The Day the Sun Unseals Our Senses
Poems by Thomas Zimmerman
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Copyright © 2014 Thomas Zimmerman This book was produced on a Dell PC using Microsoft Publisher. Fonts used include Century and Times New Roman. Book design by Tom Zimmerman. Reproduced by the Copy Center at Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan. The author thanks the editors of the following publications, where the poems in this book first appeared, sometimes in different versions: Electric Windmill Press: “Amaranth” Extract(s): “Late-Night Quatrains” Greatest Lakes Review: “Rust-Belt Pastoral” Gutter Eloquence: “Infinity Tattooed” Inkspill Magazine: “Leviathan” The Meadowland Review: “Small Bright Fires” Milk Sugar: “The Word” The Montucky Review: “An Open Field” Open Palm Print: “Hinterland” Rabbit Catastrophe Review: “After 28” (as “After 23”) Red Ochre LiT: “In Unset Amber of Another Mother” The Subterranean Quarterly: “Comfort” and “Gnawed Bone of a Love Poem” Yellow Mama: “The Meat Wheel” and “Red Felt” “Dark Mother Always” and “The Long Echo” first appeared in Green, a WCC Poetry Club anthology edited by Tom Zimmerman, 2014. “The Day the Sun Unseals Our Senses” and “River Green Eternally” first appeared in Words for the Earth, a WCC Poetry Club anthology edited by Tom Zimmerman, 2010. “I’ve Been a Searcher, I’ve Been a Fool” first appeared in Folk Art for the Far Gone, a WCC Poetry Club anthology edited by Tom Zimmerman, 2012. “Portrait Blurring” first appeared in Love and Other Unnatural Disasters, a WCC Poetry Club anthology edited by Tom Zimmerman, 2013. ☼
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The Day the Sun Unseals Our Senses Poems by Thomas Zimmerman Contents The Word Late-Night Quatrains I’ve Been a Searcher, I’ve Been a Fool Comfort Gnawed Bone of a Love Poem The Meat Wheel After 28 Portrait Blurring Infinity Tattooed Dark Mother Always The Long Echo In Unset Amber of Another Mother Leviathan Red Felt Hinterland Amaranth An Open Field Eating Apples Small Bright Fires Rust-Belt Pastoral The Day the Sun Unseals Our Senses River Green Eternally
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The Word The word was poetry, and people rolled their eyes. The word was death, and people tilled and hoed. The word was breathe, and people pinched their tender orifices shut. The word was sweet, and people bit their arms for salt. The word was love, and people dove into the water: some of them are sunken, some of them are stripped by fish, and some of them are rising, tentatively formed but pure as vowels bubbling from a baby’s mouth.
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Late-Night Quatrains The other world is also this one. —Tomas Tranströmer
1 That beautiful student and I were lovers in some other lifetime once (which neither of us foresees) and/or will be in a future one (which neither of us remembers). 2 Snick go the kitchen shears: I’m naked in front of the mirror again. (Gentle reader, just don’t dwell on this. I will for us.) Feathers, chaff whiffle down my back. 3 Our greyhound Percy has breath my wife thinks smells like fish. Well, he was a fish inside his mother. As we all were in ours. 4 Darkness more than half the day. Prescriptions in the morning, wine at night. Us not quite mummified, but dozing like pharaohs. 5 Whenever we think it will end, there is more. Thank God. No, thank quantum physics, which has come full circle with the fishy old religions. 6 River ice thickens, patience thins. Smoke escapes the chimney. Jazz, the stereo. We’re drifting toward martyrdom, guru-smooth and shining too too brightly.
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I’ve Been a Searcher, I’ve Been a Fool Orion’s up there high above the house most nights, while I stand envying my two dogs’ lives: though Scarlet’s not as white as snow, and Percy’s not as black as pitch, they’re yin and yang on leashes just the same. __________ I lie all stressed out on my hair-smell couch and read a book on Shakespeare authorship (please let the bard be real), then dream of being baked and strafed by waves of mountain light . . . so stripped, so cleansed, I’m elemental: cuttlebone codpiece, impervious to earth or air, to fire or water. Null. ___________ I need a seachange, me-change into something rich and strange . . . . I’m mangy, haven’t made my fortune—or my bed. The vodka’s in the freezer. Stout? Stout in the fridge. Tonight’s the night, tonight’s the ni-i-i-i-ght. . . . whines Neil Young on the stereo. I wish I were a man for wilder thinking, milder drink. __________
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Field-dressed, the venison no fresher, dangling from the rafters in my friend’s garage. My corpse still burping, smelling of the elements it is. I cannot live like this. God hates me. Then again, I’m not in love with him.
