while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.
But here it is winter, and wrong
to speak of other seasons as though they exist.
Time has only an agenda
in the wallet at his back, while we
who think we know where we are going unfazed
end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know
by the unexpectedness of ice and stars
and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,
a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease
one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down
into this wagonload of prisoners.
The meter will be screamingly clear then,
the rhythms unbounced, for though we came
to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating
even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails
of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,
only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.
TWO PIECES
I
Edith and Julian
waiting, awaited by others
in the hills, yes.
But by what unobstructed parade
ground do I reach that hill?
For it is
simple to say
the coordinates when they greet you,
not like getting on with life,
not the street.
II
When the cauldron is
tipped, whatever
is in it flows outward
like the mouth of a river
taking out its dentures.
No obit, more socks.
And a stray whoosis
that knew your name once
now sits on the floor.
Now no aftershocks.
The horse’s mane tears—
THE FRIENDLY CITY
Unless you put it away
he can never play with it again,
the marimba, and you know what that means.
Our city bemoans us, or does it
only seem to? Showers that come in shifts,
light poles guarded in air,
the dry cackle of trees in the Botanical Gardens?
Was it for this suburban marketplace
you wrote, and are writing still
in that wire-bound notebook?
Things like: “Man cannot stand what he has become
but he loves to lap up his own vomit”?
In that case the city will probably stay around
for most of the day. It likes your sleeping sound,
not the bad silence of the others
who are even now clogging its approaches,
giving the place a bad name.
Oh if it was a name he wanted
why didn’t somebody say something?
We could have found him one so easily
like “Elector of Brandenburg,”
and the city could have seen its reflection
finally, a ducal palace, upended.
THE DESPERATE HOURS
The man, someone’s uncle, went down
to where the barrier said to him why
do you disturb a corner of the universe
that is yours that had been yours
before either of us was invented?
He said truly I did not know I snore.
He said truly I invented a hoof medication.
But these are tangible, lazy things—
what about the uncertain, pallid ones
they gave you at birth to play with?
Why did not the city centers
come to be called what is this town?
He said I never saw any but chaste cheeks reflected
in her armor. The tower leans
O more desperately than it has done
these twenty centuries past.
Why is it my dungheap, my rosary?
And in this true saying all are warehoused,
the flatirons, the jib, even the two horses
not paying any real attention.
But it is your watch fob,
your crenellated bow window, bent
indeed like a bow, that’s why they call them that,
your small town, your farm of about forty acres
outside it. Your wart. Your five-year diary.
Your intention to have made this once it had passed.
THE DECLINE OF THE WEST
O Oswald, O Spengler, this is very sad to find!
My attic, my children
ignore me for the violet-banded sky.
There are no clean platters in the cupboard
and the milkman’s horse tiptoes by, as though
afraid to wake us.
What! Our culture in its dotage!
Yet this very poem refutes it,
springing up out of the collective unconscious
like a weasel through a grating.
I could point to other extremities, both on land
and at sea, where the waves will gnash your stark theories
like a person eating a peanut. Say, though,
that we are not exceptional,
that, like the curve of a breast above a bodice,
our parabolas seek and find the light, returning
from not too far away. Ditto the hours
we’ve squandered: daisies, coins of light.
In the end he hammered out
what it was not wanted we should know.
For that we should be grateful,
and for that patch of a red ridinghood
caught in brambles against the snow.
His book, I saw it somewhere and I bought it.
I never read it for it seemed too long.
His theory though, I fought it
though it spritzes my song,
and now the skateboard stops
impeccably. We are where we exchanged
positions. O who could taste the crust of this love?
THE ARCHIPELAGO
Well, folks, and how
about a run for the sister islands?
You can see them from where you stand—
will you barter vision for the sinking feeling
of lumps of clay?
The daffodils
were out in force, as were, improbably, the nasturtiums,
which come along much later, as a rule. But so help me,
there they were.
She said, may I offer you some?
His tangling so flummoxed him,
all he said was “Boats along the way.”
