Ten Poems for April
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Yesterday I took a walk through a broad stretch of New York park and was amazed by the sheer profligacy of spring. I walked through clouds of pink petals and pollen so thick you could see it on the breeze, the trees all open to the air with their stamens exposed, the tulips round and candyish, and the little violets in the grass. It astounds me how exuberant life has to be in order not to die: a thousand flowers will produce one viable seed, and this makes the cycle worth it. And for this reason alone–the relentless and unthinking desire to live and to reproduce—I am gifted with the sight of the sun slanting through a blushing arch of bloom, with walking down the street, petals strewn around me on the asphalt, like coins, like gems, like petals.
I’ve always had a fascination with April—“the cruelest month” according to T.S. Eliot, but to me a time of restless change, of nascent beauty, of rains and then startling sun. Buds burst and blooms shake and sap runs and the blood jumps. It’s Passover tomorrow—the spring song of my people, full of blood and exile and long treks over the sand. We drink and eat too much and talk too much and generally imitate spring’s profligacy around our tables.
I wanted to revisit an old (ca. 2010) series of poems I wrote about this month, April, originally collected in a little chapbook I never got to publish; forgive me, O paid subscribers, for exposing you to my juvenilia. Still, it was a time when I was soaked in words, and produced them at an even more frenetic clip than I do now. I was young and didn’t even know how young I was. You never do. When you’re that young, you want to get older fast, stop being so stupid. I didn’t know that once I got older I would stop writing poems altogether. I will return to writing poems someday I am sure; for now, here is an efflorescence of poems about April, written by another me, in another time, another, distant spring.
1. Poem for Abraham and Sarah in April inspired by The Torah Portion “The Life of Sarah”
It’s April. Chaff-rot boils
downstream, the grapefruits hang
going dry between green split tongues.
They close the Hermon at sunset these days,
shoot to kill at what moves in the night.
Abraham is always stabbing at Isaac
up there in those hills
while Sarah chokes down her bottle of pills.
It’s better than sitting by the TV set
with its rusty horns;
after all, she didn’t ask to come here
where it never rains.
Up there in the hills
maybe it was whiskey
or an angel or the climbing barometer
egging him on. No one expected it,
not since how rich he got—
nor Sarah to fashion a razor
from her compact mirror.
But so it goes. Abe fits a new hose
for the persimmons, pulls at his thumb
where the knife sliced through the web.
Meanwhile, Isaac, the dumb
lamb, is drawing maps in the sand.
He’s looking for a new girl to scoop
And pin up in the dark house.
He’ll take her away, her kerchief streaming
in the wind of the convertible. She’ll scrub
the last pale red stain from the bath,
and sing over the Sabbath candles,
which all April will flare like small, bloody suns.
2.
Let’s blow up all the tall buildings and turn them back into mountains. Let’s whittle the picnic tables into a fine dust, saving only the knots and whorls. We’ll keep them in our pockets for little whistles. Let’s gut our houses and leave the doors open, cool caverns for birds. Let’s cut away our jeans until they’re nothing. Let’s thumb our noses at the wind for the time being and also because we’ve forgotten where our tongues are. Let’s watch the moon slowly turning away from us at the cusp of each April. Let’s celebrate the birth, death and resurrection of Tammuz, the perfect, youthful god. Tammuz, alias Baldur, alias Jesus, alias Osiris is back from the dead. Let’s eat dates on our knees in the middle of a sealed room. Then, turning our lips back, clucking with our tongues and dancing, we’ll walk out of the door together, we’ll petrify into crystal on the walkway under an outrage of stars.
3. Janusz Bartel
Janusz Bartel is staring at the plums
that hang, still tiny nubs
outside his fourth-floor window.
It’s April
and the whole apartment bloc
feels like a hotel,
the hall
littered with half-smoked butts,
cards, corpses
of mosquitos, green rinds, the cheap perfume
of blossoms.
It’s April, each bloom is a dizzy box of glass…
Janusz wrecks clocks
and rooms, leaving his prints
on the windows,
thinking of Ada while
mangling the shag,
a woman, a strange white
house to move
into, retreat from.
spring baring
its nectar-gutted teeth
through splintered glass:
the red stain in the cup
of the plum bloom pucks
its lips up, calling
an unheard name.