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Comfort It would comfort me to walk in sunlit woods, a strong wind at my back, and heading home. The day, my consciousness, just lasts too long. My higher self and I will sculpt a dream: Long shadows on the grass, blood thudding in my ears, geese honking high above. It’s not so different from an ideal waking day. And yet we know that sex and violence knife their way through everything. We wait. Just slash my throat and dump me in the river. That’s my baser self, the one that sniffs your underwear, that’s old enough to want a wiggle in a woman’s walk, that flexes his own naked buttocks tight to strut around the health-club locker room. Oh never mind. Forget it. Strike it from the record. I have no higher self.
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Gnawed Bone of a Love Poem The gentle mammalhum, the scent of forking roots, of buried metals, bed-warm flesh like cooking meat. I should be reading more, but all I want to do is feed. To kiss: to feed. To romp your lovely bones like Scarlet on the Christmas night she found the rib roast on my sister’s kitchen counter. Growls of ecstasy. So rub my belly, scratch my ears. To me, Love sounds just like Woof! whenever we are making it.
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The Meat Wheel I wish I was free of that slaving meat wheel and safe in heaven dead —Jack Kerouac
Greasy mandala augers a pit, a pen, a hell. Dog smells me, eats the meat in her dish. Wife and I bang our hairy bags together— slap-slap, slap-slap— panting, careening on the slaving meat wheel. Earth eats everything— e, a, and t bitten off and masticated, lodged among the molars r and h. The grave’s the school door opening, the knell the tardy bell, and we the just-fed children, ignorant of our lessons.
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After 28 years of marriage, maybe this will work: We’re getting ready for bed, I’m naked, prop my glasses on my dick as if it were the bridge of my nose: “Here comes the professor!” I tell my wife. “Whatever,” she is all she says.
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Portrait Blurring The mirror’s crying—no, not you, old friend. Beloved books, so neatly stacked, begin to slide, tectonic plates much like your mind’s remainders buckling into scoured peaks and shadowed valleys. Drift. You’re passing through your life, a fallen leaf that rides upon a darkened stream that morphs to Underground. The names of stops fly by: there’s Senior Prom, then Graduation, Marriage, Birth of Son, Promotion, Birth of Daughter, Cancer in Remission, Honorary Doctorate, A Mistress You Acknowledge, Dividend Disbursement, Golden Anniversary. The train keeps rolling. Other passengers are drunk. And now they’re fucking. Eating one another. Why does no one nibble you?
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Infinity Tattooed Today I met a woman who had infinity tattooed on the back of her neck: a prism within a prism, right below the base of her skull, pressing on her spine. The spine of everything that’s human, pressed on by time: the battered coast of my hairline, my ossifying bones, my valves’ dry-rot. But, oh, the poets sing, “The soul wears out its sheath.” But first, it strains and thumps. Some call it the heart, but that’s just carbon. Still, there’s something else, and maybe no one’s named it. . . . In bed with you, my barnacled hull between your thighs: a prism of infinity, a kiss, a fingertip, a momentary glimpse of what’s beyond.
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Dark Mother Always The matted grass of spring, the smell of earth. The rawness. Bald. The thing itself. Poor bare forked animal, I live within, without, some rhythms so impalpable that sense and senses are hermetically sealed. And these are days I need the birds: the crow and cardinal. I’ve read that ancient Greeks named black and white at first. And then came red. For many generations, just these three: thus Homer’s “wine-dark sea.” My mother loved the color blue. My older sister, green. My wife has always favored red. This brings me back to matted grass: that pubic hair was under wraps too long. And now we see why everyone’s so happy. It can be complex, however. For example, think: a mother blushes when her son comes home with moustache and a beard. She cannot look him in the face. The secrets of the life force, like the sun, the face of God, cannot be gazed at squarely. Truth can never blind us, only vex us with its mystery.
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The Long Echo Tree-shadows stretch, grow monstrous: like the years, like Percy after any nap, like you back when the sex was hotter. It’s all right. We’re still alive. And look how goddamned wise. The days and pages fill so fast, the past not past, not even passing. Carousel or double helix, round and round and up and down: yes, that’s been us. Right now, the sky is gray as temple hair, but I’ll just snip it off. The sky, I mean. Which means I’m God or simply nodding off again. But God’s been sleeping in that tiny jewel inside our minds, curled up within that sweat lodge, smell of cedar breathing from our former selves. There was a melody . . . that’s now dissolved to rhythm. I’m not sure which song is best. And I’m not sure I’ve lived this right. But there’s no crisis. Just the same old questions, all the thunder in the cave until we rise on haunches, see the shadows’ play, and wonder.
