21. Taliesin Says “Umbrella”

 

                            Taliesin Says “Umbrella”

                                     (16 months)

 

       A beach parasol in a yard so far away

                            I hadn’t noticed is an uh-bubububuh,

       a Tiffany lampshade in a friend’s house

I hadn’t seen through the window is an

uh-bubububuh,

       a rolled shade on a yard sale table

                            I had overlooked is an uh-bubububuh,

       a circus tent in a book

I had never much liked as a child is an

uh-bubububuh,

       a ridiculously ugly concrete mushroom lawn ornament

                            I was trying not to pay attention to is an

uh-bubububuh,

       but the uh-bubububuh itself

                            is an uh-bubububububuh.

 

 

 

 

 

20. Taliesin Says “Yuck” (15 months)

 

                     Taliesin Says “Yuck”

                          (15 months)

 

Primordial word, the milk word, the word milk makes

erupting, ee-EE-YUCK!, word that

minces no words, true

at one end as it is of the other, yUck!,

the kids’ word, understood at once,

at once understandable, Yuck!, first distance of distaste

crossed, first wry gap sparked, EE-ee-UCK!,

the first bellylaugh word as he watches his father’s face make it,

the final poison word, word that works

when danger’s edge is no place to be playful,

YUCK!--and of poetry

an original word as well, word whose commencing capital

and emphatic closing punctuation are contained within it:

midnight, carried bump-at-a-time downstairs, wailing

against his own body’s betrayals, nevertheless he remembers

in midcry to interrupt himself and get out

the word to be said at such times, “yyyYUCKyyy!”--

to no one in particular, just to say it.

 

 

19. Taliesin Says “Hot” (12 months)

 

                 Taliesin Says “Hot”

                      (12 months)

 

Before the moralities come the virtues, he learns

quickly: touched

by stovepipe, for days he convulses on purpose,

practicing rapidity--and that word

said sudden as huffing after having had something

steaming. Breath is warm, and when it warns,

(“Hot!”) it makes a little tongue of flame

(“Hot!”) so you have to get it out quickly

(“Hot!). If you can say it to yourself

first, it happens but doesn’t have the same hurt.

Twisting in his highchair, he points like a lighthouse:

the cup “hot!”, the kettle “hot!”, the woodstove “hot!”,

painstakingly welding the framework. “Tal,”

I wish I could tell him, “if your parents are warm,

it’s only because there were times when other people

were hot,” but I needn’t try, he has his own

outposts on the frontiers of seriousness.

His mother takes him into the bedroom, explaining

“We have to stay in here while Daddy is cleaning

the chimney.” He stops, thinks, and sums up: “HOT!”

 

 

18. Taliesin Says “Up” (10 and 1/2 months)

 

                     Taliesin Says “Up”

                     (10 and 1/2 months)

 

Starting with the open sound

for awe, saying

“Ahhhh”--unbroken syllable/sermon mystics tell us is

the intonation of the unnamable--he closes it with

the sound a baby makes as a joke when he’s had

enough, “ppppppp!”--and all at once he’s got it.

“Ah-puh. Ah-p. Ahp. Up. Up!

UP!” and after that there’s no stopping him

stopping us: at all hours of the day,

that wrap around one leg, his legs climbing our hips, at last

bumping heads together, “Up! Up! Up!”

like a drill sergeant. Up means must,

up means flying through the air, up means hug,

up means love. Up means being handed

from father to mother, to father, to mother, to father, to mother,

a dozen times and the game just keeps getting better

until it’s too much to stand. Up means down,

then up again. Riding in his backpack,

standing on our laps, crawling over us in bed--

“You’re already up!”

he keeps repeating it. Even when he’s asleep

between us comes that sweet small questioning voice

that if God can condemn to Hell then He can suffer in Heaven

saying “Ah-p? Ah-p?”--his magic spell while dreaming.

 

 

 

17. Taliesin Says “Hi”

 

              Taliesin Says “Hi”

               (4 and 1/2 months)

 

Not that surprisingly, before he can walk,

before he can crawl, Squeaker says his first word,

not knowing he’s doing it, so soon

forgetting it, pure evanescent reflection

of trust, doing as we, imitating

even our breathing: out rather than in,

making a sound rather than not, tone

from lower to higher--those three things--first

stability of shape, triangulated

coincidence of questionables, meaning...

“love,” in Japanese. “Ai! Ai!”

 

 

16. The Solution, For Those Who Care To Know, Is To Suffer More

 

 The Solution, For Those Who Care To Know, Is To Suffer More

 

The world stops, or begins to stop. You can feel it:

a low insomniac grinding, vague tremblings in eyesockets,

nauseous losses of momentum, jostlings of uprightness, the straining

inclination futureward. Things get thrown

into space, as if to lighten the load

might help, but this is the world stopping, not the globe.

Luckily there comes a sound

like a sigh--say the sigh

of a waitress bringing an order

back, sighing as gently as

the meat cooling, indistinguishably

as the secretarial sigh that goes with

papers being shifted from folder to folder

carefully so as not to make someone else’s mistake

make others, or the mothering sigh

in bed beside a child while it learns its way

to sleep--almost silent. It is the sound

of the night wind, rounding along, releasing, unfolding, no one

alerted to the permanence of its direction, that stray wind

which nothing can avert from having its way, soft like love

given, returning because it has been forgotten.

