Tom Sleigh

Tom Sleigh Poems

1.

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
...

His head rose like a torch in a tomb.
Banquet-style, as at a second Symposium,
The others lounged on couches or lay knocked out.
...

Looking at the lion behind the plate glass
I wasn't sure what I was looking at: a lion, OK,
but he seemed to come apart, not literally
...

I had a blueprint
of history
in my head —
...

Lathe of the ocean. Perpetual
Motion machine of the waves. Everything still
Being turned and shaped to a shape nobody
Foresees: Ten years ago, was it, when we
...

6.

But where, oh where is the holy idiot,
truth teller and soothsayer, familiar
of spirits, rat eater, unhouseled wanderer
...

He said, "It is terrible what happens."
And "So, Mr. Tom,
do not forget me"—an old-fashioned ring, pop tunes,
salsa! salsa! the techno-version of Beethoven's
...

The omen I didn't know I was waiting for
pulled into the station the same instant as the train.
It was just a teenage boy busking on the platform,
...

Because the burn's unstable, burning too hot
in the liquid hydrogen suction line
and so causing vortices in the rocket fuel
...

What she is waiting for never arrives
or arrives so slowly she can't see it:
Like the river
bluing silver
...

What came wafting
down the ditch
by the marsh grass waving
...

Out the barred window sandbags
in a sagging wall surround the guard post
where a soldier half-hidden by the flag
...

As if your half-witted tongue
Spoke with an eloquence
Death bestows, I heard your voice
...

When I woke the darkness was so thick,
So palpable and black that my eyes
Seemed blind as stone staring into stone.
...

Out of the stone ark that carried them this far
in their two by two progress up to here,
they've outlived everyone
...

16.

On this side of the wall, the well-lit room
lights gilt pages that luxuriate

in ornate capitals commemorating kings,
while there, on the other side, smoke and fire

press against the wall, where the stick-figure soldier
huddles away from the explosions, dwarfed

by the smoke column rising. The young Marine
at Quantico who calls me on his cell

feels the full weight of the wall pushing up
beyond the barracks walls he lives in,

swaying in the sun, swaying as if to
fall on him as he focuses on Clausewitz,

Sun Tzu's Art of War, Commandant Gray's Warfighting . . .
The wall ripples from the ground on up into

the sun, and only if you let go of your
human shape and only if your body

bleeds into the wall's flat vertical
can you feel that altitude and lift

as in an elevator shooting to
the top so fast that even when it stops

you feel yourself hurtle through the air:
hold onto yourself if you enter the wall's

sub-atomic storm, where everything is motion
and not the huge kings or tiny foemen

snarled in gilt vines can keep safe from the wounds
seeping through the wall to where the soldier

smooths back his hair, the bombardment healing over
to the puckered, ashen smolder of a scar.
...

I / omen

What was going on in the New York American
Black/red/green helmeted neon night?
The elevator door was closing behind us, we were the ones

Plunging floor after floor after floor after floor
To the abyss—but it was someone else's face
Staring from the screen out at us, someone else's face

Saying something flashing from the teleprompter:
Though what the face said was meant to reassure,
Down in the abyss the footage kept playing,

All of it looping back like children chanting
The answers to nonsensical riddles, taunting
A classmate who doesn't know the question:

"Because it's too far to walk" "Time to get a new fence"
"A big red rock eater." And as the images rewound
And the face kept talking, the clear night sky

Filled up with smoke and the smoke kept puring
Itself out into the air like a voice saying something
It can't stop saying, some murky omen

Like schoolkids asking: "Why do birds fly south?"
"What time is it when an elephant sits on the fence?"
"What's big, red and eats rocks?"



2 / in front of st. vincent's

A woman hugging another woman
Who was weeping blocked the sidewalk.
Nobody moved for a moment.

They were an island caught at the tide turning:
Such misery in two human bodies.

Then the wearing away of the crowd
Moving flowed over them and they
Were pulled swiftly along down the sidewalk.



3 / joke

Faces powdered with dust and ash, there they were
In the fast food place, raucous and wild, splitting
The seams of their work clothes, weary to hysteria

As they hunched in their booth next to the buffet
Under heat lamps reflecting incarnadine
Off pastas and vegetable slag. Then the joke

Ignited, they quivered on the launch pad,
Laughter closed around them, they couldn't
Breathe, it was as if they were staring out

From a space capsule porthole and were asking
The void an imponderable riddle
While orbiting so high up in space

That the earth was less than the least hint
Of light piercing the smoke-filled, cloudless night.
(What was the joke about? Nobody knew.)

