The Absence of a Noble Presence
If it was treason it was so well handled that it
Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things
That makes us aware of certain moments,
That the end is not far off since it will occur
In the present and this is the present.
No it was something not very subtle then and yet again
You’ve got to remember we don’t see that much.
We see a portion of eaves dripping in the pastel book
And are aware that everything doesn’t count equally—
There is dreaminess and infection in the sum
And since this too is of our everydays
It matters only to the one you are next to
This time, giving you a ride to the station.
It foretells itself, not the hiccup you both notice.
The Prophet Bird
Then take the quicklime to the little tree.
And ask. So all will remain in place, percolating.
You see the sandlots still foaming with the blood of light
Though the source has been withdrawn.
What stunted fig or quince pierced those
Now empty pairs of parentheses. You shout
With the holy feeling of an oppressor, a scourge,
In order for the details to stick,
Like little blades of grass, stubborn and sick.
It is still too many ideas for a landscape.
In another time the tide would have turned, automobiles and the factory
Gushing in to frame the shining, clever, puzzled faces.
There would be even less to pick over, to glean.
But take this idea with you, please. It’s all there,
Wrapped up. In the time it takes for nothing to happen
The places, the chairs and tables, the branches, were yours then.
Qualm
Warren G. Harding invented the word “normalcy,”
And the lesser-known “bloviate,” meaning, one imagines,
To spout, to spew aimless verbiage. He never wanted to be president.
The “Ohio Gang” made him. He died in the Palace
Hotel in San Francisco, coming back from Alaska,
As his wife was reading to him, about him,
From The Saturday Evening Post. Poor Warren. He wasn’t a bad egg,
Just weak. He loved women and Ohio.
This protected summer of high, white clouds, a new golf star
Flashes like confetti across the intoxicating early part
Of summer, almost to the end of August. The crowd is hysterical:
Fickle as always, they follow him to the edge
Of the inferno. But the fall is, deliciously, only his.
They shall communicate this and that and compute
Fixed names like “doorstep in the wind.” The agony is permanent
Rather than eternal. He’d have noticed it. Poor Warren.
Breezy Stories
“Not spoiling it for later, yet few are
So febrile, so flourishing, and I extract
Digits from the Carolinas to fill out those days in Maine,
Only now trusting myself, as in the latter period I had not yet learned to do.”
And on top of all this one must still learn to judge the quality
Of those moments when it becomes necessary to break the rule,
To relax standards, bring light and chaos
Into the order of the house. A slatternly welcome
Suits some as well, no doubt, but the point is
There are still others whom we know nothing about
And who are growing, it seems, at a rate far in excess
Of the legislated norm, for whom the “psychological consequences”
Of the forest primeval of our inconsistency, nay, our lives
If you prefer, and you can quote me, could be “numbing.”
Thus, one always reins in, after too much thoughtfulness, the joke
Prescription. Games were made to seem like that: the raw fruit, bleeding.
Oh, Nothing
The tent stitch is repeated in the blue and red
Letters on the blocks. Love is spelled L-O-V-E
And is echoed farther down by fear. These two are sisters
But the youngest and most beautiful sister
Is called Forward Animation. It all makes sense
If you look at her through the clock. Now,
Such towns and benign legends as were distilled
To produce this moment of silence are dissolved
In the stream of history. Of her it may be said
That what she says, she knows, and it will always come undone
Around her, as you are thinking, and so the choice
Is still and always yours, and yet
You may move on, untouched. The glassy,
Chill surface of the cascade reflected her,
Her opinions and future, de-defining you. To be amused this way
Is to be immortal, as water gushes down the sides of the globe.
Of the Islands
Then the thirty-three-year-old man
Then the young but no longer powerfully young man
Gnashed at the towel’s edge chewed the rag
Brought it home to him right out sighed with the force of
Palm winds: to do it unto others
Is to leave many undone and the carvings that are “quite cute”
May end up as yours dry in your storehouse
And this should be good for you yet
“Not as a gift but as a sign of transition”
The way all things spread and seem to remain under the lolling
Fronds and it is not your way as yet.
