to hear the sobbing, such a voice, a dog
came up to me that night out of the blue
and put his muzzle in my hand nor would he
leave me for a minute, he would have stayed
with me forever and followed me up to my house
which butted onto the woods in back of the synagogue
and sat outside my door; or blue on the street
outside a Parlour near the Port Authority—
my seed inside—or blue in Ocean Grove
where sky and sea combined and walking the boardwalk
into the wind and blue in a shrink’s small parking lot
watching the clock and blue in my mother’s arms
always comforting her and blue with my daughter
starving herself and blue with my wife all day
playing solitaire or drawing houses and blue,
though smiling, when I came into the world, they called me
Jess Willard, thirteen pounds, and I had just hammered
Jack Dempsey into the ropes and I was shouting—
in a tinny voice—it sounded like someone weeping—
it always sounded like that—everything living.
Kingdom
As far as the color red
there was a splash in the southeast corner where
the tree I adored was dying.
And as for blue
it lay between the door and the first dogwood
sprawled and sucked and wilted.
And there was a definite tilt to the new apartment house
with pots of iris on the roof
and there was an indentation where a false
Italian had laid the bricks, the line was crooked
and once he got started nothing could stop him, seventy
bricks an hour, seven hundred a day.
As for daisies, I compare them to dogs
because of the commonality, I almost
want to say the loving community
as in the parks in downtown Philadelphia,
Mario Lanzo for one, Judy Garland another.
And as for the watering can,
and as for the ginkgo with its transitional leaf,
and as for the snapdragons, oh
I will sit and wait for that and I will
bend to pick them one by one, the red,
the orange, the mixed; and as for the railroad bridge
how long it will last,
and as for the rope hanging down from a girder, the weighted
ball a foot above the water, the life
in the river almost clearer with its simple
obscurities and new arrangements, the bushes
where they belong, inside the girders, a stray
Canada goose to swim above the cloud-stream;
and as for the bike path, how we passed each other
hugging the wall and riding on the edge,
and where we ended, either the road in front of
the billboard or the steep steps cut at an angle
below the greasy fireplace, there was—
as far as I can tell—a breaking point
and one path down and one path up,
for it was a kind of park
with grass and chains and benches
and little walkways
and fish inside a window
swimming from river to river
and I began to shiver
over my New York Times.
As for our touching foreheads,
and as for dancing with you and knocking books
and candlesticks on the floor,
and then our talk on Jesus, as for whether
he had a sister and whether he limped and whether he
disappeared, see Luke, and more and more
dancing, as far as that; and as for the kingdom
and what it meant in my life, how it was
sometimes like a cloud, how I used to stand
on the sidewalk and put my hand on the wall, I had
such pleasure I never wanted to move, the world
around me stopped, I think, and how I later
made my own kingdom, but I was fourteen or fifteen,
and how it wasn’t what Auden thought, mere drabbles of
Sunday school Isaiah and magazine Marx but
something sweeter than that and not just bony
justice and stringy wealth, say something out of the
letters we had in the thirties, WPA,
with a vengeance, nor was it kingdom come,
dying will be done, and though it would always
be later and later I loved it just as it was,
and I could smell it, it was hidden in the coal
and in the snow and in the noise the streetcars
made rounding the bend and picking up speed, I loved
walking all morning in the snow, I climbed
up icy steps thinking of how could beasts
lie down together and could the corruptible
just vanish like that, for it was a difficult climb,
and as for us, nothing was broken, only
a wine glass maybe, or an earring was lost—
and as for that, I would have broken a dish
or thrown my favorite teapot on the floor
or smashed the red and white rooster with the candy corn
feet and caramelized comb, although I would have
caressed him first since he guarded my house
and sang in an amorous voice, as far as that.
from American Sonnets
Winter Thirst
I grew up with bituminous in my mouth
and sulfur smelling like rotten eggs and I
first started to cough because my lungs were like cardboard;
and what we called snow was gray with black flecks
that were like glue when it came to snowballs and made
them hard and crusty, though we still ate the snow
anyhow, and as for filth, well, start with
smoke, I carried it with me I know everywhere
and someone sitting beside me in New York or Paris
would know where I came from, we would go in for dinner—
red meat loaf or brown choucroute—and he would
guess my hill, and we would talk about soot
and what a dirty neck was like and how
the white collar made a fine line;
and I told him how we pulled heavy wagons
and loaded boxcars every day from five
to one a.m. and how good it was walking
empty-handed to the No. 69 streetcar
and how I dreamed of my bath and how the water
was black and soapy then and what the void
was like and how a candle instructed me.
