so metal sings, and it seems
she must be hurting herself.
How old must I get before I tell her to stop?
Right now, I let her do it.
She's so beautiful in her filthy t-shirt and gym shorts.
Her hair swings with each clang, and she can do no wrong.
I let her do it as background music to storm clouds
moving in like a dark army.
I let her do it as a fond wish for myself.
I feel the vibration of the fence
as a wasp feels voices on a pane of glass.
The song in it, I can't make out.
This day then ends in rain, but almost everyone
will live through it.
Tomorrow, mad with need, a widow in Angola
might dynamite the consulate or feed her children to the pigs.
Maybe the sun's first light will hit me in those moments.
But I gladly wake to feel it, the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart."