Why saturday is better than sunday

"to have peace in a life of pain" - Eckhart
 
 
To sit here, in the morning
and hear a few birds outside.
 
To sip coffee, to hear
 
the low horn of the train.
 
My old friend Nietzsche
arises from his rented bed in Turin,
he glances at his face in the bathroom mirror.
Not too much headache this morning.
 
In Strasbourg, Germany, Eckhart
passes sparrows hopping in a dry spot
under an awning. In his mind,
he thinks of the word "endurance,"
crosses it out, replaces it with
"acceptance."
 
 
Amichai looks out across Jerusalem.
He sees two dresses hanging on a clothesline,
in his mind, replaces one of the dresses
with a man's shirt, brightens the color
of the other dress, changes "hanging" to "flapping
in a breeze," and continues to chew
on his toothpick.
 
 
And let us not end this poem
without a mention of Ryokan
sitting in his thatch hut in the woods,
yawning, cold - the hearth fire's
out.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
meeting years later
 
 
It was a long time since they had last met.
Both of their faces were a little bit broader.
The sun ruffled red feathers on a blunt-beaked
cardinal.
 
 
While she made tea in the kitchen
with a sound of clinking and steam,
 
he walked through the apartment, stopping to bend
down and appreciate a small jade maple,
two tiny porcelain cats.
 
A sound of wind chimes somewhere.
 
He noticed a book that looked familiar
nestled between Freud and Schopenhauer.
He opened it, saw pages he had dogeared
years before.
 
Well, at least there were no pretentious notes
in the margins.
 
 
She came out with the tea.
They sat and discussed relatives, weather,
occasionally old things, touched on lightly
like air on skin once a bandaid comes off
or cold air on the roots of teeth.
 
They laughed, the sunlight played on the table.
They felt the calm which only those
who have suffered much can feel.
 
When their joy becomes too full,
brimming over each sensitive edge
unendurably, who will be first
to accept it, who will be first
to walk away?
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
choices
 
 
In the morning, I prefer coffee.
At night, some "Sleepytime" herbal tea.
 
In music, generally Nick Drake or Hendrix,
in scenery, passing North Carolina fields.
 
In women, blondes,
in men, not myself;
in books, Meister Eckhart and Ryokan;
 
in food, Heartland granola and big fat oranges.
 
In clothes, black t-shirts and black pants.
 
In weather, summer.
Hmm, it used to be fall.
 
Who said there was no order in my life,
no choice, or no changing.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
the lesson of ben
 
 
I didn't know he wrote. He was just
a guy who did some odd jobs around the office.
Open-faced, unassuming, white guy, mid-20s.
 
Clearly, he'd had some experience
with pain and uncertainty, and yet
maintained a certain youthfulness --
this, in itself, gave him the innocuousness
that made him someone I could talk to -- he wasn't
trying
to get anything from me -- or even
give anything.
 
So, then, when he said
"I heard you're a poet,"
and emailed his prose,
I was amused, but not surprised.
As time goes on, I get better and better
at identifying these people:
inevitably they are damaged, a little,
they take great joy in simple things,
they don't have a lot of money,
and they actually have a sense
of hope in reality.
 
Whether what they can offer
is a chapter of a novel,
a good or lousy poem,
or just some leftover bread.
(Once, Ben told me there was
some leftover home-baked bread
in the kitchen of our office.
I was starving,
and it was good).
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
This February morning, I glance outside
the window, pulling back
the venetian blinds.
 
Cold brown grass.
Overcast sky.
 
I've had enough sleep;
I can't stay in bed anymore,
can't dream the natural way.
 
So I heat up some water,
make some Red Zinger,
sit cross-legged on the mattress
and peruse a couple pages
of Safranski's bio of Nietzsche,
not really understanding much of it.
 
Then maybe a little Buddha, or Rilke in french,
 
and maybe I write a little bit myself.
 
This dreaming is also natural,
nor is it an escape from reality.
It sits inside life
like the white of an egg,
nourishing and surrounding -
the brittle shell is almost an afterthought.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
open
 
 
Your own hand is a history of the universe:
claws retracted back to make way
for fingertip sensitivities,
cobbled wrinkle-creases like elephant folds,
open palm a shade slightly lighter
 
- some of the places for holding things
are clean, pure and pale, like the gaze
of a tired man who still laughs at your joke. These
little things
 
help, in the dusklight of the evening, when February
highway sounds shroud the trees dimmed behind
buildings
and the rain mist is just enough for the wipers to be
on.
 