The world starts, or at least begins to start.

 

 

15. Consummation

 

                     Consummation

 

Slumbering under the double covers, now distant

as infants, we no longer mind: the unpardonable odors

of feet refuse to stay put, take the shapes

of shoes and start shuffling off; wherever

we touch, sweat

wells from pores, mists of it lift, drifting across

our landscape of upheavals; hairs are blessing

creases with various ointments; and everywhere

that our insides either are or have been outside

musks and musts come tumbling up our flue of heats

to be breathed: what was too stale for kissing

commingles like an account above perverse

backbrains on polymorphous pillows. Years of this

have made the cover a sky, an atmosphere, a climate

beneath which, likely couple, we begin to repeat

and resemble--the way our child reflects us both--

and when he wakes we’ll nestle him and inwardly

sigh with the pleasure his glowing skin gives back.

 

14. What Is Given In Return

         What Is Given In Return

 

There are no words for the sound

of the wind tearing itself

in despair from the embrace

of a house. Instead, one meets

the next day, people who might

have been: the tuneless hummer,

the solemn practical joker

who fails to be funny, the crone

droning from happenstance

to coincidence, the crank

forever explaining himself

who never gets to the end--

all those lonely types

one almost is. But then

the following night, as in

some ancient tale, the task

again to be done: the sound

of the wind--that backward yearning,

that griefstricken leavetaking--

whence? But if, at last,

one finds onesself with a child

growing within the home,

draining strength and scattering

thoughts, in return one knows

the cry of the wind is an infant

abandoned to yield its love

to its own grief as it learns

no one will come--the sound

one’s child never quite made--

such that the wind turns

kin, its keening its way

of keeping closer, of being

known for itself. We go

all the way to the wind,

and the wind goes everywhere else.

 

 

13. Fathering As Lovemaking

 

 

 

                      Fathering As Lovemaking

 

Making love to one woman   and always the same   woman for a lifetime   seems after a time to   some men unbalanced if   two people so randomly   chosen fitted    without a problem and   if it is true that   knowing someone means   learning to love them   and knowing one woman   means knowing all women   then why should choice be   reduced to the crudeness   of the simplification which makes choice possible?

 

They at this   juncture become   the ones who moving   in and out of   lives at the end  will say whoever it   was the name   the face forgotten   at the moment of   truth they loved them.

 

Or become fathers   plunging into that deepest   of male fears that a woman  not only can but will   take it and yes   part of them does   disappear and as if broken off keeps going   is lost inside   then grows as he   never did and reaches  her as he   never could and fills   even her love   with love until   at last it begins  with contraction pain   waves of distention   volcanic firing at   which she opens  and love has a face   a body as he   gathers in the lost   slippery insistence  and knows for once   and for all what it is   to be a woman.   Then at last

 

a man he knows as   a man from the light   in her eyes and the ease  of her wakefulness lovemaking   was what it was but   now more this glowing  promise of all     the dolls he never    cared for he sees bring   women crowding  around to hold   to handle kiss fondle   his flesh in a bundle   women too old  or  so he would have   and girls so young    as to seem barely    and say things they would  otherwise never  

 

and sees his wife   make milk and knows   whatever changes   her for him  she will never age.  

 

 

 

12. The News, The Latest, The Final Edition, The Extra

         The News, The Latest, The Final Edition, The Extra

 

Here is what I hear

  listening as the red men listened

  ear to the ground (“Coming/a long way.”)

    through my brother: a brother so close

    I dreamed I offered to give him

    my body, if that would make us closer:

      working as a censustaker

      he went to an Army base where an intelligence officer

      laughed, as he flicked through the blanks, and asked

      how many people did his agency think there WERE

      in the country, two hundred and fifty million

      maybe? “There’s THREE hundred million, and WE

      know  where they ARE.” This is what I hear,

        fellow voters? fellow taxpayers?

 

Here is what I hear

  listening as the immigrants listened

  glass to the wall (“Mad/too fast.”)

    through my childhood friend: an almost-brother

    with whom I thought through my first and last doubts

    about God, my faith increasing as I lost it:

      living next door to the grandmother of the most famous

      mafioso in that city, his friend, a hit man, stopped in

      and told of, along with times he almost did time, the time

      he was hired by the CIA to protect someone “From

      who? From the FBI.” This is what I hear,

        fellow countrymen? fellow citizens?

 

Here is what I hear

  listening as the veterans listened,

  shelled side twisted away (Louder/LOUDER!)

    through my closest friend: one of the brethren

    I dreamed had saved my life in the same war

    he lost his life in, then came back for more:

      he wouldn’t tell me where he was calling from

      for fear of both our hides; in another week

      everything would be all right or else

      this was goodbye, “And if World War Three happens,

      you’ll know the reason.” This is what I hear,

        fellow Americans? fellow humans?

 

 

Here is what I hear

  listening as the midwife listened

  eyes closed (“There it is/can you hear it?”)

    during birth: your wife’s breathing,

    stretched across the muscular bulge of her labor as thin

    as the surface tension across a wave, blends into

      the sound of your child’s quick light breathlessness

      and teaches you to believe it. This is is what I hear--

        fellow men, fellow women--here.