Tommy Bloom you devil!
I mean
Dear Tommy, You devil,
Carried on the wind some man you are again, and again, gone with some savior into the heart of it, that chase, in your heart or in you feet these days, and laying with the hay and fleas, it’s almost like we were brothers in a thousand lives, i can feels those tiny legs already on my own skin and yet here i am again, in some dark hold, hung between casks of rum, again, of rum Tommy, the barrels full, and can’t drink a drop though I do, damn this body and the things that live within it, oh to be cured by four match heads only old friend, i would gladly press the glowing coal to my eye if i thought it would rid me of these night sweats and this constant trembling, this leaden, hollowed out heart and the curse of this eye, Thomas, love, I am heavy with drams of dying tonight, the sea churns not more than like a babe and yet, something grips me more and more, moonlight pours through the cracks of this porous deck, the men fight and drink and sing above, their boots the only interruption of those silver ribbons falling on my crooked body, as i watch the world, which isn’t more than the walls of this room, the silver light and the quivering wings of one black rook, perched not three feet from me, with both eyes wide, yes Thomas, both eyes tonight, if i lay dying and i think i might, i want to see all the world that’s been given me with thus cursed sight, what bits of the She might greet me in this holiest of place tonight, abroad these timbers, adrift this ancient sea, Tommy, they say the Lord Shiva, that blue throated god of the Indian, drank all the poison churned up from the sea and got that blue throat holy with a pure wound, tonight, while you lay in green grass, somewhere in a new world, with your heavy head on some man’s book, i’ll sweat through this hammock and this long bread, through the boards of this ship and into the sea, i’ll pray to that ancient god and look to him with this holy eye, Lord Shiva, come drink this poison out of my belly, out of my heart, Kali, churn this ocean full of death and wrap me in its colors, Tommy, this letter leaves in a bottle tonight, if you find it among the smooth rocks on the edge of some cold river, know that you are my brother and that that alone may keep my heart from open breaking tonight, may keep just enough of the red blood in my thin veins tonight and not this white linen, but I am looking into the She tonight dear one, and mixing this human blood with the sea, what’s left of me in morning will be will be, here’s to the rising sun, come and come again, to the things that protect us both, and the rum, fill your eyes with sunlight brother, and may your heart float on those amber waves, while this one sinks deeper and deeper, black as the night, cold as the bottom of the sea, and hungry.
what love i have rests with you tonight then
and thank you for your faith Thomas Mayfair Bloom,
that it may be enough to save us both.
Tennessee
My Dear Mr. Pink
Last night I took my rest in a hayrick and this morning found my nethers crowded with vermin, fleas mostly, but a few ticks as well, black and bloated on my own blood. One of those sinister creatures feasted under my arm, hidden there till late in the day when I found a clean stream to take my toilet. He was a devil to remove, I can tell you. By the time he finally popped under the heat of several (very dearly spent) wooden match heads, the air was redolent of burning hair and the private, scalding curses of a man sworn to serve the Lord.
Tennessee, I don’t know what possessed me to leave New York’s claustrophobic sprawl to circuit ride the measly parishes of the Great Plains. So far I’ve found only sod houses, their roofs cluttered with butter cups, mowing tools dulled by sun and rain, and gophers whistling their high-pitched warnings at me.
Do I obey the Lord’s command whispered in my innermost heart, or do I follow the vain whim of a man imprisoned by obligation. I don’t know if I’m heeding a call or running from the trumpet’s blare. And why do I ask you, the freest of men, beholden to neither man nor woman, rock nor God.
Anyway, I’ve already lost my horse, and with him nearly every earthly possession. On my person I carry only this pencil and paper, my Bible that seems to chastise me when the sun glints off letters gold embossed on its cover, this folio of pressed flowers, a canteen that never slakes, a steel knife sheathed in rawhide, and an apple I carried in my pocket all the way from Long Island.
In spite of my loss and frail conviction, I’m happy right now, sitting in the tall grass that flows for miles, each stem topped with a white flower or a tassel of seeds. When the wind rises the whole praire is positively maritime. And I think of you, my wild, dark friend, adrift but not lost.
Tennessee, don’t forget to suck your limes. Have your boots mended. And, as you say, put each day’s devils away at nightfall.
Yours faithfully,
Thomas Mayfair Bloom
Ahead of me
they were lighting their fires
in the dark forests
of death.
Should I name them?
Their names make a long branch of sound.
You know them.
I know
death is the fascinating snake
under the leaves, sliding
and sliding; I know
the heart loves him too, can’t
turn away, can’t
Break the spell. Everything
wants to enter the slow thickness,
aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost.
Wants to be stone.
That time
I wanted to die
somebody
was playing the piano
in the room with me.
It was Mozart.
It was Beethoven.
It was Bruckner.
In the kitchen
a man with one ear
was painting a flower.
Later,
in the asylum,
I began to pick through the red rivers
of confusion;
I began to take apart
the deep stitches
of nightmares.
This was good, human work.
This had nothing to do with laying down a path of words
that could throttle,
or soften,
the human heart.
Meanwhile,
Yeats, in love and anger,
stood beside his fallen friends;
Whitman kept falling
through the sleeve of his ego.
In the back fields,
beyond the locked windows,
a young man who couldn’t live long and knew it
was listening to a plain brown bird
that kept singing in the deep leaves,
that kept urging from him
some wild and careful words.
