The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly
Page 3
are the cars and streets moving in the usual
fashion. the room wants to be rid of me. it must
fall open and communicate with other dim,
stifled rooms when i have slaughtered my body in
the sheets and fumbled streetward to sooth the itch. what
do you learn, room? what have you told, why are the stains
and the accusing glasses pointing so when i
return? there was the girl some time ago. she would
want to know where the guilt comes from, that hums over
the bed and descends, like an uncaring thumb, to
blot me out. she would help me, when the universe
has fooled me again, and the joke has gone too far,
when the itch, climbing, deep, remains after bottle
after bottle, and i inch toward death and i
must poke my body into a thousand vacant
darknesses before i strike the correct sleep, and dream.
Driving Toward Winter
miraculously,
there is the sun, coming back.
beneath it the cows wander, more
exhausted, baffled by the sparseness
of the winter grass. were i
a cow staggering over vanishing grass,
i would feel like the man
in the story, the one where
he leaps into his sports car to find
that everything has become an ocean, saying
certainly i did not expect
the sea. yesterday the numerous
actual cars spilled over
solid hills. kissing
my wife i never wished for the sea. in
an agony of exactness, bent
into the tiny measuring dials i did not
yearn for these impossible waves,
or for the stopped movement
of trees. the wrecked,
liquid countryside unfolds
beyond me, and i am the last bubble of air,
searching for air.
licking bare dirt, the nearest cow
raises his head to me, not understanding.
i would tell him about the sun, how it
rolls nearer, hauling the spring.
but he peers at me as if through mist, as i
would peer through the fogged, cracking windows
of my fast car at the half-
distinguished movements of an unusual fish.
A Poem about Baseballs
for years the scenes bustled
through him as he dreamed he was
alive. then he felt real, and slammed
awake in the wet sheets screaming
too fast, everything moves
too fast, and the edges of things
are gone. four blocks away
a baseball was a dot against
the sky, and he thought, my
glove is too big, i will
drop the ball and it will be
a home run. the snow falls
too fast from the clouds,
and night is dropped and
snatched back like a huge
joke. is that the ball, or is
it just a bird, and the ball is
somewhere else, and i will
miss it? and the edges are gone, my
hands melt into the walls, my
hands do not end where the wall
begins. should i move
forward, or back, or will the ball
come right to me? i know i will
miss, because i always miss when it
takes so long, the wall has no
surface, no edge, the wall
fades into the air and the air is
my hand, and i am the wall. my
arm is the syringe and thus i
become the nurse, i am you,
nurse. if he gets
around the bases before the
ball comes down, is it a home
run, even if i catch it? if we could
slow down, and stop, we
would be one fused mass careening
at too great a speed through
the emptiness. if i catch
the ball, our side will
be up, and i will have to bat,
and i might strike out.
The Woman at the Slot Machine
if the children were not locked
into georgia, and texas, if
the husband were not packed away
cold, never to be fished
from air, the plunging down
of the handle might be less desperate
but alone now before
this last enemy, she juggles
for any victory. the jerked
handle offers a possible coming home. each
symbol come to rest clicks into
her eyes, because
it is there to be had, it
was there once, the old miracle come back
alive, when the bell
sang like a beautiful daughter and it was
harry, upstairs with his broken
leg, ringing for her, yelling, martha come hear
the radio, it’s jack benny and he’s playing
the violin.
The Mourning in the Hallway
my neighbor’s voice occurs within the hall, sadly:
come back inside the house awhile before
you go away. his daughter does not hear
his oldest voice swear
that he will balance forward from that door
forever toward the spaces she
has left. and even i have felt this thing,
this leaning into the ocean like wild,
like aching beasts, my wife was not alone
when, deep in her bone
and tumbling eternally, our child
continued drowning. now, hearing
this man’s face change against the tide his girl has gone
away with, i leap to hold my own son.
Out There Where the Morning
out there where the morning
is, the automobiles and citizens
are clattering along just
like pieces of the universe. from
my place by the window i can
examine an airplane as it crawls
from speck to speck on the glass.
i know that it is with
the same arrogant mechanical
lust that the pipes of the kitchen sink
are dissolving. i am
ready to believe that everything else is,
too. for instance this
room i am sure is
atom by atom taking leave. but here in
the disappearing room i am not too
heavily alone. printed on the
label of this cookie can is
the one assurance:
each cookie contains a joke.
and i know that this
is somehow good. i can
call my mother and say, mother
it is not what is true, but what
is good that now matters. mother,
mother, even here in this tumbling
jar of selves,
each cookie contains a joke,
each of us offers himself up whole
to some nearly invisible,
tasteless affirmation.
such sensation as we derive is derived
only from the joke. mother,
i am this morning electric. i am spinning
into the staccato punch line,
the end and the crumbling. i will
hear the laughter as it breaks up
and dissolves farther out in space,
as it grinds and echoes against the metal.
