by Alan Shapiro
galaxy of candles
guttering down
in dark chapels
all along the nave,
there's greater
gravity inside the
the grace that's risen
highest into rib
vaults and flying
buttresses, where
each stone is another
stone's resistance to
the heaven far
beneath it, that
with all its might
it yearns for, down
in the very soul
of earth where it's said
that stone is forever
falling into light
that burns as it rises,
cooling, into stone.
Playground
The fence can't even keep itself out now,
for years kicked in and bent up till
the bott om of it's curling
like a chain-link wave about to break
across the strip of grass
so it can wash away
or join the minor turbulence
of stubbed smokes, and condom
wrappers, and a beer can crushed
beside a queen of hearts
(thrown down in triumph
or defeat?).
Beyond the grass
and moon glow of sand
under swings and the bony
gleaming of a jungle gym
grown colder every second
by forgett ing all the busy
little heat of hands,
the blacktop is a
black hole that has
swallowed up the chalked
hearts and initials, the foursquare
boundaries and foul lines
while beyond the fence
the fence is facing
out in the street
under the streetlight
the inside of a ripped-open
half of a tennis ball
(hit or hurled?)
is blacker than the blacktop
it is tipped toward
somewhere in which
the other half is surely lying,
tipped toward the street.
Tipped, you could say, like an ear.
You could say the silence
is the sound of one ear
listening for the other
from the bott om of an
interstellar hole.
You could say sand dunes.
Aphasic metal. The breaking
chain links of a wave. At night,
in the playground,
you could say anything.
Gym
The walls are mirrors, the mirrors watch the walls
that watch the mirrors that watch the small
to large to larger barbells
that are not barbells now though ranged
in multiples of five
beside the chrome frame
of the legless leg curl and leg press,
the stacked bricks unattached
to cables, and the dry sheen
of the benches beneath the bars
beneath the lights. The room subsides,
relaxes from the room in its reflection.
Only the stairs
of the ellipticals are floating
in mid-stride but everything else
is a downward exhalation
of every breath held,
trembling, while
the iron, against its will,
was lifted, pumped, curled, or pressed,
then tremblingly set down.
The room is a downward
and inward
exhalation, the very iron breathing
into itself and through itself
to exhalations under it,
and under that,
yielding the way everything with breath yields
finally when it's breathing out.
Indoor Municipal Pool
The circulating disinfectants
make it an unearthly blue
or earth's blue seen from space,
or what pooled from the steaming
of the planet's first condensing.
In which case the pumps
and filters could be thermal
vents, and the tiny comet trail
of bubbles rising from the vents
could hold within it—if it isn't it
already—the first blind chance,
if not the promise of
the hint of the beginning
of what at long last would
emerge into the eye which
being mostly water sees
only water signaling to itself
beyond itself in accidental
wormy quiverings over
the sea floor of the ceiling.
Hospital Examination Room
The intercom is sleeping,
flashing only the red light of a dream
of no one entering
to check on no one waiting
while in the darker room
inside the mirror opposite
a red light of another dream
is flashing back.
All night, off and on,
cool air is hurried
through the floor and ceiling vents
to keep the temperature from spiking,
and while it does
until it doesn't
fresh paper, innocent of flesh,
on the examination table
rustles a little
under a phantom restlessness.
And Time too shivers
its thumbed-through
and worn-down
long-irrelevant
pages in the rack
against the wall.
And between Time and the table
from a stand,
an empty sleeve hangs
with a black tube
dangling from it
to a screen that's blank,
inside of which at the very
bott om of the blankness
sleep the numbers
of a pressure
too low to measure.
Senior Center
Light here is old, suspended
cloudy, from the cathedral ceiling,
far above the somehow brighter sheen
of its reflection on the checkered
linoleum, on the backing
and thick legs of the metal chairs
around the bridge tables,
the mahjong tables, the bingo tables—
light stumbles, it seems, it gropes,
not so much from the weight of night
against it through the sunroof
and the giant windows
as from the far-off
shining of itself
outside itself
in chairs and tables
and all across the white
checks and the black checks,
as if the source of light,
the secret, were not in light at all
but in these brighter traces
which it reaches for
the way the blind do,
baffled, feeling
the smooth braille
of every surface
for the light-encrypted
sense of what's
unreadable and clear.
Funeral Home
After the last mourners,
and the dumping out
of flowers and the polishing
and vacuuming and
sweeping up before
it starts all over again tomorrow,
a white owl keeps watch
from within his tree
within the carpet
while dust motes—stirred up
like silt in water
by the constant going
in and out all day,
the sitting and the rising—
finally reach their peak
and turn to float
back down so slowly
that the empty vases
in the dark could be
the flowers themselves,
the blossoms that have
just now opened wide
for the dry rain
that will fill them
all around the owl
on the spotless breakfront
and between the chairs
and couches and on either
side of the doorways to the
family room, the chapel,
and the roped-off staircase
which if not for the rope
could be a staircase in an inn
made to look like a home
made to look like a mansion
where no one lives.
II. GALAXY FORMATION
Triumph
I saw him as I drove by—
I don't have to tell you what he looked like—
spreading out a plastic sheet
as for a picnic
except he wasn't picnicking;
he was lying down to sleep
in the middle of the sidewalk
in the middle of the day
on a busy street,
the spoils of him lying there
for everyone to gawk at
or step around.