June
Since it is June already I could be back there
wearing a yellow hat to confuse the blue jay
or giving in to the smells; and once the heat
lets up I could be shivering in a T-shirt,
wishing I had a wool sweater, remembering
the bricks in this room and how we hated plaster
yet how we painted them white and how advanced
we felt when we finally had a telephone;
and I could be picking phlox by pulling the low-lying
roots and stop to think if there could be pomp
enough with only a single four-pointed star;
and I could bend down again for the chicory
that sky and land conspired so much with it caught
the sun for a minute, and put it over my sink,
the way we brought something into the house
that we could cut the dead leaves from and water,
now that we had a well, now that the wind
was breaking down the door and one of the old
zinc pennies was standing on end and we could find
the key inside the crock, now we had light.
Aberdeen
Proving Grounds, 1946
I have had the honor of being imprisoned, the
joy of breaking stone with a sledgehammer, the
pleasure of sleeping under a bare lightbulb, the
grief of shitting with a guard watching, the
sorrow of eating by myself, and I have
felt the lightness of being released and watched the
leaves change color from a speeding car,
and I first read the Gospels then, a stiff
and swollen paperback, the way paper
was made then, and I slept peacefully,
a blanket over the steel, as I recall,
though I planned the same murder every night,
which kept me going my thirteen working hours;
and when I got home I threw my duffel bag into
the river and walked to the No. 69 streetcar,
and even the clothes I wore, even the shoes,
even the overcoat, I stuffed into
the hot incinerator and listened to the roar
three stories down and watched the particles float
inside the chute and read an old newspaper
on top of the bundle and tested the cord and cleaned
the greasy window, since I was cleaning everything.
For the Bee
The fence itself can’t breathe, jewelweeds are choking
the life out of the dirt, not one tomato plant
can even survive, the crows are leaving, the worms
themselves won’t stay, the bricks are hot, the water
in one of my buckets has disappeared, and I
am trying to get a pencil out of my pocket
without breaking the point though it is painful
turning sideways in this heat and lifting my
leg like that; and there is a half-dead bee
drowning in my saucer and there is a dirty
kitchen window in which I sit in front of
a piece of rough slate and hold my book to the light
like someone under a tree and nod with tears
of mercy—for the bee I guess—and stare
and frown by turns and turn my head to the tree
so I can be kind and let the filtered light
go in and out and wave a little because of the
glass the way I do when I am facing
myself in the mirror and not even ridicule
the new president and not even loathe him.
Alone
I was alone and I could do what I wanted—
I couldn’t believe my luck—if I wanted to sleep
at ten in the morning I could sleep or two
in the afternoon, if that was my time, or wander
by car or foot delicately in the night
when everything was resting exhausted and stop to
eat in quiet, no humor at last, oh coffee,
coffee, I was sitting alone at a counter—
I was in a painting sort of—closeness
closer than love between me and the waitress,
and when I paid the bill more closeness; I walked
from window to window, once I walked the length
of Amsterdam Avenue, once I walked from Lake
Garda to Venice, a hundred miles, and Venice
south to Florence, through Bologna; I ate
mortadella cheap I washed in the fountains
I slept with the barking dogs and twice in my life
I woke up surrounded, once on the floor of a train station,
once on the floor of a bank. I left at five
or six in the morning; I put my keys in a bottle;
I wore two pair of socks and hid my money.
September, 1999
I was thinking about pears—or you were—I
don’t remember who first started to think,
though you said Seckel pears and I said Bartlett
and nothing I could do could budge you; I
could cut the skin so quickly and keep it so thin
the light goes through it, and I held it to the light
to catch the rose, and I knew when the core was
already brown and it was spreading just by
touching the flesh, and sometimes the neck was gone,
as far as eating, though you would call it the nose,
you with your Seckels, you with your freckles, and no one
but me has quite such pleasure extruding the stem,
and no one I know puts a pear in his coat pocket
when he goes out in the rain, as I do, though what
was the pleasure eating in sheets of water compared to
the loneliness eating by yourself, and even though
hornets were in your bowl and ten or twenty
were crawling over a rotten peach and three or
four were already after my pear since it was
autumn again and hornets were dying and they were
angry, and drunk, I just wiped them away.
