I like it best when we do not say a word.
When we lie side by side
Like two lovers after their passion is spent.
Once again, day is breaking.
A small bird in the trees is pouring her heart out
At the miracle of the coming light.
It hurts.
The beauty of a night spent sleepless.
The Toad
It’ll be a while before my friends
See me in the city,
A while before we roam the streets
Late at night
Shouting each other’s names
To point out some sight too wonderful
Or too terrifying
To give it a name in a hurry.
I’m staying put in the country,
Rising early,
Listening to the birds
Greet the light,
And when they fall quiet,
To the wind in the leaves
Which are as numerous here
As the crowds in your city.
God never made a day as beautiful as today,
A neighbor was saying.
I sat in the shade after she left
Mulling that one over,
When a toad hopped out of the grass
And, finding me harmless,
Hopped over my foot on his way to the pond.
Summer Light
It likes empty churches
At the blue hour of dawn.
The shadows parting
Like curtains in a sideshow,
The eyes of the crucified
Staring down from the cross
As if seeing his bloody feet
For the very first time.
The Invisible
1
It was always here.
Its vast terrors concealed
By this costume party
Of flowers and birds
And children playing in the garden.
Only the leaves tell the truth.
They rustle darkly,
Then fall silent as if listening
To a dragonfly
Who may know a lot more of the invisible,
Or why else would its wings be
So translucent in the light,
So swift to take flight,
One barely notices
It’s been here and gone.
2
Don’t the shadows know something about it?
The way they, too, come and go
As if paying a visit to that other world
Where they do what they do
Before hurrying back to us.
Just today I was admiring the one I cast
As I walked alone in the street
And was about to engage it in conversation
On this very topic
When it took leave of me suddenly.
Shadow, I said, what message
Will you bring back to me,
And will it be full of dark ambiguities
I can’t even begin to imagine
As I make my slow way in the midday sun?
3
It may be hiding behind a door
In some office building,
Where one day you found yourself
After hours
With no one to ask for directions,
Among the hundreds of doors
All lacking information what sort of business,
What sort of drudgery goes on
Inside its narrow, poorly lit rooms.
Some detective agency
That’ll find God for a small fee?
Some company ready to insure you,
Should one day,
Despite the promises of your parish priest,
You turn up in hell?
The long hallway ends at a window
Where even the light of the dying day
Seems old and dusty.
It understands what waiting is,
And when found out
Appears surprised to see you here.
4
The moment you shut off the lamp,
The two dead people
You called your parents.
You’d hoped you’d see tonight
The girl you loved once,
And that other one who let you
Slip a hand under her skirt.
Instead, here’s that key in a saucer of small change
That wouldn’t open any lock,
The used condom you found in church,
The lame crow your neighbor kept.
Here’s the fly you once tortured,
A rock you threw at your best friend,
The pig that let out a scream
As the knife touched its throat.
5
People here still tell stories
About a blind old man
Who rolled dice on the sidewalk
And paid children
In the neighborhood
To tell him what number came up.
When they were away in school,
He’d ask anyone
Whose steps he heard,
The mailman making his rounds,
The undertakers loading a coffin in their black wagon,
And you, too, mister,
Should you happen to come along.
6
Dark evening, gray old tenement,
A white cat in one window,
An old man eating his dinner in another.
Everyone else hidden from view,
Like the one who waits for the tub
To fill up with hot water
While she undresses before a mirror
Already beginning to steam over.
Imagination, devil’s helper,
Made me glimpse her two breasts
As I hurried by with my face tucked in my collar,
Because the wind was raw.
7
Dear Miss Russell:
Nights, you took me on a private tour
Of the empty town library.
I could hardly keep up
As you darted along the rows of books,
Whispering their names,
Pointing out the ones I ought to read,
Then forgetting all about me,
Pulling the light cord
And leaving me in the dark
To grope for a book
Among the shelves,
Surely the wrong one,
As I was soon to learn
At the checkout desk
Under your pitying gaze
That followed me into the street
Where I dared not stop
To see what I held in my hand
Until I had rounded the corner.
8
A rusty key from a cigar box full of keys
In a roadside junk shop.
The one I held on to a long time
Before I let it slip
Through my fingers.
Most likely, when it was still in use,
The reclusive author
Of “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Was still cooped up
In his mother’s house in Salem.
It opened a small drawer
With a stack of yellowed letters
In a dresser with a mirror
That gave back a pale face
With a pair of feverish eyes
In a room with a view
Of black, leafless trees
And red clouds hurrying at sunset,
Where soon tears fell
Causing the key to go rusty.
9
O Persephone, is it true what they say,
That everything that is beautiful,
Even for one fleeting moment,
Descends to you, never to return?
