like an old indian, for just a little
rain over this desert.
Telling the Hour
if you want to know
the time you must look
at a clock, or stare continuously
into the moon,
until it grows round like a clock.
under the moon growing round
a hunter strolls; he must be saying,
“i have killed an animal.” however,
as the evening draws
close in for a better look, it is
nine p.m. and the hunter’s arms
are loaded with air, his belly
swells with the solitude. he is saying,
“i think i have killed an animal,
a barely visible bird,
at eight p.m., or the dim
figure of a woman bent over
her sewing, in a distant house,
who glanced occasionally
at the big moon. and i shot
a telephone pole as it strained
into the sky, wanting desperately the moon.”
as he continues among the trees,
the ticking of the city becomes
larger, moving the birds and insects
from the air, rattling
the moon so that it opens
and tolls down upon the hunter.
his hands try to caress the sudden,
awkward hush, and he wonders more often,
“have i killed an animal?”
Retirement
i would like to be just an old man with my gin,
retiring even from these leaves into
my big, gradual silence beyond the wood
and it will be good,
wife, because i have pointed to you,
and you have become real. within
this darker stillness my eyes grow too wide.
it must be that seeing you in the trees
becoming softer than i ever dreamed
has made it all seem
a multitude of nonsense, all the seas,
the planets, all i wrote. i lied,
i swear to you i lied, becoming old and so
very drunk, when i did not lie to you.
The Year’s First Snow
emptying into
the freezing, quiet alleys
there is the voice of a single
ferreting drunk. if he is singing
it is lovely, and if he talks on
strangely, he, at least,
understands. by the river, noiselessly,
some lovers have frozen
in the winter, and they will be taken
away, with the floods of spring.
in an upper window
of the county jail, the sleepless man
who was framed knows
that all along, all along,
this snow that rests
more heavily over the reach of branches
has been descending.
On a Busy Street a Man Walks Behind a Woman
there is the chance that you will step
ahead of me into the traffic
alive, and that there will be
an accident. always i am walking,
i am seeing your heels and thinking
of something else, but always i am
asking you to remember: if you step carefully
into the screeching
of tires and become bloody, i must not
be the one extending himself awkwardly
into the confusion to say, my dear
mrs. hutchins, do
forgive the way we have arranged
your body, dead like that
on the pavement, but surely you
understand? it must
not be me who is the one
fisherman to fish you up drowned among
all that seaweed. it cannot
be me looking in all
directions for help, knowing all
along that it is just you
and me, finally, and that i am
alone to hear the sound of the breakfast
bell opening as it did
into the corners of the barnyard, and your
mother’s voice calling back
and forth among the animals. am i
positioned here alone to welcome
you from such a very distant
place, and must i now tell you what every
second in your life, what all the
breathing and the continual inching
forward of the body through each and every
day, when i am so absolutely
young, when i am so
unprepared, must i
tell you what it has all
at last come to? you are
dead, mrs. hutchins, amid this
mob craning to see your own blood,
which has somehow
gotten away from you in all
the excitement—i am so truly sorry,
of course it isn’t fair, you weren’t
prepared, but don’t you see it works
this way for all of us, for instance that
i am here just isn’t fair, either, because
of my unpreparedness, because of my lack
of anything to say except you’re dead,
you’re dead, i didn’t
do it, i didn’t do it.
Checking the Traps
morning,
the door opening, changing
into a doorway. half
the night i stayed awake and smoked
and watched the mousetraps.
the mice were there, nudging
into cups and plates, one fell
into the toaster, but escaped.
they waited until i gave up and slept to die.
for these mice
the night will be long, i heard
the iron snapping
in my sleep and dreamed my wife was
closing the door.
two mice are dead, for my wife.
mice make her legs
go watery, as they do sometimes after her climax.
one mouse’s head is barely
in the trap, one eye probing
toward the ceiling where i could tell him
there is nothing.
the other mouse is flung willingly under the iron
bar. i wonder, were they
married? was she pregnant? they are
going out together,
in the garbage this morning. it was
morning when we were married.
it has been morning
for a long time. that mouse, with his
eye. did he hear the iron snapping,
and dream it was his
wife with her stretching, laden tits
closing the door?
The Man Among the Seals
for Ed Schroeder
at night here in the park it is different:
the man by the seal pool stalks
through an acute emptiness, encircled
by the city. is he
taking off his clothes?
by day i have seen
the seals, enclosed, blundering
among the spattered rocks. they climb
like prisoners of a ferris wheel, above
their pool and above
the peanuts floating through
air, high over the sudden, too large
teeth of the spectators. but at night
without their land-locked captors moving
gracefully by, the seals
seem less inept, even
on the hostile rocks.
before dawn they rise
and dive, becoming masters
in the water. the figure in
underwear on the left is not
a seal. before me and
an audience of trees he has
joined the seals. drunk, perhaps,
and, a staggerer on land,
&n
bsp; perhaps he hopes to move cleanly,
like a seal, through water. or,
sober, perhaps he dives to assume
the clumsiness now shed by the seals: then
he will tumble drunk onto
the ground, and the seals, plunging
landward, will find
no awkwardness among the rocks, will
no longer wonder deep
within themselves at a dry hardness
which is not ice. each day
he will return, wetness
forever staining through his pants,
to watch his seals as they rise
above the rocks to pluck the floating
bits of food, as they slide through
the air over the trees, the
ferris wheel grown
stationary with shame, the tiny
unfamiliar bodies jerking
under balloons through the lighted park.