And then they stopped laughing and stared into their plates,
Ash smearing down their faces as they chewed.



4 / spell spoken by suppliant to helios for knowledge
from the Greek Magical Papyri


Under my tongue is the mud of the Nile,
I wear the baboon hide of sacred Keph.
Dressed in the god's power, I am the god,
I am Thouth, discoverer of healing drugs,
Founder of letters. As god calls on god
I summon you to come to me, you
Under the earth; arouse yourself for me,
Great daimon, you the subterranean,
You of the primordial abyss.
Unless you tell me what I want to know,
What is in the minds of everyone, Egyptians,
Greeks, Syrians, Ethiopians, of every race
And people, unless I know what has been
And what shall be, unless I know their skills
And practices and works and lives and names
Of them and their fathers and mothers
And brothers and friends, even of those now dead,
I will pour the blood of the black-faced jackal
As an offering in a new-made jar and put it
In the fire and burn beneath it what's left
Of the bones of all-praised Osiris,
And I will shout in the port of Busiris
The secrets of his mysteries, that his body,
Drowned, remained in the river three days
And three nights, that he, the praised one,
Was carried by the river into the sea
And surrounded by wave on wave on wave
And by mist rising off water through the air.
To keep your belly from being eaten by fish,
To keep the fish from chewing your flesh with their mouths,
To make the fish close their hungry jaws, to keep
The fatherless child from being taken
From his mother, to keep the pole of the sky
From being brought down and the twin towering
Mountains from toppling into one, to keep Anoixis
From running amok and doing just what she wants,
Not god or goddess will give oracles
Until I know through and through
Just what is in the minds of all human beings,
Egyptians, Syrians, Greeks, Ethyopians, of every race
And people, so that those who come to me.
Their eyes and mine can meet in a level gaze,
Neither one or the other higher or lower,
And whether they speak or keep silent,
I can tell them whatever has happened
And is happening and is going to happen
To them, and I can tell them their skills
And their works and their names and those of their dead,
And of every human being who comes to me
I will read them as I read a sealed letter
And tell them everything truthfully.



5 / from brooklyn bridge

Sun shines on the third bridge tower:
A garbage scow ploughs the water,

Maternal hull pushing is all out beyond
The city, pushing it all out so patiently—

All you could hear out there this flawless afternoon
Is the sound of sand pulverizing newsprint

To tatters, paper-pulp ripping crosswise
Or lengthwise, shearing off some photo

Of maybe a head or maybe an arm.
Ridiculous flimsy noble newspaper,

Leaping in wind, fluttering, collapsing,
Its columns sway and topple into babble:

All you'd see if you were out there
Is air vanishing into clearer air.



6 / from the plane

Pressed against our seats, them released to air,
From the little plane windows we peered four thousand feet
Down to the ground desert-gray and still,
Nothing seeming to be moving on that perfect afternoon,
No reminder of why it was we were all looking,
Remembering maybe the oh so flimsy
Wooden sawhorse police barricades, as the woman
In front of me twisted her head back to see
It all again, but up there there was nothing to see,
Only the reef water feel of transparency
Deepening down to a depth where everything
Goes dark and nothing moves unless it belongs
To that dark, darting in and out or undulating
Slowly or cruising unblinking, jaws open or closed.



7 / spell broken by suppliant to helios for protection
from the Greek Magical Papyri

This is the charm that will protect you, the charm
That you must wear: Onto lime wood write
With vermilion the secret name, name of
The fifty magic letters. Then say the words:
"Guard me from every daimon of the air,
On the earth and under the earth, guard me
From every angel and phantom, every
Ghostly visitation and enchantment,
Me, your suppliant." Enclose it in a skin
Dyed purple, hang it round your neck and wear it.



8 / roll of film: photographer missing

Vines of smoke through latticework of steel
Weave the air into a garden of smoke.

And in the garden people came and went,
People of smoke and people of flesh, the air dressed

In ash. What the pictures couldn't say
Was spoken by the smoke: A common language

In a tongue of smoke that murmured in every ear
Something about what it was they'd been forced

To endure: Words spoken in duress,
Inconsolable words, words spoken under the earth

That rooted in smoke and breathed in the smoke
And put forth shoots that twined through the steel,

Words plunged through the roof of the garages'
Voids, I-beams twisted; the eye that saw all this

Tells and tells again one part of the story
Of that day of wandering through the fatal garden,

The camera's eye open and acutely
Recording in the foul-smelling air.