Open faces, open palms:
in this way, you survive.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
egg
 
 
It seemed like a giant sun,
white and sprayed over with opening
moments which did not, however, destroy
the spherical being of itself -
I touched what felt like curdled milk
or the opening of an animal
 
pulled myself out
of the egg
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
hope
 
 
There are hopeful people everywhere.
Two miles from me in this city
a mother tucks her baby to bed.
She brushes his black hair off his forehead
and presses her palm to it, feels its coolness.
His white brow is untroubled and smooth.
He is hopeful, too, in his dreams.
 
A dreadlocked man working the checkout
hums a pop song to himself. He does not know
that the reason for all the plateglass, for all the
stark lighting
is to reduce the incentive for theft.
The bright light gives him some hopefulness:
the things in the store are clear and detailed.
The air is clean. It's a good pop song.
The shift doesn't last forever.
 
There's a hispanic family up the street from where I
sit here
typing this. The man, rugged, short, stocky, long
brown sideburns. The woman walks out of kitchen steam
the phone crooked to her neck. Little papi, four years
old,
zigs and zooms fat blocks of red, green, yellow Lego
while the TV plays a DVD, J Lo movie.
There is hopefulness in this household.
 
But one gets suspicious
of a man who describes hopefulness,
who makes a point of assigning it
to certain people or situations.
One wonders what his motives are.
One senses that he might be desperate
or that he is trying to portray things
as they are not.
 
And there's a hopefulness in doubting him this way.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
fields
 
 
when summer wind presses and wishes against
the tops of fields, making long lazy zigzags
and snakelike indentations, as if an invisible giant
walking across.
 
When the man invited the woman out onto the porch
where a bottle of wine and two glasses stood on the
railing,
and a single rose, and they poured the wine
and sat on the porch steps, watching the stars
above the field.
 
When, nearing sleep, he felt a feeling inside of
himself
as deep and wide, as quiet and calm as the fields
which one passes by in North Carolina
on any of the highways.
 
When, commuting to work from her house,
he glimpsed the fields anonymous and distant
in their seasons - white with new growth in the
springtime,
dark-furrowed with plowing, in the summer,
heavy and green, in the fall. Once,
 
stopping to get gas in a small town, he let the pump
run,
and wandered slowly around to the back
of the country store, where cracked concrete gave way
to honeysuckle bushes, scattered sunflowers,
and the beginnings of a field - he saw a fat garden
spider
swinging in its web.
 
But chiefly the dreams of fields,
the sense of coming close to sleep
and finding it to be peaceful, and wide, and calm,
and perhaps he places his leg over hers
and now falls asleep.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
home
 
 
I start to think of it more as my home
as I start to recognize my own inner
sad distortions, emptinesses
in the scenes around me:
 
whoever thought those rocks would look good
in front of that house, had to be kidding;
the bleakness of the state government buildings
in downtown Raleigh, is second to none;
 
and the hazy days of dump pop songs
and mealy corndogs
slowly obscured my youth
like grime at the edges
of cash register keys. The woman
who worked in the silk plant store
 
was beautiful - high legs and high cheekbones -
but I never met her. Except
 
if you want to call
this looking, and wondering, every day,
a meeting . . . .
 
In this way me and the landscape were similar.
The frightening air inside the hospital doors.
 
All the same, the herbal tea
that they served in the hippie coffeehouse
was good, it tasted good.
 
 
 
 
*
 
 
Chapel Hill
 
 
 
When I returned to Chapel Hill
they had shut down the persian teahouse - which
figured -
it was a place that I loved, so it had to be fragile.
 
But the used bookstore
remained in business, so I went and sat
in the poetry section, on one of their funny chairs,
and looked at a dome-headed photo of Allen Tate.
 
By the time I wandered
back out onto the street, it was dusk,
some sounds of drums were coming from the Mexican
café,
and I saw little red and green lights, strung through
the shrubs
in back of a tiny three-piece band.
 
Many students, walking to and fro.
 
I left my car parked behind the McDonalds
and slowly walked up Franklin Street,
looking at the bottlecaps and butts in the gutter,
the crystal green of the crossing light,
 
the white-shirted kids working at Kinkos.
 
A smell of sour beer in the alley to He's Not Here. We
were
always too nervous to go there, in college.
 
Down past the Carolina Café, I sat on the stone
hip-high wall
in back of which rolling grass and giant old trees
took you back toward the university buildings.
Indeed, I was surrounded by beauty in my youth.
Smell of perfume, as painful as ever.
I walked back to my car, tears in my eyes.

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