Eternities
Discreet reader of discreet lives.
Chairs no one ever sits in.
Motes of dust, their dancing days done.
Schools of yellow fish
On the peeling wallpaper
Keeping their eyes on you.
It’s late for today, late.
A small crucifix over the bed
Watches over a stopped clock.
•
Sewing room, linty daylight
Through a small window.
You will never be in my shoes, Eternity.
I come with an expiration date.
My scissors cut black cloth.
I stick silver pins into a tailor’s dummy,
Muttering some man’s name
While aiming at its heart.
•
Raleigh played cards with his executioners.
I sit over a dead mouse in the kitchen.
Hot night, the windows open,
The air rich with the scents of lilacs
And banked fires of backyard grills.
My lovely neighbor must be sleeping naked,
Or lighting a match to see what time it is.
•
The torment of branches in the wind.
Is the sea hearing their confession?
The little white clouds must think so.
They are rushing over to hear.
The ship on the way to paradise
Seems stuck on the horizon,
Pinned by one golden pin of sunlight.
Only the great rocks act as if nothing’s the matter.
•
In a city where so much is hidden:
The crimes, the riches, the beautiful women,
You and I were lost for hours.
We went in to ask a butcher for directions.
He sat playing the accordion.
The lambs had their eyes closed in bliss,
But not the knives, his evil little helpers.
Come right in, folks, he said.
•
Conscience, that awful power,
With its vast network of spies,
Secret arrests at night,
Dreaded prisons and reform schools,
Beatings and forced confessions,
Wee-hour crucifixions.
A small, dead bird in my hand
Is all the evidence they had.
•
The sprawling meadow bordered by a stream,
Naked girl on horseback.
Yes, I do remember that.
Sunlight on the outhouse wall,
One little tree in the yard afraid of darkness,
The voice of the hermit thrush.
•
Thoughts frightened of the light,
Frightened of each other.
They listen to a clock ticking.
Like flock of sheep led to slaughter,
The seconds keep a good pace,
Stick together, don’t look back,
All worried, as they go,
What their shepherd may be thinking.
•
A sough of wind in the open window
Making the leaves sigh.
“I come to you like one
Who is dying of love,”
God said to Christine Ebner
On this dull, sultry night.
“I come to you with the desire
Of bridegroom for his bride.”
•
Soul’s jukebox
Playing golden oldies
In the sky
Strewn with stars.
When I ask God
What size coin it takes
I’m greeted
With stunned silence.
Eternity’s Orphans
One night you and I were walking.
The moon was so bright
We could see the path under the trees.
Then the clouds came and hid it
So we had to grope our way
Till we felt the sand under our bare feet,
And heard the pounding waves.
Do you remember telling me,
“Everything outside this moment is a lie”?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water’s edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea.
XII
from MASTER OF DISGUISES
Master of Disguises
Surely, he walks among us unrecognized:
Some barber, store clerk, delivery man,
Pharmacist, hairdresser, bodybuilder,
Exotic dancer, gem cutter, dog walker,
The blind beggar singing, O Lord, remember me,
Some window decorator starting a fake fire
In a fake fireplace while mother and father watch
From the couch with their frozen smiles
As the street empties and the time comes
For the undertaker and the last waiter to head home.
O homeless old man, standing in a doorway
With your face half hidden,
I wouldn’t even rule out the black cat crossing the street,
The bare lightbulb swinging on a wire
In a subway tunnel as the train comes to a stop.
Nineteen Thirty-eight
That was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna,
Superman made his debut in Action Comics,
Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,
The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill.,
As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers.
“You must’ve been a beautiful baby,” Bing Crosby sang.
A pilot the newspapers called Wrong Way Corrigan
Took off from New York heading for California
And landed instead in Ireland, as I watched my mother
Take a breast out of her blue robe and come closer.
There was a hurricane that September causing a movie theater
At Westhampton Beach to be lifted out to sea.
People worried the world was about to end.
A fish believed to have been extinct for seventy million years
Came up in a fishing net off the coast of South Africa.
I lay in my crib as the days got shorter and colder,
And the first heavy snow fell in the night
Making everything very quiet in my room.
I thought I heard myself cry for a long, long time.
Preachers Warn
This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction—
And still the sun shines, the sparrows come
Each morning to the bakery for crumbs.
Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds
And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter.
Its owner is making lunch for his ailing grandmother.
He heats the soup and serves it to her in a bowl.
The windows are open, there’s a warm breeze.
The young trees on our street are delirious to have leaves.
Italian opera is on the radio, the volume too high.
Brevi e tristi giorni visse, a baritone sings.
Everyone up and down our block can hear him.
Something about the days that remain for us to enjoy
Being few and sad. Not today, Maestro Verdi!
At the hairdresser’s a girl leaps out of a chair,
Her blond hair bouncing off her bare shoulders
As she runs out the door in her high heels.
“I must be off,” says the handsome boy to his grandmother.
His bicycle is where he left it.
He rides it casually through the heavy traffic
His white shirttails fluttering behind him
Long after everyone else has come to a sudden stop.
Old Man
Backed myself into a dark corner one day,
Found a boy there
Forgotten by teachers and classmates,
His shoulders slumped,
The hair on his head already gray.
Friend, I said.
While you stood here staring at the wall,
They shot a president,
Some guy walked on the moon,
Dolly, the girl we all loved,
Took too many sleeping pills and died
In a hotel room in Santa Monica.