You
You know my story better than I do and if
I stray a little you will correct me but more
like a child corrects his mother, entwined as they are,
when even a word is mispronounced or some
small detail is passed over, especially
how many teeth were in a mouth or what
the name of the wolf was—or the green spider—
only for once it is smells we are talking about
and I am trying to describe a fragrance
by using words and I try desperately
to do it, and you nod by way of agreement,
knowing how difficult and even ridiculous
it is and we both know that only by likeness
can we be near, comparison I should say,
and both of us struggle to describe the smell of
snow in 1940, mixed as it was with
coal fumes and the rawness of locusts in that
foggy mountain climate and an air
explosive with dust and dirt from the steel mills rising
like orange fat for the gods, though you weren’t born yet.
The Ink Spots
The thing about the dove was how he cried in
my pocket and stuck his nose out just enough to
breathe some air and get some snow in his eye and
he would have snuggled in but I was afraid
and brought him into the house so he could shit on
the New York Times, still I had to kiss him
after a minute, I put my lips to his beak
and he knew what he was doing, he stretched his neck
and touched me with his open mouth, lifting
his wings a little and readjusting his legs,
loving his own prettiness, and I just
sang from one of my stupid songs from one of my
vile decades, the way I do, I have to
admit it was something from trains. I knew he’d like that,
resting in the coal car, slightly dusted with
mountain snow, somewhere near Altoona,
the horseshoe curve he knew so well, his own
moan matching the train’s, a radio
playing the Ink Spots, the engineer roaring.
Exordium and Terminus
In your rendition of The Year 25–25
the airplane rattles, the engine roars, the sardines
around me smile, like sardines, and you kiss me
twice, once on the cheek and once on the ear.
It is a song from 1965–1970;
some keeper of music will know the title, the singer,
where it was on the charts, what it reflects
of what was Doomsday then and how long it stayed
in the top ten or twenty. And who was president,
whether he had a girlfriend, whether J. Edgar
was still around and whether or not his boyfriend
ate cottage cheese like him. And what I was doing,
and what car I was driving, and how much money I
owed to banks, universities and relatives.
And whether I had a girlfriend and what her breasts
were like—and her mind—and did I like being
subversive, and who would sleep with Nixon? and what was
the name of the motel on Route 22 that cost
twenty dollars in 1973, and was it
wrong to prefer the Watergate hearings to making
love, and how the pigs have taken over Doomsday.
In Time
As far as clocks—and it is time to think of them—
I have one on my kitchen shelf and it is
flat, with a machine-made flair, a perfect
machine from 1948, at the latest,
and made of shining plastic with the numbers
sharp and clear and slightly magnified in
that heartbreaking postwar style, the cord
too short, though what does it matter, since the mechanism
is broken and it sits unplugged alongside a
cheap ceramic rooster, his head insanely
small and yet his tiny brain alert for
he is the one who will crow and not that broken
buzzing relic, though time is different now
and dawn is different too, you were up all night
and it is dark when he crows and you are waiting
to see what direction you should face and if
you were born in time or was it wasted and what
the day looks like and is the rooster loyal.
Les Neiges d’Antan
Where art thou now, thou Ruth whose husband in the snow
creased thy head with a tire iron, thou who wore
ridiculous hats when they were the rage and loved
exotic cultures and dances such as the Haitian
Fling and the Portuguese Locomotive, my wife
hated because of her snooty attitude
or that her hair was swept up and her nose was aquiline
and her two boys raised hell with our green apples
the Sunday they came to visit, she in whose Mercury
we parked for over a year, every night
in front of her mother’s house in one of the slightly
genteel streets that led into the park
the other side downhill really from the merry-go-round,
or where is Nancy or who is the Nancy Ezra Pound
located in between his racial diatribes
Blessed as We Were Page 4