Green Grass

Is it too much to ask

that on someone’s last day

here on Earth they might 

remember something I’ve written,

recall, through famous stained 

and shaded windows of their life 

and three-and-a-half minute songs and days 

filled with more substance than one 

ever expected, a few words brightened

into a particular order of my discovery 

lit from the discoveries of others, the poets

whose lives I owe my own? The mind, this 

one, is pitiful today. I can’t remember to 

pick up that necessary thing texted to me

while I was in its place of purchase, a gold door

hinge at the hardware store or a quart of oat 

milk creamer from Food Town—bougie litter 

however required—let alone 

a phrase of tempered beauty that I like 

to think resides in the free gallery of recollections

I’ve curated, but the poems I try to pin up 

slip so often from the wall it’s as if I don’t want

them there. What is it that I even enjoy about

language among language? Green grass

is a favorite phrase, though not much on its own

in a poem. I’ve always appreciated “always”

maligned as adverbs are and a superlative 

at that. I can’t help that it invokes

“always
                      it’s
                               Spring)and everyone’s
in love and flowers pick themselves”

which I painted (the whole poem, not just

these lines) on the ceiling of an attic bedroom. 

It was 2007 when I was living

in Boston and waiting tables at the airport,

hoping that was an indelible means 

of mnemonics, the paint, but when I tried to 

recite it to Rainer at a late (my) birthday dinner in Bay Ridge 

over a big bowl of piquant steaming shellfish 

I only had those four lines, Rainer who is remembering

the senses as poetic project, scent enticed after

being dulled due to global illness or sound recaptured,

facile and cumbersome to delicate and bashful, 

a project of “way[s] to tolerate the mind.” That cummings poem 

is beautiful (I pull up the full text on my phone and think 

so, yes) but working at the airport was not 

beautiful or anything I care to remember, though I do

and it might be, beautiful and worth remembering

that is, serving scallops, shucking oysters, pushing

champagne on lone travelers, black shirt, black 

pants, chowder spills blotted with dabs of coffee, white

back to black, the tinted windows to the jet 

bridges toning the blemish of morning 

sun, red over East Boston, car parked on the other 

side of the chain link I’d duck through, cutting a green

beaconed edge of tarmac, passengers lofted overhead, 

returning one evening, sun set over whatever’s west,

to all the cars on the block with their windows

broken out, sedan interiors redacted with invading night,

and my car for some reason untouched, the pearl

spot of street light overhead pillowed in 

overlooked glass. I can’t predict the visions 

and associations that shuttle at any given time 

let alone what might happen in the moments 

before, as Dlugos thought, white, red, and black,

another set of lines I have painted figuratively

inside my head but can’t materialize without

re-reading “G-9”—it’s like stamping green 

reeds underfoot that stubbornly return upright

erasing any path you’ve made. “I’ve trust enough in all / 

that’s happened in my life, / the unexpected love /

and gentleness that rushes in / to fill the arid spaces /

in my heart, the way the city / glow fills up the sky /

above the river, making it / seem less than night.”

The year turns again, 2024. Rainer and I meet

up at a drizzly Washington Square Park, big arch over 

the terminus of 5th Avenue, where commerce comes 

to an end spreading exhausted among the real estate 

holdings of NYU, their lurching, privatized compound, 

a catastrophe of sheer square footage weighting

the earth with cement and property value. There’s 

candlelight reddening under the arch, a vigil for 

martyred Palestinian writers, mourning greenery laid

across the ground, images of the dead in black ink 

circulate on white printer paper, flags drape about 

the crowd, three hundred of us congregated to listen 

to recitations of poems, letters, and posts of 

annihilated artists, academics, great generational 

minds now buried under rubble, many with their families, 

their belongings, their books, and their work. 

The amplification is weak, however, and the casual rain 

fits every word with a coat of ambient static. I hear a phrase 

pierce through that membrane, Saleem Al-Naffar  “…life 

is coming / for that is its way / creating life even for us.” 

I note this in my phone before the poem ducks 

back under its muffling cloth, its other words

lost even before there was a chance to remember

them, but it does, as Dlugos wrote, seem less than night

in the city among people who will stand in the rain

next to one another, unknowing of most details that

account for whole individuals, personalities and lives, but 

at least aware of what has brought them all together, 

shoulder to shoulder, cupping their votives 
 
under hands and umbrellas, approximating 

lit wick to unlit in a spreading constellation

passing concentration. Rainer and I peel off

for Julius, where we’re met with a similar togetherness, 

but it’s just that everyone is gay and wants a drink. 

Gin martini for both of us. There is something to be

said here about the ethics of the image, how events are

washed together, democratized within art’s gutter,

language among language, a critique we

could level against ourselves for the evening,

indiscriminately, of events or lives, positioned next to

one another in abstract like colors or words conscripted

by proximity as mere effect into the work we do

daily, a method fit for airport art, a placid seascape

or busied abstraction, something obvious, tasteless,

and known. Like, what is your idea of a bad poem?

Rainer:
I don't know that I have a clear idea of what an individual bad poem is, but I have a sense of bad things that have happened to poems. And I think that, at their worst, poems have experienced the same thing as the personal essay, where in literal and metaphorical ways they've been used as sort of application materials where you have to prove a certain kind of suffering—not the suffering itself, but you have to prove that you've learned from it. All bad things you experience must become opportunities of revelation. It's like the application to college and the bad poem to me are similar genres where it's not the person writing that’s at fault, but it's a totally coerced genre where you've been asked to pretend that the world absolutely fucking you was a site of inspiration.

That's sort of that's like, akin to 

like, the idea of—you know—the closed 

poem that Lyn Hejinian writes about. The, like, 

reliance on the epiphanic to be the sole 

determiner of significance. Whereas, like, the pleasure of 

that work, the pleasure of reading, comes from—you 

know—many things, but one of them can be

existing within the same imaginative space 

as the mind of the poem, which is a beautiful thing

like enjoying the private bubble of a shared interest,

or how I imagine I could at some point take measure

of my life’s syntax and the silences I fill and, relaxing

into a more self-respecting sort of living, tend a garden,

pulled into cleaner schedule, hours cleared of

the groaning of my psyche against the occupation

of the final freedoms my attention seems to

regard as up-for-grabs, previously unassailable

free time, where sense comes streaming 

in glossed strands of un-languaged impulse then trails

off, at an hour unknown to most, as material

transformed into whatever else it becomes,

passed through the cloudy shelf into forgetting

when it’s collected into the unconscious or where 

a thought repairs after the thinking has been destroyed.

We are—I choose to imagine—indivisible from

what we think or have thought or will at a point

or perhaps never think, qualified by an absence

of thought, our irreducible dumbness that lingers

like an empty handbag drooping from a limb or clutched

between the teeth, leather taste loitering on

the palate. We could only be so fortunate

to be unknowing of a thought, forever unminded,

the reeds standing upright and undisturbed,

black on white under its own red star.

Green grass. Always green grass. Green

always grass. Green grass always. Always.