The Buddha Rat

Weigh too much or weigh
Too little,

Settle into woodchucks or take
A fancy

to be feather-weight birds.
Very seldom

However you catch one singing.
As merchandise

Old men go very cheap
Marked down

Marked down year after year
After year.

So much of what we live goes on inside—
The diaries of grief, the tongue-tied aches
Of unacknowledged love are no less real
For having passed unsaid. What we conceal
Is always more than what we dare confide.
Think of the letters that we write our dead.

I should mention, however,
that whenever I use the word "five,"
I'm referring to that group of Russian composers
who came to be known as "The Five,"
Balakirev, Moussorgsky, Borodin—those guys.

Oh, and Hypsicles was the Greek astronomer.
I believe he also did something with the circle.

Let's see—anything else?
"Grimke" is Angelina Emily Grimke, the abolitionist.
"Imroz" is that little island near the Dardanelles.
"Monad"—you all know what a monad is.

There could be a little problem
with mastaba, which is one of those Egyptian
above-ground sepulchers, sort of brick and limestone.

Are you all familiar with helminthology?
It's the science of worms.

And you know Phoebe Mozee is the real
name of Annie Oakley.

Other than that, everything should be obvious.
Wagga Wagga is in South Wales.
Rhyolite is that soft volcanic rock.
What else?
Oh, meranti is a type of timber, in tropical Asia I think,
and Rahway is just Rahway, New Jersey.

The rest of the poem is self-explanatory,
so I'll just let it speak for itself.

It's about the time I went picking wild strawberries.

The desire to be physically close to the beloved
Turns out to be a lesson learned so well
It didn't need to be repeated,
Except it did, apparently it did,
Lifelong. This process—rediscovering
The humanity in the old stories
That remind us mothers love their daughters
And that when we love someone we need them
In front of our eyes; that in the absence
Of the beloved the whole world pales—
Had I forgotten? How could I not have known?
I must have known and not known both at once.
I must have needed
To see this love set down in black and white
To realize it was millennia old.
To force it—to force me—to pay attention,
Life needed poetry. And poetry
Reciprocally needed life in order
To flow like blood through any woman's veins,
Demeter's or Persephone's or mine.
Through any lover's, any person's body.
Words like life, poetry, literature are of course
Offensively abstract. But not so far
From syllabus and stanza, ode and hymn,
Hovers the ache we live and live within.

for life: the long, dusty travail
around the bases, for instance,

to try to go home again;
the Sacrifice for which you win

approval but not applause;
the way the light closes down

in the last days of the season—
I didn't believe you.

It's just a way of passing
the time, I said.

This morning the snow,
The soft distances
Beyond the trees
In which nothing appeared—
Nothing appeared.
The several silences,
Imposed one upon another,
Were unintelligible.

I was therefore ill at ease
When the crows came down,
Whirling down and calling,
Into the yard below
And stood in a mindless manner
On the gray, luminous crust,
Altogether definite, composed,
In the bright emnity of my regard,
In the hard nature of crows.

Light crested as the leaves moved from
green to green, like breathing.

From the roof: jungle, cane and sea
moved to the rhythms of wind, sickle
and tide—various bodies.

None more naked than the pink,
transparent lizards whose entire workings—
gut, muscle and vein—were visible to
the naked eye as they climbed the walls
visible through them.

Evenings, music and the hard-
working moon—so many chinks and spaces
through which to make patterns.

Bodies moved together in patterns
toward nakedness.

Beneath us, the cats brawled, fucked,
and cried like babies, cried so high and deep
the music couldn't drown them out.

Now and then, a mango fell with a thud
or a giant moth made shapes against the flames.

The elements were welcome. Not one
thing did not hunger to be changed.
The heat ran like a river between us all.