Really, there are so many kinds of everything
it halts you when you think about it,
which is all the time, really—oh, not consciously,
that would be a waste, but in sly corners,
like a rabbit sitting up straight, waiting for what?
We can study drawing and arithmetic, and the signs
are still far away, like a painted sign
fading on the side of a building. Oh, there is so much to know.
If only we weren’t old-fashioned, and could swallow
one word like a pill, and it would branch out thoughtfully
to all the other words, like the sun following behind the cloud shadow
on a hummock, and our basket would be full,
too ripe for the undoing, yet too spare for sleep,
and the temperature would be exactly right.
Miserere! Instead I am browsed on by endless students,
clumps of them, receding to this horizon and the next one—
all the islands have felt it,
have had their rest disturbed by the knocking knees of foals,
by kites’ shrieking. And to think I could have had it
for the undoing of it,
snug in the tree house, my plans
open to the world’s casual inspection, like an unzipped fly�
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but tell us, you must have had more experiences than that?
Oh the cross-hatched rain, fanning out from my crow’s-feet,
the angry sea that always calms down,
the argument that ended in a smile.
These are tracks that lovers’ feet fit.
But at the end they flag you down.
GUMMED REINFORCEMENTS
Insame, trapped together in a …
How would you like one?
Growing up is what it is,
leaning into the wind, without a cent.
We had the most beautiful childhood
and lunch—that’s even better.
I only paid $4.75 for mine.
An embarrassment, considering
it would be an embarrassment for me too.
Then he frolicked and said, whatever happens
happens in a dream,
eleven, twelve, fifteen times a day.
Sometimes when you are away
it happens at night,
all night.
Children we had lost once
know how to keep repeating the piece
they learned, knew the way back to us,
us, as grave robbers, of an old candy store
with a cake as centerpiece: a wild,
fragile one. Therefore read this:
a sun, mild as any, with diamond-tipped consequences
somewhere. An atmosphere of brooding, perhaps …
Yes! And the cake was square!
How did you guess? And all along, a
stork was creeping up the stair
to its bower, injured by the furniture
and last-minute preparations. Nobody
came to sign its register.
There was no one in the large drum
a canker folded over, looking
at you real mean-like.
And I and the dream are still only acquaintances
after all this time, a century, it seems,
from Arkansas. Did the goats get milked in time
for your hand to graze it? Was the squall over then?
Those who paint the heavenly porch
put a damper on all our ideas, extreme creations
like love. You heard me, ladies—
past and pure truth, swaying,
light out over the land.
The crowd of robbers doesn’t go away.
It would rather be sunset, if that were inexorable
enough. But it’s not. Count the pigeons, the people,
townspeople, running fast in all directions.
Sign here for the blanket of furze, please.
SPOTLIGHT ON AMERICA
I must proceed unflustered.
I should have shopped around.
After all, comparison shopping is what this place’s
all about. I think. These are very crisp.
Nothing like a big stranger in the dark
“to concentrate the mind,” as Dr. Johnson said.
Venetian blinds are for keeping close watch on—
there goes another one!
And if there is no peace in declarations
they may become ornaments. After all, superstitions
did once, and aren’t they very like history,
even the same thing as?
Back then when someone said “Pigs in a blanket,”
these shifting animals in nordic drapery
would coalesce. Today, other pieces of statuary
from far and near, near and far,
are hastening toward the whirlpool of history.
Well, let them try it. And if a few old pros
want it, let them try it too. Let this frangible
passing moment be the last to know, as usual.
WHAT DO YOU CALL IT WHEN
The fire betokened it
as a woman means many things
in this deck—
that’s why unsavory characters
He knew that out of hiding
the fire would burn fast at last
providing the smooth yet crinkled edge
so much flatness requires
that from savannas
the kitchen landscape may begin:
amazed quinces
the drink on the corner
so everything would be a red or a blue sign
Crowders-out of old age
assassins of youth
gentlemen walking:
the trustees of this enterprise.
It is not difficult to single out one pearl in a bushel of them. What’s needed is to set us back on the track, having gently peed, and that for some orpheum other than ourselves. Some shelter that is not us.