Now and then I thought of you,
Listening to the squeak of the chalk
On the blackboard,
The sighs and whispers
Of unknown children
Bent over their lessons,
The mice running in the night.
Visions of unspeakable loveliness
Must’ve come to you in your misery:
Cloudless skies on long June evenings,
Trees full of cherries in our orchard,
To make you ache and want to be with me,
Driving a cab in New York City.
Nancy Jane
Grandma laughing on her deathbed.
Eternity, the quiet one, listening in.
Like moths around an oil lamp we were.
Like rag dolls tucked away in the attic.
In walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers.
(How about that?)
A dark little country store full of gravediggers’ children
buying candy.
(That’s how we looked that night.)
The young man pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds.
It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh.
A bird called out of a tree, but received no answer.
The beauty of that last moment
Like a red sail on the bay at sunset,
Or like a wheel breaking off a car
And roaming the world on its own.
Carrying On Like a Crow
Are you authorized to speak
For these trees without leaves?
Are you able to explain
What the wind intends to do
With a man’s shirt and a woman’s nightgown
Left on the laundry line?
What do you know about dark clouds?
Ponds full of fallen leaves?
Old-model cars rusting in a driveway?
Who gave you the permission
To look at the beer can in a ditch?
The white cross by the side of the road?
The swing set in the widow’s yard?
Ask yourself, if words are enough,
Or if you’d be better off
Flapping your wings from tree to tree
And carrying on like a crow.
Driving Home
Minister of our coming doom, preaching
On the car radio, how right
Your hell and damnation sound to me
As I travel these small, bleak roads
Thinking of the mailman’s son
The army sent back in a sealed coffin.
His house is around the next turn.
A forlorn mutt sits in the yard
Waiting for someone to come home.
I can see the TV is on in the living room,
Canned laughter in the empty house
Like the sound of beer cans tied to a hearse.
Sightseeing in the Capital
These grand old buildings
With their spacious conference rooms,
Leather-padded doors,
Where they weigh life and death
Without a moment of fear
Of ever being held accountable,
And then withdraw to dine in style
And drink to each other’s health
In private clubs and country estates,
While we linger on the sidewalk
Admiring the rows of windows
The evening sun has struck blind.
Daughters of Memory
There were three of them, always three,
Sunbathing side by side on the beach,
The sound of waves and children’s voices so soothing
It was hard to stay awake.
When I woke, the sun was setting.
The three friends knelt in a circle
Taking turns to peek into a small mirror
And comb their hair with the same comb.
Months later, I happened to see two of them
Running in the rain after school,
Ducking into a doorway with a pack of cigarettes
And a glance at me in my new uniform.
In the end, there was just one girl left,
Tall and beautiful,
Making late rounds in a hospital ward,
Past a row of beds, one of which was mine.
When she still knew how to make shadows speak
By sitting with them a long time,
They talked about her handsome father,
His long absence, and how the quiet
Would fill the house on snowy evenings.
“Tell us, child, are you afraid?” they’d ask,
While the girl listened for steps in the hallway,
The long, dim one with a full-length mirror
That’s been going blind like her grandmother
Who could no longer find or thread a needle
As she sat in the parlor remembering some actors
Her son brought to dinner one night,
The one young woman who wandered off by herself
And was found later, after a long search,
Floating naked in the black water of the pond.
Puppet Maker
In his fear of solitude, he made us.
Fearing eternity, he gave us time.
I hear his white cane thumping
Up and down the hall.
I expect neighbors to complain, but no.
The little girl who sobbed
When her daddy crawled into her bed
Is quiet now.
It’s quarter to two.
On this street of darkened pawnshops,
Welfare hotels and tenements,
One or two ragged puppets are awake.
Summer Storm
I’m going over to see what those weeds
By the stone wall are fretting about.
Perhaps they don’t care for the way
The shadows creep across the lawn
In the silence of the afternoon.
The sky keeps being blue,
Though we hear no birds,
See no butterflies among the flowers,
No ants running over our feet.
As for the trees in our yard,
They bend their branches ever so slightly
In deference to something
About to make its entrance
Of which we know nothing,
Spellbound as we are by the deepening quiet.
The Melon
There was a melon fresh from the garden
So ripe the knife slurped
As it cut it into six slices.
The children were going back to school.
Their mother, passing out paper plates,
Would not live to see the leaves fall.
I remember a hornet, too, that flew in
Through the open window
Mad to taste the sweet fruit
While we ducked and screamed,
Covered our heads and faces,
And sat laughing after it was gone.
The Lovers
In the woods one fair Sunday,
When we were children,
We came upon a couple lying on the ground.
Hand in hand, ourselves afraid
Of losing our way, we saw
What we first thought was a patch of snow,
The two clutching each other naked
On the bare ground, the wind
Swaying the branches over them
As we stole by, neve
r to find out
Who they were, never to mention it afterwards
To each other, or to anyone else.
The Empress
My beloved, you who spend your nights
Torturing me
By holding up one mirror after another
To me in the dark,
If there’s anything I know to say or do today,
I merit no praise for it,
But owe it to the subtlety of your torments,
And your perseverance in keeping me awake.
All the same, who gave you the right
To judge me in my wretchedness?
What soul white as snow
Compiled this endless list of misdeeds
You read to me every night?
The airs you put on when I tell you to stop
Would make one believe
You were once a bedmate of a Chinese emperor.