9 / lamentation on ur
from a Sumerian spell, 2000 B.C.

Like molten bronze and iron shed blood
pools. Our country's dead
melt into the earth
as grease melts in the sun, men whose
helmets now lie scattered, men annihilated

by the double-bladed axe. Heavy, beyond
help, they lie still as a gazelle
exhausted in a trap,
muzzle in the dust. In home
after home, empty doorways frame the absence

of mothers and fathers who vanished
in the flames remorselessly
spreading claiming even
frightened children who lay quiet
in their mother's arms, now borne into

oblivion, like swimmers swept out to sea
by the surging current.
May the great barred gate
of blackest night again swing shut
on silent hinges. Destroyed in its turn,

may this disaster too be torn out of mind.
...

for my father

1. Today

Today, this moment, speechlessly in pain,
He fights the terror of being poured out,
The fall into darkness unquenchably long
So that even as he hurtles he keeps holding

Back like a dam the flood overtops—but nothing now
Can stop that surge, already he swirls
To the source of Voices, the many throats inside the one
Throat, each swallowing the unstoppable flood ...

And as if that, all along, were what he'd wanted,
He hears the Voices begin to die down
The way a marsh in spring pulsing and shrilling
Sunup to sundown falls gradually still

—Unappeasable, the silence that will follow
When his every last drop has been poured out.


2. Countdown

In your hospital bed, the plastic mask across
Your face siphoning air into your lungs,
You lie helpless as an astronaut
Blasting into space: Eyes oblivious

To ours, your body's fevered presence
Shimmers like the phantom heat that will trail
Up the pipe of the crematory oven:
How distant we will seem after

Such intensity ... We drift in your stare
Like the dust stirred by the cow your parents
Gave you as a boy to teach responsibility.

Already you are space immeasurable
By your slide rule, your graphs that plotted
Payload, liftoff, escape velocity.


3. Prayer

In the house of the dead I pace the halls:
The walls, collapsing, stretch away in desert
Or flatten into horizonless ocean.
I step outside, the door clicking shut

Comforting in its finality ...
Now I see the house as if I looked down
From far off mountains, and saw you crouching in
The sun-scoured yard, eyes keenly focused,

Pupils narrowing to a cat's green slits:
I can't look you in the face, you see only
The openness of sky rising above mountains.

(Only after the world had emptied
You and filled you with its openness
Will I feel the love I pray to feel?)


4. The God

a dream

A warming pulsing flood like blood surging through
Veins, and now the god stirs in my hands
Dull as stone in this gravity-less Nowhere.
Sensation shivering through me, deliberate and sure,

I cradle you, I sponge you clean
As if you were my son, the emptiness you
Drink like heavy black milk erasing
Your wrinkles and gouged lines of pain.

The god bends me to the work, my fingers driven
By the god, blinded by the god's
Neutrality, until I pull apart the threads
In this place the god commands:

Face wholly unwoven, without heart, mind, you
are nothing in my hands but my hands moving.


5. His Stare

Absently there in a moment of pure being
He sits in his chair, eyes locked, staring:
The air's transparence gains solidity
From his looking; while his emaciated features,

The way his flesh sags from sharpening cheekbones,
Make the summer air weigh like marble on the harsh green
Of the trees he is too weak to prune.
And yet the contemplative distance he is sealed in

Projects with ferocious purpose the will of his body
To withdraw into this eerily removed contemplation
Like one who has heard a tuning fork ringing
And enters and becomes each spectral vibration;

So utterly absorbed that love is a distraction; even
The world, its barest colors, bleeding away before that stare.


6. The Current

The numbing current of the Demorol
Sweeps him out to sea where the secret night
He lives in slowly begins to darken,
His daytime routine of watching his blood cycle

Through the tubes of a machine shadowed by blackness
Blinding as an underwater cave. Already
He filters the dark water through gills aligned
To strain that element he more and more resembles:

Like walls of water held in miraculous
Suspension, the moment of his death looms impartially
Above him, my hands holding his tightening
Its grip even as his hand loosens ...

As if my hand could lead him past that undulating
Weight towering above us out of sight.