They laughed and began to dance in a ring, heads bobbing, ankles sweeping, the same old private dance that is remorse for not having blossomed sooner and the poison of this day, under vines, to correct that stance.
Fairs and cupolas notwithstanding it is a tray of cameos to be brushed past, the invisible seizure, as when crowds don’t find what they are looking for.
So I came at last to you for the comedy of it, and in this I have no regrets, only silences, secrets, and the mask that was sent me long ago. I repeat it in paragraphs in these parts and am not ready to go home yet.
PLEASURE BOATS
Wash it again
and yet again.
The equation drifts.
Wallowing in penguins,
she was wallowing in penguins.
With fiendish cleverness
the foreground closes in.
The four-leaf clover loses.
PRETTY QUESTIONS
The two parks interfaced,
of summer earth,
of shroud and color,
red hope.
Are you growing up to write your novel now?
He’d been waiting on tables for several years,
lost without a stinger.
Should travel agents travel less?
The girls can never be free of the volcanoes’ might.
See, it was like tar between the boards,
outlines, though without force or purpose—
just things to drag
along, carry along, to meet a fee
with. And the damage
during the minute was requested:
that it was over last night
before quitting was necessary,
in a certain way that I was going to tell you about.
They came at me with ice-cream implements.
You read it first here.
Why you are all blue,
your shoes are too,
so is the barrel of space that encloses us.
Maybe everything is.
We should want it to be.
Help. I have to go to the bathroom.
Why, there’s your difference, of course,
your having to come down
from the park, gorse-scented,
and the pleasing treetops.
Not much of this was ever mine
but some of it had to be for
me to invest it with a shine.
Go on. I’ll go on doing that
if we can stay together, play together.
The two mountains were all mine.
They are yours now.
That is, you can have them if you want them
and the day that comes with them.
PATHLESS WANDERINGS
Whereas I, efficacious ruin,
in former times a ladder, no quarter
gave to the bullies as they were emptying out
of school, in the time of roses.
It seems I grew exceeding tall.
There was something wrong with most men.
Women, however, were overcome with sympathy
where the last lawn tennis had been.
In my sleep I shared tears and bread
with my loving companions. We were three,
stamped with the brav
ura of those times.
I can tell you not one swatch matters now.
The tide has come in once too often.
We kneel to say our prayers
to an enormous kettledrum. The reeds’ stance
perfects the searchlight’s curving grasp,
sleeps behind things.
Which is what we all …
Then when I saw the ball descending
and felt the air crisped for the packaging of me
I did what others before you have done:
appeared to you as a raven in a dream
that washed away all landscapes, now and to come.
Too bad the birds don’t like their bath.
I like it cheaper,
and to have the exact change,
teeth for this meat.
ON FIRST LISTENING TO SCHREKER’S Der Schatzgräber
The woman with the confused soul keeps calling.
Was gibt es? Now that you’re in Honolulu you’ve got to live it up
no matter what kind of grub they throw at you
on Main Street. O but my past is operatic
you see, the glitter, wink and shimmer,
all are in my bones. The hegemony of irrational
behavior always leaves the by-then-very-determined hoplites astonished,
they moan in groves. Or do you prefer
the sea? How about this empty, gravel-encrusted courtyard?
The sea please. A time of increased understanding.
Such things as male bonding didn’t exist.
En revanche, ponytails were something small horses wore.
Asses in gear, we frisked in salt-air sunlight. Obviously a whole lot
aren’t going to exist today; we should be thankful for it
and pick up our rooms, for tonight the night will be bright,
fewer of us than can stand it will be chosen,
examined, tossed cruelly into corners like rag dolls
missing one or more limbs. Say, then,
what did you want when you came here?
Was it to subvert our cunning, our lust,
and turn them back on us, reflections in a chipped pocket mirror?
And if so why then utilize us
as indicators? Our auras are unsafe,
or so we think, so we have been taught. And those who graze them
invariably come to grief.
But that’s just what life’s about, isn’t it?
So your coming sped our just deserts.
One is off with a nerd in a pothole somewhere.
And we can have, have, I say,
whatever surplus barriers come our way.