Only to be an absentee frees from the want of speculation
Drawing out conversations in the lobby more than you care
And each gift returns home to the bearer idly, at suppertime
Odd that he noticed you diminished in this case, but with any
The true respect conserves the hoofprint in the dust.
Farm Film
Takeitapart, no one understands how you can just do
This to yourself. Balancing a long pole on your chin
And seeing only the ooze of foliage and blue sunlight
Above. At the same time you have not forgotten
The attendant itch, but, being occupied solely with making
Ends meet, or the end, believe that it will live, raised
In secrecy, into an important yet invisible destiny, unfulfilled.
If the dappled cows and noon plums ever thought of
Answering you, your answer would be like the sun, convinced
It knows best, maybe having forgotten someday. But for this
She looked long for one clothespin in the grass, the rime
And fire of midnight etched each other out, into importance
That is like a screen sometimes. So many
Patterns to choose from, they the colliding of all dispirited
Illustration on our lives, that will rise in its time like
Temperature, and mean us, and then faint away.
Here Everything Is Still Floating
But, it’s because the liquor of summer nights
Accumulates in the bottom of the bottle.
Suspenders brought it to its, this, level, not
The tempest in a teapot of a private asylum, laughter on the back steps,
Not mine, in fine; I must concentrate on how disappointing
It all has to be while rejoicing in my singular
Un-wholeness that keeps it an event to me. These, these young guys
Taking a shower with the truth, living off the interest of their
Sublime receptivity to anything, can disentangle the whole
Lining of fa
bricating living from the instantaneous
Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from,
To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,
Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy
The long sweetness of the simultaneity, yours and mine, ours and mine,
The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem
Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.
Joe Leviathan
Just because I wear a voluminous cap
With a wool-covered wooden button at its peak, the cries of children
Are upon me, passing through me. The season at this time
Offers no other spectacle for the curious part-time executioner.
In his house they speak of rope. They skate past the window.
I have seen and know
Bad endings lumped with the good. They are in the future
And therefore cannot be far off.
The bank here is quite steep
And casts its shadow over the river floor.
An exploration, a field trip, might be worth making.
We could have made some nice excursions together.
Then he took a bat and the clams and
Where hope is the door it is stained with the strong stench of brine.
Inside too. The window frames have been removed. I mean
He can pass with me in the meaning and we still not see ourselves.
Some Old Tires
This was mine, and I let it slip through my fingers.
Nevertheless, I do not want, in this airy and pleasant city,
To be held back by valors that were mine
Only for the space of a dream instant, before continuing
To be someone else’s. Because there’s too much to
Be done that doesn’t fit, and the parts that get lost
Are the reasonable ones just because they got lost
And were forced to suffer transfiguration by finding their way home
To a forgotten spot way out in the fields. To have always
Had the wind for a friend is no recommendation. Yet some
Disagree, while still others claim that signs of fatigue
And mended places are, these offshore days, open
And a symbol of what must continue
After the ring is closed on us. The furniture,
Taken out and examined under the starlight, pleads
No contest. And the backs of those who sat there before.
A Prison All the Same
Spoken over a yellow kitchen table (just the ticket
For these recycling-minded times): You’ve got to show them who you are.
Just being a person doesn’t work anymore. Many of them drink beer.
A crisis or catastrophe goes off in their lives
Every few hours. They don’t get used to it, having no memory.
Nor do they think it’s better that way. What happens for them
Is part of them, an appendage. There’s no room to step back
To get a perspective. The old one shops and thinks. The fragrant bulbs
In the cellar are no use either. Last week a man was here.
But just try sorting it out when you’re on top
Of your destiny, like angels elbowing each other on the head of a pin.
Not until someone falls, or hesitates, does the renewal occur,
And then it’s only for a second, like a breath of air
On a hot, muggy afternoon with no air conditioning. I was scared
Then. Now it’s over. It can be removed like a sock
And mended, a little. One for the books.
