Fanny Howe

I won’t be able to write from the grave

so let me tell you what I love:

oil, vinegar, salt, lettuce, brown bread, butter,

cheese and wine, a windy day, a fireplace,

the children nearby, poems and songs,

a friend sleeping in my bed—

and the short northern nights.

I’d speak if I wasn’t afraid of inhaling

A memory I want to forget

Like I trusted the world which wasn’t mine

The hollyhock in the tall vase is wide awake

And feelings are only overcome by fleeing

To their opposite. Moisture and dirt

Have entered the space between threshold and floor

A lot is my estimate when I step on it

Sorrow can be a home to stand on so

And see far to: another earth, a place I might know

The first person is an existentialist

like trash in the groin of the sand dunes

like a brown cardboard home beside a dam

like seeing like things the same

between Death Valley and the desert of Paran

An earthquake a turret with arms and legs

The second person is the beloved

like winners taking the hit

like looking down on Utah as if

it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan

like war-planes out of Miramar

like a split cult a jolt of coke New York

like Mexico in its deep beige couplets

like this, like that … like Call us all It

Thou It. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!”

The third person is a materialist.

I may never see the Vatican or Troy

but only let me sit in a car somewhere

I recognize as home by the hand

of the one I love in mine-

just once – O universe – one more time

Not a rink but ashed-over ice

Rain on a windshield, a green light

Apartments made of dirt, neon

hangers outlined in the cleaner’s window

I think proximity is the abyss

between God and us because

every fabric of my body is trying

to know why saying

I love you

in a time of extremity is a necessity

I have seen it happen

A face with fangs and gills

represents history and an angel

is beating the beast on the back

Both are made of marble

One is a dragon

Its head is flat

like the iron tanks

in muddy water

that drove the men into the Gulf of Tonkin.

…

In my experience

the angel with his wings up

is trying to kill the dragon of history

to prove that air

is stronger than the objects in it

and if he wasn’t made of stone, he would.

Satan fell behind, it was a taxi’s shadow

where Man put his foot on the sidewalk

 

His mouth covered mine and he was gone

 

Italo once said a kiss on the mouth is the sign of betrayal

and pointed at Judas in the painting

 

(his muscular hand, his brush)

 

There was an ache in the canvas he had speared himself

 

That was the day when rain fell until twelve

outside the studio and twelve months before that shadow

 

 

 

 

Not a rink but ashed-over ice

Rain on a windshield, a green light

 

Apartments made of dirt, neon

hangers outlined in the cleaner’s window

 

I think proximity is the abyss

between God and us because

 

every fabric of my body is trying

to know why saying

 

I love you

in a time of extremity is a necessity

 

 

 

 

 

Dreams before waking are eyes into the future

where there is no Zurich but an alphabet

 

beginning with z

so go away before I ask to know

 

what you mean about wanting to go

 

Terrified of being first?

of being dirt?

 

Of being ambushed or embossed? Personally

I want to batter my way out of this cage of psychology

 

and get to the longing I really know about

 

 

 

 

Morning dusk — his figure furry

 

Threads of gray hair

 

and outside, a world without a leader

Oil and land mines

 

Lonely words scurrying to work

 

If the dark bricks hide criminal life

so does each body

 

dedicated to maintaining power

by suppressing its delights

 

 

 

 

 

Inside this egg the walls are lacquered blue

 

Creamy tones of windowsill

and slat. Dawn from hell on up

 

I hear a rooster deny, deny, deny

or is it Man

 

Lies smell in every detail

as the light increases in this shell

 

Maybe the end of the world happened long ago

A whirl as quick as Judas breaking his neck

and every sound is an echo

 

 

 

 

Poor love in the order of existence

 

subsists on passivity inside this skin

where pain has cut a pattern

 

and a red heart’s a little devil

speared by its own hand

 

and the brain of this stranger —

is it mine or its own — and its skeleton?

 

Can I toss them aside

like an armful of sticks and set out as a feeling

to find Hana and Issa across the night

 

 

 

 

 

Happiness has become unbearable

so don’t stay with me

 

Ilona said this from the hall

 

Doors are here for both ways of walking

 

The split bed and bodies facing

where two unanimities

make a positive zero

 

She was hoping to die into Hans

so I left her house

 

 

 

 

 

I thought I was happy and said to my friend

 

It’s because we are together

 

The blushing hills were rusty

its nerves as icy as his sleeves

 

Doll’s hair, snow like artificial

Elimination of detail, a day to be grateful

 

He had broken parole

 

With speed-thinning strides

a horse passed by without a saddle

 

 

 

 

 

A body never forgets

The lens is turned on its own tremendum

 

Only blocks away — tubes, needles, straps

at the physician’s prison

 

No sign of reflection, just blood and bone

trying to incorporate meds into atoms

 

When the body escapes without identification

this is its identification:

 

Chunks of moonstone smoothing a curb

Honey night snow in the city

 

 

 

 

 

She swept up my hair from the linoleum floor

and shook out the sheet

 

A rouge along the shades and drinks to be drunk

 

In transit, in transit, in stations and camps

 

little white spots wobbled from wall to phone

 

Star-lashes batted

 

— it was truck lights exiting the pike

and other war zones

 

 

 

 

 

Farther wars report on us:

 

an arsenal of artworks and theories

that contribute to the power of the military

 

“Beware of the fruits of your labor!”