7. The Rehearsal

I lead you back, your Orpheus, until you
Stand inhaling, on the topmost stair,
The rank rich air of breathing flesh—
But like fumes rising from earth's molten core

The voices of the dead reach out to you,
Your whispering parents, dead for forty years,
Entreating me to turn—and so I
Turn, as must you: Your footsteps die,

You dwindle, blur into unfillable
Space echoing like the dark of a cathedral ...
But there is no dark, no stair, no Orpheus

—Only this voice rehearsing breath
By breath in words you'll never read these
Lines stolen from your death.
...

i.m. Denis Johnson, 1949-2017
the unified field

It wasn't that there was anything to say
that would stop him from feeling this way — the X
of himself splayed out in space

where gravity was weakest. He and his father
and talkative mother
suffering tiny strokes that took away

this syllable from this word, that syllable
from that, all this lay
in one pan of the balance scale

while in the other there was nothing but dark matter
and the cosmic inconsequence
of his literal physical heart beating.

And then the unified field, faced with its own emptiness,
bent down to his chest as if to listen.


a toast to pavlov's dogs


Oh Leash held by a hand I can't see, here
in the laboratory where nothing can change
and where yips and bites are fine-tuned to the pack's mentality,

am I one of his dogs, the three-legged one that knows nothing
of my lack except for how I bark, growl,
and whine to be let in? Am I the salivating triangle

guided only by my nose that keeps me
on the move in my limping trot away from you, Leash, yanking
me back from all the filth I want to shove my nose in?

Why won't you let me go free? The sad gestures
of our growing intimacy is a reflex we
can't escape or express: sometimes, emotion is just mange.

So Leash, here's a toast to my lab pals: August, Fast One,
Pretty Little Lady, Joy, Beauty, MiLord, Clown.



the judgment after the last


What would we like to see happen?
Would we like to drive nails into our hands?
Would the shame engulfing us like flame

on a computer screen make us understand
that throwing a match into the Grand Canyon
while snapping a selfie, and never once thinking

how far that match falls, is the original sin
that a donkey's ears twitching
as we ride it to the bottom reveal as the truth

about our consciences? How many nails
will we need? Go to the movies, do research,
be the Regulator forced to kill kill kill

and that's when we'll find out just who we are
or if there's anything like "who" anymore.



mission


It's not simply that the palm trees are on fire
but that they waver up more fire than fire,
brighter and harsher and more intoxicating

than the flames spreading ever thought of being — 
the thick black smoke turning noon to midnight
rears up in a wall that nobody can see

over or around or through even as this nobody
comes crashing through the screen
right into my living room: poor nobody! In this loneliest of times,

he tells me how much he loves me, how his lack
and mine feel somehow the same and that the flames
crawling over him have become his mission:

burning, he erects a burning house of smoke
we can neither live in or abandon.



sunday is never the last day of the week


Using zip ties and Velcro to strap on a homemade bomb,
who is to blame, who should have told us
that on the far side of the screen in this Sunday calm

our generation has had its time? In that corner
where we slept together so many nights, yes, in that corner where
the bed of the dead lovers has been put out with all the other

Monday morning trash, there are always two doors
opening and closing as one of us goes out and the other comes in.
Why couldn't we show our love for one another

the way the void dissolves into the zero? Why did the animal
grafted to the human find such satisfaction in explosions? Darkness
to darkness, ashes to ashes, the animal to the human,

why shouldn't we take pleasure where and when we can — 
provided this is pleasure, provided that the body isn't null.



last rites


Even if the suit they dress me in for my funeral
is dry-cleaned at Perfection Laundry, then washed
and washed in the blood of the lamb, the knees

will still be muddy from kneeling down, the sleeves,
mismatched, will tell their own threadbare tale
about the breath of life breathed into tabletop dust.

What would the naked man and woman and talking snake say
about the god who no longer remembers if they're forgiven
or not? Listening as a kid to the old stories,

there were never enough beanstalks and giants
and Jacks. Now, the pallbearers pick up my coffin,
they carry me out to the ruined cathedral where the saints'

wooden faces, frozen in their homely expressions of grace,
are shadowed by flocks of  blackbirds whirling past.



coda: the hunger artist as a senior citizen


Nowadays, in my cage
in old straw, where
my brother keeper

forgets to come feed me anymore,
at last I'm fasting for its own sake,
not to break records I've broken

a thousand times before.
Besides, nothing could be easier
than to starve forever

if the food they keep on
giving you makes you sick.
This hunger is a moment's

vision that will persist
in a pillar of radiant house dust.
...

