One torn photograph after another
Whose pieces do not fit—
And why should they, grim whispers,
With all your seasonings of folly?
Every time I went to the sea and sky
To seek advice, this is what I got.
BATTLING GRAYS
Another grim-lipped day coming our way
Like a gray soldier
From the Civil War monument
Footloose on a narrow country road.
A few homes lately foreclosed,
Their windows the color of rain puddles
About to freeze, their yards choked
With weeds and rusty cars.
Small hills like mounds of ashes
Of your dead cigar, general,
Standing bewhiskered and surveying
What the light is in no hurry
To fall upon, including, of course,
Your wound, red and bubbling
Like an accordion, as you raise your saber
To threaten the clouds in the sky.
SUNLIGHT
As if you had a message for me...
Tell me about the grains of dust
On my night table?
Is any one of them worth your trouble?
Your burglaries leave no thumbprint.
Mine, too, are silent.
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.
Like conspirators hatching a plot,
They withdrew one by one
Into corners of the room.
Leaving me the sole witness
Of your burning oratory.
If you did say something, I'm none the wiser.
The breakfast finished,
The coffee dregs were unenlightening.
Like a lion cage at feeding time—
The floor at my feet turned red.
THE BIRDIE
Two-room country shack
On a moody lake.
A black cat at my feet
To philosophize with
Stretched out on the bed
Like a gambler
Who's lost his trousers
And his shoes,
Listening to a birdie raise its voice
In praise of good weather,
Little wiggling worms,
And other suchlike matters.
MINDS ROAMING
My neighbor was telling me
About her blind cat
Who goes out at night—
Goes where? I asked.
Just then my dead mother called me in
To wash my hands
Because supper was on the table:
The little mouse the cat caught.
COCKROACH SALON
The clips of the scissors
And the voices
Difficult to discern at first
Even as I press my ear against the wall.
The barber and his customer
Talking of greasy spoons,
Late night back alleys,
Rats leaping out of trash cans
Then, nothing further...
Had they wandered off
Deeper into the wall,
Or possibly inside my head?
Where else? Where else?
Someone replied cheerfully,
Her identity and whereabouts
A complete mystery, a scandal.
MIDNIGHT FEAST
for Michael Krüger
Snowflake and laughter salad.
Cuckoo-clock soup.
Andouillettes of angel and beast.
Bowlegged nightingale in aspic.
Peep-show soufflé.
Fricassee of Cupid with green peas.
Roasted bust of Socrates with African postage stamps.
Venus in her own gravy.
Wines of graveyard lovers—
Someone slid under my door
While I sat staring at the wall.
ONE CHAIR
That can't help creak at night
As if a spider
Let itself down
By a thread
To hang over it
With the chair quaking
At the outcome.
INSOMNIA'S CRICKET
I'll set you up in a tiny cage over my pillow.
You'll keep me company,
Warn me from time to time
As the silence deepens.
My father spent nights in the bathroom
Thinking about the meaning of his life.
We'd forget all about him,
Find him asleep there in the morning.
O cunning walls, ceilings
And mirrors in the dark,
I heard his pocket watch tick on his grave—
Or was it a cricket?
In the same tall grass
Where eternity was being made
By a few solitary fireflies
In the tails of someone's black coat.
TALK RADIO
"I was lucky to have a Bible with me.
When the space aliens abducted me...."
America, I shouted at the radio,
Even at 2 A.M. you are a loony bin!
No, I take it back!
You are a stone angel in the cemetery
Listening to the geese in the sky
Your eyes blinded by snow.
III
MY TURN TO CONFESS
A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That's me, dear reader!
They were about to kick me out of the library
But I warned them,
My master is invisible and all-powerful.
Still, they kept dragging me out by the tail.
In the park the birds spoke freely of their own vexations.
On a bench, I saw an old woman
Cutting her white curly hair with imaginary scissors
While staring into a small pocket mirror.
I didn't say anything then,
But that night I lay slumped on the floor,
Chewing on a pencil,
Sighing from time to time,
Growling, too, at something out there
I could not bring myself to name.
THE HERMETICAL AND ALCHEMICAL WRITINGS OF PARACELSUS
Any man or woman, this book tells me,
Can bring an egg to maturity under the arm,
Materializing thus in a wonderful fashion
What may seem to you wildly beyond belief.
If the parents have large ears and long noses,
That helps. Large ears are a sign of good memory
And brainpower, while a long nose denotes
A farsighted person, secretive but fair.
The newly hatched chickens walk
The yard with their eyes cast down
Looking for precious stones in the dirt
With which they hope to repay their parents.
As for a rooster procreated in such manner,
It inclines to idleness and frivolous pursuits,
Gaining whatever livelihood it can get
At state fairs and seaside penny arcades.
ON THE FARM
The cows are to be slaughtered
And the sheep, too, of course.
The same for the hogs sighing in their pens—
And as for the chickens,
Two have been killed for dinner tonight,
While the rest peck side by side
As the shadows lengthen in the yard
And bales of hay turn gold in the fields.
One cow has stopped grazing
And has looked up puzzled
Seeing a little white cloud
Trot off like a calf into the sunset.
On the porch someone has pressed
A rocking chair into service
But we can't tell who it is—a stranger,
Or that boy who never has anything to say?
I SEE LOTS OF STICKS ON THE GROUND
Do people still whittle around here?
Do they carry clasp knives for that purpose?
Do they sit on porches and tree stumps
With shavings piling up at their feet?
Are dogs keeping a close eye on them?
Do they lay their heads on their paws
And sigh as the stick gets shorter?
What thoughts are they thinking as they whittle?
Little thoughts about many little things,
Or big thoughts about one big thing?
