Knowing Bliss

The bar’s got red lights under the chairs,
swanky, and Frank’s in the hot seat,
undertaker at his father’s funeral
home in Hoboken—tells us these insane stories
about how sometimes they get someone
on the embalming table who’s not really dead.
He says “once you start draining ‘em
it’s too late to go back.”
So it’s possible to die once
and then again, at the hand of your preserver,
some guy from Jersey who’ll tell your story,
maybe amp it up a little for shock value
at a Meat Packing District bar.
Any other time, this might be really disturbing.
But no one can be dead when you’re drinking
martinis, dressed all chic in Manhattan black.
We shriek, cover dark holes in our faces
with our hands, squeal like a bunch of girls
and the undertaker eats it up.
We ignore our thoughts of your sister,
on a table in some grim basement,
the funeral that followed, when someone like Frank,
his face getting flushed now from too much whiskey,
had on a calm suit and an empathetic expression.
We were there in our mourning black,
and youth was nothing to be so boisterous about.
None of that’s real at the bar called “Tonic”
except afterwards, emerging from the dank subway,
arm-in-arm and almost home,
we pass a bouquet of flowers,
cheap carnations chucked into a gutter
by an angry lover, and I remember
how you tossed the last flower
into your sister’s grave in a field in Pennsylvania.
How you stood and watched it fall
all the way in, never expecting
its restless refusal, how it would fly
out of the earth, turning over itself
in the air, always landing in your hand,
needing to be buried again and again.

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper

the pie already had a talking
tumbling audience among small
trucks and a fire engine on
the kitchen floor

everybody will like this pie
it will have apples and cranberries
dried apricots in it many friends
will say why in the world did you
make only one

this does not happen with poems

because of unreportable
sadnesses, I decided to
settle this morning for a re-
sponsive eatership I do not
want to wait a week a year a
generation for the right
consumer to come along

This was a day when nothing happened,
the children went off to school
without a murmur, remembering
their books, lunches, gloves.
All morning, the baby and I built block stacks
in the squares of light on the floor.
And lunch blended into naptime,
I cleaned out kitchen cupboards,
one of those jobs that never gets done,
then sat in a circle of sunlight
and drank ginger tea,
watched the birds at the feeder
jostle over lunch’s little scraps.
A pheasant strutted from the hedgerow,
preened and flashed his jeweled head.
Now a chicken roasts in the pan,
and the children return,
the murmur of their stories dappling the air.
I peel carrots and potatoes without paring my thumb.
We listen together for your wheels on the drive.
Grace before bread.
And at the table, actual conversation,
no bickering or pokes.
And then, the drift into homework.
The baby goes to his cars, drives them
along the sofa’s ridges and hills.
Leaning by the counter, we steal a long slow kiss,
tasting of coffee and cream.
The chicken’s diminished to skin & skeleton,
the moon to a comma, a sliver of white,
but this has been a day of grace
in the dead of winter,
the hard cold knuckle of the year,
a day that unwrapped itself
like an unexpected gift,
and the stars turn on,
order themselves,
into the winter night.

As a special treat, the author reads his own poem. Text follows below the video.

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning glass,
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
or the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and–somehow–the wine.

Just Now
W.S. Mermin

In the morning as the storm begins to blow away,
the clear sky appears for a moment and it seems to me
that there has been something simpler than I could ever believe
simpler than I could have begun to find words for
not patient not even waiting no more hidden
than the air itself that became part of me for a while
with every breath and remained with me unnoticed
something that was here unnamed unknown in the days
and the nights not separate from them
not separate from them as they came and were gone
it must have been here neither early nor late then
by what name can I address it now holding out my thanks