Poem at Thirty
The rich little kids across the street
twist their swings in knots. Near me,
on the porch, wasps jazz old nesting tunes
and don’t get wild over human sweat.
This is the first summer of my middle life.
I ought to be content. The mindless harsh
process of history; with its diverse murders
and starvations, its whippings, humiliations,
child-tyrants, and beasts, I don’t care for
or understand. Nor do I understand
restlessness that sometimes stops my sleep.
Waking, those mornings, is like being thrown from a train.
All you know comes to falling:
the body, in its witless crooning for solidity,
keeps heading for the ground.
There is no air, no sound, nothing
but dumb insistence of body weight
coming down, and there is no thought of love,
or passing time, or don’t want to be alone.
Probably one hundred thousand impressions
wrinkle the brain in a moment like this,
but if you could think about it
you’d admit the world goes on in any case,
roars on, in fact, without you, on its endless iron track.
But most mornings I ease awake:
also a falling,
but delicate as an agile wing
no one may touch with hands,
a transparent wing like a distant moan
arriving disembodied of pleasure or pain,
a wing that dissolves on the tongue,
a wing that has never flown.
Because I’ve awakened like this,
I think I could love myself quietly
and let the world go on.
So today I watched a pudgy neighbor
edge her lawn, and heard the small blade whine;
I saw her husband, the briefcase man,
whiz off in his Mercedes without a glance.
I believe I’m beginning to understand
that I don’t know what such things mean:
stupid pain or pure tranquillity,
desire’s dull ache or conquering the body,
the need to say we and be known to someone
or what I see in myself as I sit here alone.
The sun glares most mornings
like an executive’s thick pinky diamond,
and slowly the dark backs off
This is one reason this morning I awakened.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Some fine people I’ve known swirl to me
in airy forms like just so much hot dust.
They have all moved through in dreams.
A lover’s smell, the gut laugh of a friend,
become hard to recall as a particular wind.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
Like the deep vacuum in sleep, nothing
holds you up or knocks you down, only
it doesn’t end in waking but goes on and on.
The tangles of place, the floating in time,
you must accept gently like a favorite dream.
If you can’t, and you don’t, the mind
unlocks the mind. Madness, with his lewd grin,
always waits outside the window, always
wanting to come in. I’ve gone out before,
both to slit his throat and to kiss his hand.
No one can tell you how to be alone:
Watch tiny explosions as flowers break ground;
hear the children giggle, rapid and clean.
It’s hard to care about ordinary things.
Doesn’t pain expand from lack of change?
I can’t grasp exactly the feelings of anyone.
No one can tell you how to be alone.
At thirty the body begins to slow down.
Does that make for the quiet on this porch,
a chemical ability to relax and watch?
If a kid bounces her pelvis against a chain-link fence,
bounces so metal sings
and it seems she must be hurting herself
how old must I get before I tell her to stop?
Right now, I let her do it.
She’s so beautiful in her filthy T-shirt
and gym shorts, her hair swings with each clang,
and she can do no wrong.
I let her do it as background music
to storm clouds moving in like a dark army.
I let her do it as a fond wish for myself
I feel the vibration of the fence
as a wasp feels voices on a pane of glass.
The song in it I can’t make out.
This day, then, ends in rain
but almost everyone will live through it.
Tomorrow’s thousands losing their loved ones
have not yet stepped into never being the same again.
Maybe the sun’s first light will hit me
in those moments, but I’d gladly wake to feel it:
the dramatic opening of a day,
clean blood pumping from the heart.
-Michael Ryan
Poem of the Month 