You know that important and eloquent defense
of sanity.
I forgive them
their unhappiness,
I forgive them
for walking out of the world.
But I don’t forgive them
for turning their faces away,
for taking off their veils
and dancing for death.
For hurtling
toward oblivion
on the sharp blades
of their exquisite poems, saying:
this is the way.
I was, of course, all that time
coming along
behind them, and listening
for advice
And the man who merely
washed Michelangelo’s brushes, kneeling
on the damp bricks, staring
every day at the colors pouring out of them,
Lived to be a hundred years old.
- Mary Oliver
When she left him (and she left him), there was no chance of her getting far. She fled from the old man, seathoughts spilling out of his mouth like milk, broken mercury. Oysters bleeding pearls at his feet. Things bloomed for him because he knew how to make them do so.
But when she went, and she went, she saw that his robes were shredded. Polyester. She saw the wrinkles in his face were painted on. Just with kohl. She shook her head, spun back to the citystreet she was on. No cove, no swirling water, no Neptune whispering and no trident breaking foam, no no no (said her head). Just pigeons with two-toned rainbows dusted around their necks. Just a fruit seller (the oranges bruised, the pears polished). A few halfhearted girls in ripped fishnets- or sometimes new fishnets, depending on the age of the girl. Milling about checking chipping nails and re-braiding perfect, dyed hair. They stepped on the very dye boxes they’d bought a week ago, crushing garbage in their designated alleyways.
He had begged for her to stay. Had ran his fingers lightly over the paper bracelet she wore on her left wrist. He said please. She said no.
She had gone to him every night, sitting in the backs of bars (themed like carousels, or underwater palaces. Home, she thought, home) with one two three drinks and waited for his tricks to finish. She would enter his trailer as if a winged being, let him take her face in his hands and stare her down. She would ask him when he’d send her home. He said ‘soon, soon’ and eyed the paper bracelet, the words printed there.
He did card tricks- capitulating Queens spinning desperate, a floating Jack hovering like a breath before a word (‘yes,’ he had hoped) to make her stay. He produced silk flowers from the insides of his robes and made live white spiders crawl out of their centers slowly. Balletic. He made the spiders turn to blue moths that floated on wafer thin wings, away. The tricks weren’t good enough. So he ripped off his robe, the old man who was not old, and appeared (like magic!) in a black and white silk clown suit. His face bloomed blanche with black triangles, and blush on his cheeks, a black cupid’s bow sleeping on his lips. He mimed for her to stay. He pleaded, his black diamonds weeping. She would not, and it was not funny.
She packed nothing and dressed in layers. Her red hair fell over castle shoulders and her cheekbones ached for permanence, permanence, but she could not go back. He had promised her. He had promised that she would turn back into a mermaid and go, swimming, back into the sea. He had promised her so many times.
She shut the door quietly, leaving him on his knees in his harlequin suit. She walked until she couldn’t, and then she stumbled into a hotel lobby, lids heavy, heart sticking. It was there that they found her, two men in white suits followed by a black-and-white harlequin with eye-triangles running bitter. When they found her asleep, the clown walked to her on careful feet, ripped off the paper bracelet, and handed it to the men. ‘St. Jude’s Asylum for Women,’ it read, and the men nodded to each other and took her away.
-RB
How was it, that side of the world, when you sang to them?
How were they, and friend, how were the rolling waves of that sea?
And what carried they on their long, wet tongues?
Oh Tennessee, the wind here today carries everything.
What has been stuck for almost
ever creaks,
rocks, and is
swept away this day of mid spring, the winged
one is a foot in the heavens you know, as if about to
burst from that dark place. We too my friend,
we too.
Just as the body sends blood in a bright bulb,
blind and certain that it will arrive,
I have trusted you with my own extremes,
sent your cloud of astral matter
into those scenes where I was most myself–
the act of love treading me like a mixer,
stowed in a room, stopped and watched, waiting for mail–
and alone, always alone: I have been ashamed
of how alone I was, damned and forgettable.
In death, even my organs will be split, solitary,
each cabined in a different thorax, churning and methodical,
like travelers after a bad flight.
As plants evolved to court humans
with pigment or fructose, I won with language,
the heavy serifs of temper. Do not assume
that I was sterling-tongued or flattering: I was hard,
full of obstacles; it was the clean logic of argument
that I loved, the proofs like clean-sliced cake.
There was no comfort to me, more the presence
of what you had already thought and a body
to think it in with you. We need someone in the room with us,
praying and hungry, and guilty of the same things.
There were the people I could afflict
and there were the immune: a few words in code
for what we’d have of each other.
Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that’s late
it is my song that’s flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
and it’s done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.
My Dearest Harriett,
Who writes on sheets in fits of sleep.
I laced the walls of my bedroom in bed sheets in hopes of tucking the bedroom into its name,
that your spirit might inhabit the walls, the fold in my loose-fitting nightgown.
“Lock your knees and the sleep is easier,” you always said. I thought I’d try standing up.
Do you stroke a fit like a cat in order to make such pleasant sounds? An attack?
The maid tells me you have left it in every room, even in the bath, and yet I stand
that I cannot possibly mimic the shape of your perspiration shadow.
“If you need a special friend, call me,” read the writing on the bathroom wall.
I stared at it for days. I wrote it backwards here.
Yet in tête-à-tête.
In fits myself,
Madame