Crossing Over the Ice
i should have brought
an axe to this white place and seen
for sure if, far beneath,
a city is falling irretrievably away.
as it is i can only guess
that this spot, warmer
than the rest, is where the tallest
steeple was cut loose to unmoor the town.
i wonder: could i nudge my vision
over onto the spaces below?
it has thus far been
easy to locate myself, somewhere between hands
warming in pockets and the hands that waken,
empty, out of the shadows
of buildings. i know
what’s going on; the stars
evade the oceans, thank goodness,
and just here there are
the trees fumbling with roots under the earth.
to chip through to a town
that will not come back might
put me anywhere, i might become
that someone on the farther bank, who is standing
still within the movement of trees, as if
one step would lose him gradually
into the stars. he may be
the one who has leaned
his head into the air underneath and seen
another dawn glowing like a deep fish,
seen, as here above,
the citizens in the morning
growing tinier, weightless
and lost from their families,
preparing for beautiful
supermarkets, for an endlessness
of downward flight under an expanse of snow.
Upon Waking
at the far edge of earth, night
is going away. another
poem begins. slumped over
the typewriter i must get this
exactly, i want to make it
clear this morning that your
face, as it opens
from its shadow, is more
perfect than yesterday; and
that the light, as it
hesitates over the approach
of your smile, has given this
aching bed more than warmth,
more than poems; someway
a generous rose, or a very
delicate arrangement of sounds,
has come to peace in this new room.
A Child Is Born in the Midwest
as i look on your struggle i remember
i have seen arriving from movie theaters
the forms of people
disgraced, slanting heavily out of the cold,
their coats, the muscles under the skin
fraying, given up to the air.
and later, near morning,
i have seen their figures compelled
from the panic and emptiness of the town asleep
into all-night diners, which flounder, exhausted.
outside the towns the wide plains
are delirious
with frozen animals,
and the sky is rising with moons and moons.
these faces lifted over the street
are not moons. even so, they are
lost somewhere between worlds and home,
in a town that can’t quite hold onto the earth.
i listen to your tiny,
unbelieving anguish,
and i wonder if i have known
these faces in another time;
and i think that you have come here, drifting
through universes of cold
because no longer, no longer
could the womb contain your loneliness.
To Enter Again
for the astronauts on the occasion
of their re-entry
for the first few instants in
this jungled machine we were all
at once human. then
we became confused monsters,
and then we were, as before,
sardines waiting to land hung
over like sardines.
for the first few instants
we had been dragged
outside of everything. but
the cracks began to show, each
of us was too much the
other, and we were once
again inside our terribly good
balloon, revolving and knowing
far too much.
the first day we slept
little, we examined and counted
the stars. we thought we should. and now
we sleep most of the time, dreaming
ourselves away from this haze
of tubes and gauges. we have learned: we
have been brought here to
wait, and to learn
to live packed
in forever, waiting to be pried
out. to live here truly
washed by the sea, turning end
over end, waiting to halt,
and breathe, but never
halting. waiting to slide at
last toward the freshly lighted
earth, there to wait and dive again far
down into tubes and fantasies.
the moon lies
there beyond us, cringing toward the neat
package of stars, not
waiting. below, in dreams, the earth scatters
in all directions way from
itself, and yearns
toward us, toward our distant perfection.
Drunk in the Depot
for Bob Zimmerman
drunk here in the railway depot
i can recall your train budging
forward in that other depot, that first
squash of steam making
your window real and solid. that is
why i am jumping down onto
the tracks, or because i am a gazelle.
i left later, by bus, and now
the city is gray and vacant, so i
am bounding out of the depot along
the tracks though i think
i am here to see someone
off. the train moved and you were
windowed in and everything was
final. or i might have left
by plane from the airport. no,
it was bus. i am supposed to
wave goodbye to a girl. that
was the last time i
saw you, so i will keep
moving down the tracks because
i am some kind of zebra, because
these railway tracks are mashing
like ridiculous snowshoes into
the distance. she thinks i am
cute, in a grubby, nonsexual
way. it was summer then; now
it is winter, with all
the roads stationed outside
the houses and the snow coming
to get them. it should have been
night, and it is.
The Cabinet Member
…wake up in the morning:
a critical edi
torial, or a Herb Block cartoon.
RICHARD NIXON
wake up
in the morning: a critical
editorial, or a herb block
cartoon. sometimes, if my wife
would just leave me alone things
would be all right. you should see
this cartoon,
or the poor sogginess
of this bacon, you don’t believe this
country’s going down
and not up. the sewers
demand attention. the potomac
is swallowing up all the love,
and society is
killing itself, for love. if i
had a dog there would be
more love in it for me. if
i had something in my hands.
In a Rented Room
this is a good dream, even if the falling is
no less real, and even if my feet will crumble
on the lurking ground. my throat itches, and i am
awake in this room which is no less vacant for
all my presence and there are no aspirin. here
is the sun with its tired surprise, the morning. there
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 2