Drunken Americans
I saw the reflection in the mirror
And it doesn’t count, or not enough
To make a difference, fabricating itself
Out of the old, average light of a college town,
And afterwards, when the bus trip
Had depleted my pocket of its few pennies
He was seen arguing behind steamed glass,
With an invisible proprietor. What if you can’t own
This one either? For it seems that all
Moments are like this: thin, unsatisfactory
As gruel, worn away more each time you return to them.
Until one day you rip the canvas from its frame
And take it home with you. You think the god-given
Assertiveness in you has triumphed
Over the stingy scenario: these objects are real as meat,
As tears. We are all soiled with this desire, at the last moment, the last.
Something Similar
I, the city mouse, have traveled from a long ways away
To be with you with my news. Now you have my passport
With its color photo in it, to be sweet with you
As the times allow. I didn’t say that because it’s true,
I said it from a dim upstairs porch into the veiled
Shapely masses of this country you are the geography of
So you can put it in your wallet. That’s all we can do
For the time being. Elegance has been halted for the duration
And may not be resumed again. The bare hulk tells us
Something, but mostly about what a strain it was to be brought
To such a pass, and then abandoned. So we may never
Again feel fully confident of the stratagem that bore us
Little by little, as most things do. To profit
By this mainstream is today’s chore and adventure. He
Who touches base first at dusk is possessed first, then wins.
Penny Parker’s Mistake
That it could not be seen as constituting an endorsement
Any way she looked, up, down, around, around again, always the same
For her, always her now, was in the way it winked back.
For naturally, to be selling these old Indian dinosaur
Eggs and to be in some obscure way in their debt, not
For the modest living they provided, rather in having come to know
Them at all (not everybody need know everybody, and when you
Stop to think of it, this fits each of us tighter than
Any of the others) was the throwback to the earlier
Age each dreamed, a dream with little gold flecks
And reflection of wet avenues in the japanned facing of it.
Now, naturally we caring for the success of the success
Cannot cancel postures from some earlier decade of this century
That come to invade our walking like the spokes of an umbrella
And in some real way undermine the heaven of attitudes our chance was.
To be uncoiling this way, now, is the truer, but slier, stage of inebriation.
Or in My Throat
To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps
To some reader a latticework of regrets, through which
You can see the funny street, with the ends of cars and the dust,
The thing we always forget to put in. For him
The two ends were the same except that he was in one
Looking at the other, and all his grief stemmed from that:
There was no way of appreciating anything else, how polite
People were for instance, and the dream, reversed, became
A swift nightmare of starlight on frozen puddles in some
Dread waste. Yet you always hear
How they are coming along. Someone always has a letter
From one of them, asking to be remembered to the boys, and all.
That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead.
It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over
Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face
Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey
, stupid!
Untitled
How tall the buildings were as I began
To live, and how high the rain that battered them!
Why, coming down them, as I often did at night,
Was a dream even before you reached the first gullies
And gave yourself over to thoughts of your own welfare.
It was the tilt of the wine in the cavalier’s tilted glass
That documents so unerringly the faces and the mood in the room.
One slip would not be fatal, but then this is not a win or lose
Situation, so involved with living in the past on the ridge
Of the present, hearing its bells, breathing in its steam….
And the shuttle never falters, but to draw an encouraging conclusion
From this would be considerable, too odd. Why not just
Breathe in with the courage of each day, recognizing yourself as one
Who must with difficulty get down from high places? Forget
The tourists—other people must travel too. It hurts now,
Cradled in the bend of your arm, the pure tear, doesn’t it?
At Lotus Lodge
After her cat went away she led a quiet but remarkable
Existence. No tandem ways, but once out of town
The boxcars alternated with scenes of the religious life
In strong, faded colors. There is something in every room
Of the house, and in the powder room one truly inconceivable thing
That doesn’t matter and is your name. You arrived late last night.
In between then and now is a circle for sleeping in
And we are right, at such moments, not to worry about the demands of others;
They are like trees planted on a slope, too preoccupied
With the space dividing them to notice this singular tale of the past
And the thousand stories just like it, until one spills over
Into dreams, and they can point to it and say, “That’s a dream,”
And go about their business. There is no compelling reason
For this moment to insist, yet it does, and has been with us
Down from the time England and Scotland were separate monarchies. She got