 

 

 

 

 

My father was a soldier

who was smaller than my son

 

when he returned as a ghost.

 

I begged him to stay with us

but he said: “Not until you come to life.”

The monk is a single 
and so am I 
but which kind? 

All of them 
from young to wild 
and the boyish one 
(mine) cared for the weak 
until there was no one 
to care for him 
besides an old woman 
who lived as a she.

 

I became a penitent
sequentially:
first in sandals
then in boots
then with a hood
and bare feet.
Now night-bound, now nude, then old.

 

·•·

Another brother and I took a train with a view of mountains
floating in water
out of Limerick Junction
to Heuston Station where Wittgenstein
tried to discover emotion.

He hit a horizon.

“Philosophy should only be written as poetry.”

 

·•·

In a Sabbath atmosphere you stand still and look backwards
for time has ceased its labors
and no cattle tremble.
You can contemplate the peripheries
and for a flash see the future as a field in a semi-circle.

Everything is even on the Sabbath. The died and the living.

Each person or place wants you as much as you want another.

·•·

Towards a just
and invisible image
behind each word
and its place in a sentence
we must have been sailing.

Scarcely defended, best
when lost from wanting perfect sense.
But still, recognizable.

Be like grass, the phantom told us:
lie flat, spring up.
Our veils were scrolls
you couldn’t walk into
but only mark the folds.

·•·

I’ve lost my child at the bend where we parted.
We will never come back to that hour.

Let me write about the place again the path so sandy
and the table cloth blowing in a wind from Newfoundland.
It was here it began. She left her bouillabaisse untouched
and headed out on the train.
Sort of, soft, gold at sunset, turrets and sandals
were hard to identify so many copies.
Let me concentrate on ancestral faces
and I will recognize hers
before my powers fail and our DNA has been smeared
on cups and cigarettes, bottles and gloves, bowls and spoons
and replicated, sucked or kissed into the lips of strangers.

 

·•·

I have to pass through the estuary
to investigate breakdown as a trail of nerve-endings
at the beginning of everything.

Scrapes like threads seeking holes.
It’s a strange textile that serves as a road map.

This one did:
its blue led to the edge.

Where could a fabric begin and end except as a running woman
who sews and passes it along?
So I ran with it in my hands.

A kind of eucharist.
No break in its material from the first day on earth
to the Sabbath where all are equal
and the cows covered in sackcloth.

·•·

Where has my mind gone?

The bloody thieves
are very quick.

You may have noticed I’m naked
and sliced by glass.

Soon words will be disappeared
and then the Celtic church
and seven friends
I will not name.

One word that contains
so many:

dearth, end, earth, ear, dirt, hen, red, dish, it and
I must examine each part
then cut the ropes without a heart and set out.

·•·

The slide downhill on my back to a ledge
and the sea out there and a city
to the left of the mud.
The place they call an area
preparing for an earthquake. Under-shade and crowds
of hungry old people lining for bread.
One woman collapsed on her side
and another helped her up
and I was let into the bunker
by the best kind of communist.

There was orange vomit on a large cape over a large woman.

The hills! No bells.
I went down for what reason.
Not to enter a cell.

Luckily no one was white.
We discovered we were in a loft space from the olden days
that I indicated pleased me.
because I couldn’t get my body out no matter what.

I paused long enough to encounter
a slender elder with the delicate posture of a Rastafarian.
The people were indifferent as they are to whites but polite.
The lean man showed me the door in colorful clothing.

But there was a huge blast from the building beside us
And we ran up rickety stairs to look at what
was now a structure speared with broken glass and stone.
A worker was already being transported on a stretcher.

We looked around at the mess then went inside to discuss
our love of failures, every one of us.

·•·

I hauled so many children after me
with ropes and spears and nets
like sea-creatures that others would eat
without them I have no purpose.

As in the Gospel account, I believed in their belief.
But now there would be what? For he, the little one,
was kneeling and saying, You must run.

The lover I still loved stayed near the door
so I raced off, you stood, when the police came
seeking coherence in everything.

The total machine of retribution presses on.
Regardless of a prayer or what a person did.
This is incredible.
We’re breaking up.

·•·

A Trappist led me around as one of him
to a ship heading for the country where they edit the best films.
There was a city on deck: residential with pleasing evening trees
and then a downtown area until we couldn’t tell the suns
from the portholes on board.

The ship would transport us to a staging dock in Iona.
I would lose my luggage from the twentieth century
(though its particles and buckles were forged in eternity)
and make my private vows to the creator
in every theater we entered.

·•·

Together we traveled in a boat as it filled with night-water
from the bottom up.
By night-water one means fear.
So the refilling is adding a sting to the salt.

Living naked
still leaves you covered

by a surface of wood, feathers, fur or skin.

Bare skin, blue skin: a muff of lambskin
over the ears where the thief can get in.

It’s lucky the mind freezes before the heart.

·•·

Back there is the string of mountains your uncle painted
and you lost. Out there is the clotted cream
on a raspberry tart that he couldn’t finish.

There is the goose and the blackbird, the brindled donkey
and the trap. They stand on the thin black thread of your lineage.
Your scissors are split, your fiddle is cracked, its strings are thin
and your mouth is dry, your clothes American.

No more rush of notes as if a window is open inside.

Only if you are insane or asleep
and the gods and animals
pound their way in
on a divine night wind.