And when I drove by later
the same day, and then again still later
late that night,
he was still there, sleeping,
and maybe I slowed down
to check on him or got him at least a blanket,
or called an ambulance,
but whatever I did or didn't do
I did it to forget that
either way
he was the one asleep on the sidewalk,
I was the one borne along in the car
that might as well have been a chariot
of empathy, a chariot
the crowd cheers
even as it weeps
for the captured elephant too wide
to squeeze through
the triumphal arch
and draw home
to bed my sweet
sensitive Caesar of a soul.
Forgiveness
If not for her, then no one,
in the high-collared dress
with the bone-white butt ons,
white as the serviett e beside her,
as the teacup before her
on the dark mirror of the mahogany table
in which a shriveled
phantom of herself she isn't looking at
is floating, the hand and teacup
on the surface sinking
as she lifts the teacup to her mouth.
Hand trembling as she lifts it,
though not at all from agitation
but from a merely
neurological event
that isn't punishment
beyond the punishment in store for anyone
lucky enough to live so long.
If not for her, then no one,
steam from the teacup
delicately rising
while she speaks
not matter-of-factly
but unfazed, even defiant
looking directly at us from the screen
telling what happened sixty years ago
as if it happened to another
woman, a girl really,
just a girl she might have read about
in one of the books
that line the shelves
behind her, in a leather-bound classic
writt en if not for her, then whom?
The commandant's new bride
in a faraway village
that might have been
a village in a book of fairy tales,
if not for the Jews, and the stench
it was almost visible
vaporous in the last days
from across the Ettersburg
beyond the trees—you couldn't
leave the house it was so
terrible like breathing them,
their breath, and every morning
every evening
sitting down to eat
and have to see them drifting past the window,
the striped rags borne by the stench itself—
how could you
eat, how could you not
feel sorry for them,
how could you not
hate them
for how sorry they made you feel,
for the day they ruined.
I was a new bride. This was my life...
And only now as the tears start does she smile,
hand trembling downward as it's lift ed up,
trembling upward as it sinks,
the teacup steaming delicate phantoms
all around the still defi ant smile
that's also kind now, somehow,
as if she'd read our minds
and after all these years could finally
forgive everyone, see it was just
our ignorance about the many ways
there are to suffer.
She dabs her eyes, her cheeks,
and then leaning forward, looks down a moment
into the phantom face
she puts her two hands on and pushes up against,
pushing it down
away from her
to get up from the table.
Conductor
There were white mitts on his hands
to keep his hands
from pulling out the feeding tube
the IV port the catheter
and long after
he stopped communicating
he began to wave them back and forth and
up and down
as if an orchestra
that wasn't there
were playing music no one could hear
and whether because there was no score
or the absent instruments
weren't tuned or the nonexistent players
were too distracted or didn't care
the balky white mitts had to pause a lot
tapping the air people
pay attention people
before they swerved again and
dipped and paused and tapped again
all aft ernoon and into evening
until they got it right,
the piece entitled Gone,
and the white mitts could lie there
and just listen.
Edenic Simile
The way there wasn't
anything to cover up
or hide from till
they heard in the sudden
leaf shiver
and fret of gravel
the Lord approaching
through the garden
calling their name—
so, in the men's room
at the Spring Garden
Bar and Grill,
the man at the urinal—
whom I could hear
from outside singing
hunkahunka
burning love
head back (I imagined)
eyes closed waving
in perfect rhythm
to his singing
a tenor sax
of piss—stopped singing
stopped pissing
soon as he heard me
and zipped up
and looked away
as he shouldered
past me so I
in silence head bowed
could take his place
and he in silence
head bowed
before the mirror
could wash his hands,
the hands he might not
have felt the need
to wash at all
if I hadn't entered;
and when he left
there was a momentary
roaring of men and women
till the door shut,
then only
the hiss
I made and the silence
of someone else
behind me waiting.
Close to You
the automatic tunes of
the codes by which
to which in which
that grease the traffi c
of our gliding
all day long
unnoticeably
in and out
of view
unlike
until a woman
spills on the counter
at the Quik Stop all
the insides of her
pocketbook and now
is scavenging
through receipts
pens tissues
and prescriptions
for the bills and loose
change she needs
to buy the smokes
she wants
she's sorry just
a second it's here
somewhere if
we could just
give her a second
hands trembling
with the weight of
the sudden pressure from
the eyes that
because she's caught
a little short
unhoused and visible
are swarming
as to some arena
to gorge in pity
and annoyance
woe and wonder
on the spectacle
she is because
the line behind her's
getting longer
and the cashier's
fingers tap
an ever edgier
drumroll on the counter,
and above her head
up near the ceiling
Karen Carpenter
her lushly starvedto-
death angelic
voice is singing
from so far away
it's like it's trying
to keep from being
pushed out from inside
the speaker through
the tiny perforations
naked and quivering
to be let back in.
Galaxy Formation
For Reg Gibbons
In an article I'm reading in my neighborhood bar, I learn that dark
matter, "though unseen, makes up more than 90 percent of
the mass of the universe."
Older than visible matter, wherever dark matter has coalesced,
its gravitational force pulls stars and gases into galaxies and clusters
of galaxies, and even super-clusters, holding in place what
otherwise would wash away in the expanding universe.
I hear a woman to my right talking on her cell phone; not wanting
to be noticed, her voice is soft but tense with what it's trying