Mark Irwin: Three poems

Irwin, Mark

We would like to linger here even longer,

especially when the sun lays gold

down over lawns, some so white-fenced, idyllic, and sexy

they obsess us with what?--Ourselves?--That recurring

wilderness within? All night the rain

gently sucking leaves till morning. And here

are the flowers that put out our eyes. We should throw

our bodies onto the earth, just as we throw

them onto each other. Reyes and I walked long

talking of love in a place with no people. We could feel

its absence burning within. First at twilight

in the cow boneyard. Then next morning

beside the birthing pen. The way the heifer licked

the wet calf up, then mooed

life into its bones. This, when nature is

only itself, when love is

sheer will. But still, the mother's eyes bulging

toward the birth, and the mooing that goes down

into the glistening body, down into the soft hooves,

and down into the earth. This mooing

that goes on and on and will not stop, up to

the final sucking ass and carcass of death. This, what we would,

but lack. We choose instead

such sheer reprehensible and pansexual

delights, vogueing us beyond our shirted longing,

incomprehensible despite. Quiet fools we move

and are moved by movings until staring

through the glass eyes of pleasure, we feel its palace

collapse. Oh how we long to feel that muscled

abandon for which there is no height,

an expanse whose taste is

salt, and whose hearing is all underwater,

all struggle, all breathing, one ocean, one

night. Everywhere now new leaves are ungluing, their green encased

with light. What we give changes us into something more

airy, something to last.

Buffalo Nickel

Listen, can you hear the faint drone of sirens

moving through a river of cars? They are a violence

tattooed on cities, and we lean like plants

from the stems of our bodies, lean as toward

the drone of the sea. We need a new coin

with a jet on one side and on the other,

God. What would he look like?--Jambalaya

of noise.--A city's recrudescence

of glare. Engine Rock, aboriginal its orangish-red

glow. Reptilian,--all escarpment and scale.

Ochre are its bones, bleached pink and lavender its ashy

halo. The Nebraskan sun gold on their horns,

at dusk their wooly hair like smoke. As a boy in New York

I touched one, held the clear, bright language of myth

on a nickel. Wilderness is where

we never wander. And where, and where

and where. Dusk, the ghostly pastels of a few TV's

shimmer in Taos Pueblo. Where the creek divides

the kivas, a few beer cans tinsel the ground.--Trash

offerings up to some divinity? What did you

discover today? In La Junta, a man was trampled

by his own horses. The limits of the land,

the limits of the body. Buffalo,--brown matted fungus of god.

Home is not here, but there, not now, but then.

Discovery

1.

Across the urban sky the slow bass sound

of jets, invisibly latticed, so many vibrating

strings. They are this century's music, a soft tearing

of air, a music of excoriation, a larger breathing

2.

than us all. In grey November air, the museum's a dark canvas.

Outside, people pause and talk hesitantly

about real lives, too small or large

3.

to be contained. Driving west in evening, in what seemed then

a larger dream, he stopped in a small mountain town.

Taking the map, the butcher traced

with sinewy fat and blood on his fingers

the fibrous sections of roads

4.

through green. The grandmother dying, shrunken to half her weight,

looked out the sunny window of the nursing home

and said, "Look, there's our house." And the sad

thing was not the lack of recognition, as he held her bony

head up to the glass of water, and up to the aquarium's

larger glass walls, but that all of the houses looked

5.

the same. Colorado, Wyoming, Utah. History

and freedom. The future of nature is dream.

6.

The little girl's fingers all impatience

all over the silk bows of her presents. Mansion

of Happiness. April. The green hazel limb heavy

with the swarm's gluey gold. A kind

of fire in their bodies, inextinguishable because the queen

loves darkness. The words I heard after so much

breathing through cheap motel walls in Kansas.

"You wouldn't have had to have had me,"

7.

made me think we are all divested travelers. Space.

To what extent are astronauts dead men?

Or men trying fitfully to conceive? I kissed

Dorothy inside the Statue of Liberty. What a staid,

athletic pose. "Where are we going?"

she said. At the church; everything was

conducted in the past. "Would you have taken

this man to be your..." "Yes, I would

have," she said. We left a little sad

8.

but hopeful for that past. There is little as beautiful

as a bright yellow bulldozer

breaking into the dark earth

and moving it around like a big mechanical

sunflower shouting, grunting

9.

some kind of love. The memory of being in someone's body

is not unlike remembering someone who has died.

What allows the physical to become bodiless

10.

summons memory to replace desire. The suburbs

endlessly sprawl. They want to redeem us

but do not know how. I live

in a box with a window. There is a tree

I water on Sundays. No one ever

11.

visits. When the hive swarms

the new piping queen is unlocked

to insure the species.

All wing she loves

12.

the darkness. The newspaper clipping said

he shot, but missed his sleeping wife.

"Just a bad dream," he confessed

to have said, soothing her back to sleep

before he shot and killed her

13.

then later went to the movies. Imagine

having to imagine a wilderness,

unable to remember

14.

one. Lewis and Clark reported a herd of buffalo

stretching farther than a man could

15.

see. We live in a ravished world.

Once violence was real.

Mark Irwin is the author of two volumes of poetry: The Halo of Desire, published by Galileo Press in 1987; and Against the Meanwhile (3 Elegies), published by Wesleyan University Press in 1988. He was an NEA Fellow in 1994.

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul 1995
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