Dressmaker pinning a red dress in a store window,
Old man walking your sickly old dog,
Even you little children holding hands
&
nbsp; As you cross the busy street with your teacher,
What hope do you have for us today?
With the sky darkening so early,
The first arriving flakes of snow,
Falling here and there, then everywhere.
10
Invisible one, watching the snow
Through a dark window
From a row of dark schoolhouse windows,
Making sure the snowflakes fall
In proper order
Where they were fated to fall
In the gray yard,
And hush the moment they do.
The crow nodding his head
As he walks by
Must’ve been a professor of philosophy
In a previous life
Who despite changed circumstances
Still opens his beak
From time to time
As if to address his adoring students,
And seeing nothing but snow,
Looks up puzzled
At one of the dark windows.
11
Bird comforting the afflicted
With your song,
The one or two lying awake
In the vast slumber
Of small town and countryside,
Who know nothing of each other
As they listen intently
To every little tweet
Afraid they’ll do something
To make it hush.
In the cool, silvery light,
The outline of the window visible,
Some trees in the yard
About to let go of the night,
The others in no big hurry.
XIII
from THE VOICE AT 3:00 A.M.
Postcard from S.
So far I’ve met here two Homers and one Virgil.
The town is like a living anthology of classic literature.
Thunder and lightning almost every afternoon.
When neighbors meet, they slap mosquitoes
On each other’s foreheads and go off red in the face.
I’m lying in a hammock next to a burning barn
Watching a birch tree in the yard.
One minute it wrestles with the wind and smoke,
The next it raises its fists to curse the gods.
That, of course, makes it a Trojan
To the Greeks just arriving on a fire engine.
Empty Barbershop
In pursuit of happiness, you may yet
Draw close to it momentarily
In one of these two leather-bound chairs
With the help of scissors and a comb,
Draped to the chin with a long white sheet,
While your head slips through
The invisible barber’s greasy fingers
Making your hair stand up straight,
While he presses the razor to your throat,
Causing your eyes to spring open
As you discern in the mirror before you
The full length of the empty barbershop
With two vacant chairs and past them
The street, commensurately empty,
Except for the pressed and blurred face
Of someone straining to look inside.
Grayheaded Schoolchildren
Old men have bad dreams,
So they sleep little.
They walk on bare feet
Without turning on the lights,
Or they stand leaning
On gloomy furniture
Listening to their hearts beat.
The one window across the room
Is black like a blackboard.
Every old man is alone
In this classroom, squinting
At that fine chalk line
That divides being-here
From being-here-no-more.
No matter. It was a glass of water
They were going to get,
But not just yet.
They listen for mice in the walls,
A car passing on the street,
Their dead fathers shuffling past them
On their way to the kitchen.
Serving Time
Another dreary day in time’s invisible
Penitentiary, making license plates
With lots of zeros, walking lockstep counter-
clockwise in the exercise yard or watching
The lights dim when some poor fellow,
Who could as well be me, gets fried.
Here on death row, I read a lot of books.
First it was law, as you’d expect.
Then came history, ancient and modern.
Finally philosophy—all that being-and-nothingness stuff.
The more I read, the less I understand.
Still, other inmates call me professor.
Did I mention that we had no guards?
It’s a closed book who locks
And unlocks the cell doors for us.
Even the executions we carry out
By ourselves, attaching the wires,
Playing warden, playing chaplain
All because a little voice in our head
Whispers something about our last appeal
Being denied by God himself.
The others hear nothing, of course,
But that, typically, you may as well face it,
Is how time runs things around here.
Autumn Sky
In my great-grandmother’s time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.
•
The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.
•
Oh, Cynthia,
Take a clock that has lost its hands
For a ride.
Get me a room at Hotel Eternity
Where Time likes to stop now and then.
•
Come, lovers of dark corners,
The sky says,
And sit in one of my dark corners.
There are tasty little zeros
In the peanut dish tonight.
Separate Truths
Night fell without asking
For our permission.
Mary had a headache,
And my eyes hurt
From squinting at the newspapers.
We could still make out
A few old trees in the yard.
They take it as it comes.
Separate truths
Do not interest them.
We’ll have to run for it, I said,
And had no idea what I meant.
The coming of the inevitable,
What a strange bliss that is,
And I had no idea what she meant.
Late September
The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.
Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.
This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.
&
nbsp; XIV
NEW POEMS
I’m Charles
Swaying handcuffed
On an invisible scaffold,
Hung by the unsayable
Little something
Night and day take turns
Paring down further.
My mind’s a ghost house
Open to the starlight.
My back’s covered with graffiti
Like an elevated train.
Snowflakes swarm
Around my bare head
Choking with laughter
At my last-minute contortions
To write something on my chest