In Praise of Distances
as the winter slips up under
the palms of my hands, it is getting
harder to be a poet: i am woe
itself. my car fades
without pain from the parking lot. i
t
crumples to one knee, like
an elephant, startled
into lifelessness by the hungry bullets of winter.
the graveyard wavers
distantly. the car will no longer stand
between me and the debts nuzzling
at my door. i will no longer go rattling
among the miles as if
distance were a safe thing, as if i slammed
the ancient car door
in the face of all the noises.
my wife tells me, why don’t you get
a job? but once i had a dog,
whose vital organs became
confused beneath his skin, until he died;
i will not leave this animal kingdom
until he comes back from the trees.
i will keep my nostrils
opened for the lonely jangle
of his collar landing over the buildings
or for some sign that he will be returning.
my hands will not
be filled with advertisements; so
they will be filled with the difficulty
that is winter. if he is lost,
farmers hoping for spring will discover
his voice among the corn stalks,
seeking a safe place to lie
quietly down. as i wait for him
by the window,
i have the suspicion that the meaning of things
will never be sorted out.
A Consequence of Gravity
my wife’s voice yelling from
the window holds the distant echoes
of a thousand mothers-in-law, all the women,
all the weight, increasing, of this planet.
i will not listen. here in the yard i am watching
an old story: a child has dived
into the earth attempting to fly, and injured
farther than the skin he gives
his long syllable toward the moon.
there is no one to tell him he will settle
for years, in a gradual re-enactment
of this flight, against the earth,
as he cries over his miserable attachment
to the ground and mourns
that first unlucky generation
of airplanes, the lost inventions still burrowing
somewhere desperately away from the air,
making caves, making
no sense at all crushed into the sides of mountains.
i grow, like an imprisoned pilot,
heavier, near death, my face
makes mistakes in the last oxygen of the cockpit.
through the dusk the moon has rolled
again out into her private ocean. i cannot
help it, like a blank virgin she has retired
beyond the air, and here, bereft, surrounded
by grotesque, inedible women and the painful
breaking of another spring i admit it,
i will never touch her, hold her.
For the Death of the Old Woman
one after another along
the perspective of the street, the people
remain upright. my hands
are blacking out, from the cold,
dry body of this old woman.
she has died,
while she was sitting, concerned
somewhere in her house, growing
more beautiful, something has left
the big rocker, has moved
through the leaves brushing her window,
beyond the trees and first
national bank to a point
overlooking the collapse of cities.
the rivers are backing up
with whales
and wreckage, with
the crowds of foam becoming huge and
hanging to the factories that lean
over the wettening banks.
the figures
of graves diminish toward
the horizon:
on the street,
these faces are not chipped with grief,
as they leap after busses.
in the window of a store front a man
who did not know her adjusts
the limbs of a mannequin, and
the ascending voice
of a child wants to know, do the rivers freeze
by themselves, can you walk on them.
The Man Who Was Killed
whatever the wind says that divides
the surface of the river
into tiny, upward gestures of surprise
is not known, not here
by me on the bank. i have wondered
this same thing about the wintry faces of pedestrians,
i have wondered how much of this
is crazy and how much is real. he must have been
hearing the wind, to be so deeply
startled when the bullet rushed
from the assassin’s control. he remembers always
how it was, to breathe. his eye
drifts through the streets in the city,
through the rain, dreaming after his life.
April 20, 1969
when i think that i am watching
the evening lengthen toward the end of this country,
i know there can be no sea
at the end of the pier. even
the sea has gone to hide deep
in the spaces below the sea, and the few
children who have stayed this long in the yard
are disappearing toward their dinners.
INNER WEATHER
An Evening with the Evening
The night is very tall
coming down the street. The light
of the streetlights coming on
in sequence just in front of the dark,
this light is a prison
broken loose from itself.
The city has an expression
on its face like that of someone hoping
he will not be noticed,
it is like that of the man now watching
the processional flaring of the lamps from the corner,
beneath the bank sign.
He notices the city, he notices
the reflection of his own face in the city,
he wonders what the city must have done
to the night,
that it should avert itself like a debtor
while welcoming the night
with such display, such grim pomp, so courteous
a removal, before
the arrival of darkness,
of any competing darknesses that may have
managed to precede it there.
Suddenly it is the total blackness
with the numerous small lights of the face
of the city shining through it;
then it is the end,
which is only himself, going
home to his wife and children,
turning and trying to walk away from the darkness
that precedes him, darkness of which he is the center.
Winter
On the streets, which have gutters,
in the shadows of doorways, at
busstops, at this moment
and yesterday, before the bars, their breath
excluded in great
clouds, turning from the wind
to spit
and laugh horribly
at the life standing up inside them
with such pain as
loneliness permits, and the weather,
turning to each other
with jokes and lies, with the baggage
and garbage of their humanness as if one
they held it toward would
take it and thank them
is us, all of us, all dragged by the legs upstream
like poor stooges sunk to drowning
for a living.
On Clinton St. the bars explode
with the salt smell
of us like the sea, and the tide
of rock and roll music, live
humans floating on it
out over the crimes of the night. How
unlike such outwardness the clenching back
of a man into himself is,
several of us are our own fists
There! emphasizing on the tabletop.
Prayer: That We May Be Given This Day the Usual Business
Some days the automobiles are smiling,
other days they
are morose;
and so it is with humans, always
going around crying, until one
day one of them is all smiles,
introducing, buying drinks.
Had you never met one,
these nevertheless would be known
to you readily by their descriptions,
these humans, heads, legs
and arms inexplicable, graduating
immaculately like the small
blossoms into this faith,
that soon, soon the moon
shall descend to touch
us each deeply,
here.
But there is a shadow
to touch each roof
at six-thirty in
this country, and it comes to them