Come dark, is there enough of a stick left
To sit back and chew on a toothpick?
EVERYBODY HAD LOST TRACK OF TIME
The wide-open door of a church.
The hearse with one flat tire.
The grandmother on the sidewalk
Leaning on a cane and cupping her ear.
The lodger no one has ever seen,
Drawing her bath upstairs.
The little boy who climbed on the roof
To keep the clouds company.
An old man carrying a chair
And a rope into the backyard
As if he meant to hang himself
And then sat down and lost track of time.
BRETHREN
A woodpecker hammers
On the gutter of a nursing home
Where the war cripple sits
In a wheelchair by the gate.
The windows are wide open,
But no one ever speaks here,
Neither about the crazy bird,
Nor about that other war.
ASK YOUR ASTROLOGER
My stars have been guilty of benign neglect.
They neither procure riches for me
Nor burn my house down.
They've left me dangling halfway
Between good and bad luck.
A predicament I cannot afford to treat casually.
I'm all on edge. I look over my shoulder.
There goes some deadbeat
Stepping on shadows of pedestrians
As if they were scurrying mice.
I have to go into a church to avoid him.
To our Lord who has withdrawn
Into a corner with his wounds
I say, that world out there
Is a riddle even you can't solve.
Afterward, the coast clear, I rush to buy
A newspaper and read my horoscope.
A diet of small disappointments and minor
Contentments is to be my lot for the week,
Unless, of course, the astrologer blew it.
KAZOO WEDDING
The groom is red-cheeked as he blows into a kazoo
And so is the bride as she blows one too.
The guests are blowing hundreds of kazoos
And the Minister as he prepares to bless their union.
The weeping bridesmaid covers her ears.
One sounds like a bad muffler on a hearse,
Another like a wedding dress ripped open at midnight.
Look, even our Lord on the cross is tooting a kazoo!
What are they playing? the hard of hearing are asking.
It's a wedding march, Grandpa, the ushers shout.
SNOWY MORNING BLUES
The translator is a close reader.
He wears thick glasses
As he peers out the window
At the snowy fields and bushes
That are like a sheet of paper
Covered with quick scribble
In a language he knows well enough,
Without knowing any words in it,
Only what the eyes discern,
And the heart intuits of its idiom.
So quiet now, not even a faint
Rustle of a page being turned
In a white and wordless dictionary
For the translator to avail himself
Before whatever words are there
Grow obscure in the coming darkness.
TO FATE
You were always more real to me than God.
Setting up the props for a tragedy,
Hammering the nails in
With only a few close friends invited to watch.
Just to be neighborly, you made a pretty girl lame,
Ran over a child with a motorcycle.
I can think of a million similar examples.
Ditto: How the two of us keep meeting.
A fortune-telling gumball machine in Chinatown
May have the answer,
An old creaky door opening in a horror film,
A pack of cards I left on a beach.
I can feel you snuggle close to me at night,
With your hot breath, your cold hands—
And me already like an old piano
Dangling out of a window at the end of a rope.
SLURRED WORDS
Taking cover in the closet
With my dark suspicions.
Two of her nightgowns brush my cheeks
As I stand trembling.
At the funeral, I thought I had much to say,
When in truth I had nothing.
I was just one more crow
Trailing after the pallbearers.
This house is haunted,
Though I've never seen a ghost.
I don't count myself, of course,
Or their bare feet in bed,
Incubus, spreading his black wings
Over her in the slow afternoon hours
As she lay writhing
Like a snake at the end of a stick.
MEETING THE CAPTAIN
In one of these old seaside towns,
On soot-stained December afternoons
When it's wise to hurry home
Past the closed-up summer homes,
While he hugs the shadows in pursuit.
I caught a glimpse of him once
Towering in his stovepipe hat
At the top of the stairs to my room
With its view of the sky at sunset
Washing its bloody rags in the sea.
Looking for stowaways under my bed,
Runaway orphans, pot lickers
In wooden clogs, rat and mice catchers
And finding, instead, Melville's book
And a gull moping on the windowsill.
SWEETEST
Little candy in death's candy shop,
I gave your sugar a lick
When no one was looking,
Took you for a ride on my tongue
To all the secret places,
Trying to appear above suspicion
As I went about inspecting the confectionary,
Greeting the owner with a nod
With you safely tucked away
And melting to nothing in my mouth.
LEAVES AT NIGHT
Talking to themselves, digressing, rambling on—
Or is it a tête-à-tête we are overhearing?
A flutter of self-revelations, a gust of recriminations
With the moon slipping in and out of the clouds.
A half-mad oak tree affronted by nature's conduct,
The vagaries of New England weather.
The foolish adoration of every skimpy ray of sunlight,
Or some other disturbing truth?
A mock-heroic farce being played in whispers.
The tree as the hanging judge, the tree as the accused.
Windy night squabble followed by a long hush
As they wait anxiously for our applause.
IV
STARLINGS IN A TREE AT DUSK
Spooked me. They had heard a rumor
We had not yet,
And were collectively
On the verge of panic.
The few of us passing the park
Quickened our steps,
With a wary, sidelong glance
At each other.
Bent under some obscure burden,
We were fleei
ng,
Crossing the avenue and dispersing
As if we, too, had wings.
THE HEADLINE
The way you sat at the kitchen table
Made you look like you were staring at your feet
Or thinking of the next move
On an invisible chessboard.
Truth to tell, you were doing neither.
It was seven o'clock in the morning.
You were waiting for a ray of sunlight
To warm your cold feet,
Or your wife to amble in drowsily
In her frayed blue bathrobe,
And reach down with hair over her eyes
For the paper that had slid out of your hands