I wanted first to end up as a drunk in the gutter
and in my twenties I almost ended up there—

and then as an alternative to vodka, to live

alone like a hermit philosopher and court
the extreme poverty that I suspected lay in store for me anyway—

and then there were the years in which

I needed very badly to take refuge in mediocrity,
years like blunt scissors cutting out careful squares,

and that was the worst, the very worst—

you could say that always my life
was like a patchwork quilt always ripped apart—

my life like scraps stitched together in a dream

in which animals and people,
plants, chimeras, stars,

even minerals were in a preordained harmony—

a dream forgotten because it has to be forgotten,
but that I looked for desperately, but only sporadically

found in fragments, a hand lifted to strike

or caress or simply lifted for some unknown reason—
and in memory too, some specific pain, sensation of cold or warmth.

I loved that harmony in all its stages of passion,

the voices still talking inside me . . . but then, instead of harmony,
there was nothing but rags scattered on the ground.

And maybe that's all it means to be a poet.
...

Tom Sleigh Biography

Tom Sleigh (/sleɪ/) is an American poet, dramatist, essayist and academic, who lives in New York City. He has published seven books of original poetry, one full-length translation of Euripides' Herakles and a book of essays. At least five of his plays have been produced. He has won numerous awards, including the 2008 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, worth $100,000, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Shelley Award from the Poetry Society of America, and a Guggenheim Foundation grant. He currently serves as director of Hunter College's Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing. He is the recipient of the Anna-Maria Kellen Prize and Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin for Fall 2011. Tom Sleigh was born in Mount Pleasant, Texas, where he lived until the age of five, when he moved to Utah. He lived in Utah until seventh grade, when he moved to California. He attended the California Institute of the Arts, Evergreen State College, and the Writing Seminars Johns Hopkins University for two years, where he graduated with an MA. In his mid-twenties he moved to Massachusetts, to work at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He began teaching at Dartmouth College in 1986 and later taught at New York University, the University of Iowa, UC-Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, and serves as director of the Hunter College Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing, where he also teaches poetry writing.)

The Best Poem Of Tom Sleigh

Space

My mother and I and the dog were floating
Weightless in the kitchen. Silverware
Hovered above the table. Napkins drifted
Just below the ceiling. The dead who had been crushed
By gravity were free to move about the room,
To take their place at supper, lift a fork, knife, spoon—
A spoon, knife, fork that, outside this moment's weightlessness,
Would have been immovable as mountains.

My mother and I and the dog were orbiting
In the void that follows after happiness
Of an intimate gesture: Her hand stroking the dog's head
And the dog looking up, expectant, into her eyes:
The beast gaze so direct and alienly concerned
To have its stare returned; the human gaze
That forgets, for a moment, that it sees
What it's seeing and simply, fervently, sees...

But only for a moment. Only for a moment were my mother
And the dog looking at each other not mother
Or dog but that look—I couldn't help but think,
If only I were a dog, or Mother was,
Then that intimate gesture, this happiness passing
Could last forever...such a vain, hopeless wish
I was wishing; I knew it and didn't know it
Just as my mother knew she was my mother

And didn't...and as for the dog, her large black pupils,
Fixed on my mother's faintly smiling face,
Seemed to contain a drop of the void
We were all suspended in; though only a dog
Who chews a ragged rawhide chew toy shaped
Into a bone, femur or cannonbone
Of the heavy body that we no longer labored
To lift against the miles-deep air pressing

Us to our chairs. The dog pricked her ears,
Sensing a dead one approaching. Crossing the kitchen,
My father was moving with the clumsy gestures
Of a man in a space suit—the strangeness of death
Moving among the living—though the world
Was floating with a lightness that made us
Feel we were phantoms: I don't know
If my mother saw him—he didn't look at her

When he too put his hand on the dog's head
And the dog turned its eyes from her stare to his...
And then the moment on its axis reversed,
The kitchen spun us the other way round
And pressed heavy hands down on our shoulders
So that my father sank into the carpet,
My mother rested her chin on her hand
And let her other hand slide off the dog's head,

Her knuckles bent in a kind of torment
Of moonscape erosion, ridging up into
Peaks giving way to seamed plains
With names like The Sea of Tranquility
—Though nothing but a metaphor for how
I saw her hand, her empty, still strong hand
Dangling all alone in the infinite space
Between the carpet and the neon-lit ceiling.

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