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In Unset Amber of Another Mother The yin-black midnight rises up my pant-legs, soaks my socks, begins to weep so warmly into sleeves, then snakes a moat around my neck: I’m trapped in unset amber of another mother, cuddling slippery tissues that I cannot kick or swim free of. __________ My muscles shrink, my skin flaps slack as wash. In bed, that mass of curvy flesh, those soft, moon-nippled breasts, that smell of metals when my nose just touches hair. Above, the pinion-rumble of a great black bird with jewel-tipped feathers, heron bill, and amulet of fur suspended from its neck. __________ Outside, bright liquid eyes are singeing blackgreen cedar hedge, the driveway shimmers like a phosphorescent spring, the backyard deck’s a Yankee whaler, compass needle everywhere except magnetic north. My unborn son and I bear-crawl along an ocean floor to eat the pink and silver fish we snag. __________
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The water in the hollow stone behind my face begins to drain. I wake, I drink, I drink so deeply from a bowl of melted snow: I kiss, I kiss so deeply lips—my wife’s— as salty as our suffering, as sweet as mystery.
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Leviathan The spooked crows fold and refold, sharks in darkening tides. My wife's asleep inside the couch’s large red mouth, her eyelids river-bottom silver-silt. __________ Sea monsters gather, green as grass beyond our backyard deck. The breeze has shifted, cooled: the tree-leaves show pale underbellies. First stars shimmer, fins of gods. __________ Inside the ocean of my mother, I was like Leviathan: I swallowed all. And then, the Charles, the Nishnabotna, Mississippi, gray Atlantic, blue Aegean, Erie burning, storms that sluiced me into earth. __________ The rain’s left paw-prints in the mud of me. I’ve trawled the catfish-haunted wide Missouri, battened like a savage on the Great Lakes’ superflux, the waters’ daughter-son. __________ What hooves, what cat-o’-nine-tails flails our roof! A lightning strike illuminates my moaning wife— Beluga-white, I swim in sheets—My strands of pearl burn deeply in the sea.
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Red Felt cowboy hat and hair dishwater blonde, a “hippie marauder,” she called herself. My second girlfriend, second grade. Wanda. Brought her home to Mom. 1967. My year as Batman. Cracked my skull in a playground fracas, stitches, concussion, all of that. These are details, but I don’t remember how I felt. Gertrude Stein said, “We are always the same age inside.” So did I feel then as I feel now? Old head and young heart are what I’ve tried to nurture now in fled youth, early middle age. I think sometimes about the roles I’ve played and play, wonder if there is a me, or just a series of these regional-theater skits in which I know my lines by heart by simply looking at the set.
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Hinterland Bare branch outside the window quakes, a dendrite in the brain: duress a ragged pine in biting wind. White sky that, oddly, won’t entice a bird. Don’t let the crisis come. Lie down or fold the laundry, go to church. There’s wine. For pity’s sake, don’t try to write.
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Amaranth Saw it in a poem knew it was a plant but had to look it up. Flower that never fades. Mythy and over-the-top symbolic but beautiful too. The flower between your legs the petals of our speech every shade of purple and red the cornucopian end of Coltrane’s tenor sax my mother’s pasta bowl even that church bell tolling continuance or surcease. The poem when things go right writer and stars (asters after all) aligned to draw readers those sometimes humbling but ever perusing bees.
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An Open Field Horizon haze. Dead Dad and Mom out there beyond. I’m ankle-deep in tilled soil— soiled, as I should be. Such living. Such a strand of nows. Pearls, emeralds, diamonds, pebbles, clods, feces— Doesn’t really matter. Some of the earth packed so hard that water runs off, wind skids by, fire won’t bite. I like my earth tilled and breathing, despite the worms, the mess, the tracking in.
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Eating Apples We dream a golden sunset in the apples that we eat, and when we kiss between the bites, our thoughts commingle, wild sweet wine, the ichor of alive. __________ Gray horses leap beyond the faint horizon line: the storm arrives. And you lie back, your eyes a-swim, twin eggs of tears. The years just bleed, and lead so soon to death, I think you think. __________ Rain licks the heaped green platter of the earth. I've read that no one’s heart is evergreen, that each burns red, then glows a mellow gold: we learn about the world. __________ So take my hand and feel the tree's firm fruit that cools your angst, the myriad leaves that kiss you oh-so-tenderly in their descent.
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Small Bright Fires Two robins hop in sparkling grass, a wasp is circling by the backdoor screen, its legs obscenely dangling down, and you apply your daily face before the bathroom vanity. __________ It’s Bach’s first cello suite that’s moaning on the stereo, an essence light and dark, then sour, sweet. Last dusk, you dug up dandelions before the bolts of lightning came, those nails Jove drove into the sky’s blue skull that bleeds the virga, dying ghost of rain. __________ Each night, in sleep, my hands grow five heads each, bruised pilgrims, pale, betrayed by silver stars. A few are martyred, some will freeze, and all go blind: none find the small bright fire that you hide.