4.
It's April
I am falling in love with men in sweaters
with the gold stamen in each flower like the needle
in the brooch with which Oedipus blinded himself
and with April herself
a girl who hems her dresses with light
and from whose smoke-seared throat issues
a perpetual song of praise
April: I am listening for the sound of my hungry friends
who cry like ravens for a crust of bread
while in the public park the girls in bright dresses
built out of heat, draped in floral flags
dip whole loaves in fragrant oils
April, the violence of this earth has never seemed as sweet to me
the hot night comes like the crust of a dark bread
I dream that all night my breaths are turning into flowers
dappling the room, turning the air black with fragrance
I wake having dreamt that sleep evaded me
on a black ship gone over a white sea
April: I sleep and I drink and I smoke and sleep again
dying, like a field of poppies,
for the least touch of sun
5.
Today the wind made a hail of petals all down the street. You watch the segmented flowers fall cup-down to the earth. You wish, as always, that there were labels on each of the trees, that the whole earth was an arboretum. You would also like to see labels on everyone’s foreheads: Ben Jones, born 1980, shivers when he passes big dogs and open doorways. Rashid Hamaowi, b. 1975, still remembers her. You wonder what yours would say. You wonder if, slimming the kern of each line, you could make your unruly self disappear. Limb by limb, like a rain of blossoms, you would drop to the pavement, settle in a whorl, drown a little, taken by an impulse of wind into the water. The days pass like geese driven backwards by a gale. You want to build your life like an almanac: ripe wheat, shifting moons, black lines of ongoing predictions.
6.
It’s April. I want to build up a dozen white columns and break them again. The stems of the tulips look like a field of bones. Spring, a violent dream, a shudder through all growing things. I feel like one of those waylaid on the road by Siris the bandit, a giant who tied his victims between two bent trees and let them go again. Flung on the curved shoulders of winds, my limbs, like red standards, will fly into the bellies of many countries; where the drops of my blood fall a flower with a new name will rise and open its gaping mouth. Spring, feeding on blood and dust, will grow lurid as a painted bust, will continue its dense chorus, adding day after overbloomed day like a handful of seeds that brims, lapping up the wrist, falling, piling, trembling.
7.
it’s april
the leaves are breaking open their wax scales
and putting out pale tongues to the light
the slick birches are sloughing off skin
so many flowers too the trees calving these soft-
bodied blooms which flare and die in an hour
and oh my love whose restless hands don’t still,
your mouth is livid
as a branch impelled up by flowers
history is drowning there
and in the sunlight which washes the day pale to nothing
and in the vivid clapping of the pale leaves as they emerge knocked roughly
by the spring wind which takes in its arms a roomful of blossoms
open your mouth
let the wind in which takes all succor and turns it into song
8.
It’s April, barely
April any longer,
the leaves are flushed dark now
no longer pale and new,
and I’m afraid and drug-flushed
on a Monday night,
dreaming of him
whose skin the rain washed white
when he stood, dizzy, under it
for twenty years; softly
the night breaks over him, lowly
the eaves and asters bow to him
where he goes on the street
the rent brick summons itself whole again,
he is Alejandro, in his black boat-shoes
whom the night looks wonderingly on
filling his pockets with stones and grasses
with damp odors, with susurant stars.
9.
MAN: I am the seed.
WOMAN: I am the cradling husk.
MAN: I am Heracles.
WOMAN: I am the burning dress.
MAN: I am Theseus.
WOMAN: I am the skein of thread.
MAN: I am Sisera.
WOMAN: I am the cup of milk; I am the killing stake.
MAN: I am a furled scroll.
WOMAN: I am a story told in the night.
MAN: You are as you are. I will pin you in a book. Bind you to a rock. To a fear of the sea. You are the moon. Cast from the earth. Shut in a wall. With your hands pressed to your mouth.
WOMAN: I press my hands to my mouth. When I open my palms—
10.
It’s April everywhere.
All on earth is full
to its green brim.
Your curls, flushed husks,
burn down to your shoulders
and the moon,
a rind picked clean,
sweeps over a scene
heavy with bulbs and bric-a-brac.
What you hold between your palms
burns like a lamp in its glass cradle.