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Rust-Belt Pastoral The rusted Weber’s glaze of rain is eating still more deeply into it. The sky’s the color of a circa 1990 PC screen. The storm’s still coming east, Chicago blue to Hammond brown to Ypsilanti gray to Cleveland burnt sienna, Pittsburgh blackened steel, New York a mound of diamonds stuck in tar. Our heads sit silent, basement buckets we now fill with Coltrane’s tenor cracking heaven’s dome, Detroit’s own Elvin bashing hard, McCoy chunk-chunking, Jimmy thunking, all for love’s supreme transcendence, trance, and dance. . . . We move our bodies, hair—our bodies’ grass— sticks everywhere, inside our mouths, beneath your breasts. . . . It’s not far physically, and in our minds eternally, the walk through green-cool woods, the hike of rocks and roots, to reach the greatlake shore, to drink the wine we’ve packed, await the stars’ wide net— we’re steelheads, herons now— We glide, we gulp night in, it lets us drown, we seek its bottom, knowing we will rise. 26
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The Day the Sun Unseals Our Senses A black dog sits in cedar shadow, sniffs the edge of sunlit grass. Somewhere in northern woods, an old man, bearded, nails the hide of something unidentifiable to his inside cabin wall. In bed, a wife cries hard into the hair on her husband's chest. __________ Blue-gold wings spread over the city, The Magic Flute plays on the stereo. All the brick houses sit silent. I'm entombed in my room of pictures and books, odd as a blond mummy in central China. My wife's wingless leather sandals lie planted at the foot of our bed. __________ She comes to me with everbrown eyes (flowers that we fail to see wreathe every human face), pulls me outside, we're tossed in the jade undertow, our bodies grow diamonds (sad the captain who outlives his ship), a bowhead whale breaches in the middle of our street (our ancestors sold their god for cereal grains and sex: we begin to think we'd like to buy him back), and then we're pulled up—beyond blue and gold—beyond yonder— (seehearsmelltouchtaste) peeled clean and gleaming—
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we’re out far, in deep— waving and drowning, diving and falling into (fireairearthwater) life.
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River Green Eternally Fish-mouths dot the dark green glass of the river like rain that flies upward and outward from the core of the earth. We're in a boat. Your hair smells like the metals of a plowed field or the matted grass at the lip of a pond. Light flecks us as if we've just pried the eyes from a gilded Eastern idol. You straddle me: I feel great heat, the boat and the water rocking beneath me. __________ Day drains out, night pours in: sunspots dot the dress you've laid on top of the quilt rack. We lie on the loom of the bed: shadows web us. I test the wind with a wet finger, and we're in the river of swallowed waters that the gods make green with their ichor. Our breath's diamonds rupture the glassy darkness, we're rolled round in the river's mouth, a tree frog screams— we're spit out, sleep like seeds.
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Notes Page 5: The epigraph is from Tranströmer’s poem “Start of a Late Autumn Novel,” from The Half-Finished Heaven, translated by Robert Bly. Page 6: This poem takes its title from lines in the song “Speakin’ Out,” on Neil Young’s album Tonight’s the Night. Page 7: Detail of a park statue in Nice. Photograph by the author. Page 10: The epigraph is from Kerouac’s “211th Chorus” of Mexico City Blues. Page 17: Detail of a sculpture at the Paris Opera. Photograph by the author. Page 19: Exhibit at the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco. Photograph by the author. Page 26: Elvin, McCoy, and Jimmy are Elvin Jones, McCoy Tyner, and Jimmy Garrison, members of Coltrane’s great 1960s quartet. Page 27: A fountain in Eze. Photograph by the author. Page 29: A Van Gogh memorial in Arles. Photograph by the author.
Further Reading Free digital versions of the author’s poetry chapbooks In Stereo: Thirteen Sonnets and Some Fire Music; Nights Your Wife Is Gone; Reckonings: Reflections of a Teacher-Poet; and Reconstructed Demon Dreams are accessible at the author’s website: http://thomaszimmerman.wordpress.com/ ☼
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Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center, and edits two literary magazines at Washtenaw Community College, in Ann Arbor, MI. In 2012, he received the Distinguished Humanities Educator Award from the Community College Humanities Association. His poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, Best of Indie Lit New England, and the Rhysling Award. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and two retired racing greyhounds.
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zetataurus press ann arbor mi
isbn-13: 978-0-9844641-7-3