by Alan Shapiro
spilling the goods out
in profuse disorder at her feet.
Like what if not like here
at night where the improbable
is law, and logic
a penumbral state in which "tar heels"
from Ohio could be "first in flight"
above a beach named after a bird
named after a cat.
The Public
The no one of it
is everywhere.
It is a high-rise that
is itself a wall
of windows all
but one of which
halfway up is dark,
rising above the locked
gate against which
a stray page of the day's
disasters has been
blown flat, trembling
against the iron
bars as if trying
to pass through or
over them, like a
fugitive the dogs
are closing in on,
wanting in, wanting
for God's sake someone
to take him in, as if
that sole blue light
above were safety,
except it isn't
safety, is it,
it's the news
on television, the same
news of the same
day—it is news
calling out to news
as pixel to print
to pixel over circuits
and atonal airways
that someone earlier
left on before leaving
to make it seem
as if someone were home.
IV. AT THE CORNER OF COOLIDGE AND CLARENCE
For Tom Sleigh
Beloved
The block is empty. I'm the boy there in the street,
Looking downhill for you to turn the corner,
Out of the avenue where horn blare, veils
Of exhaust, and strangers in a hurrying sleepwalk
Through each other tell me you'll be here soon.
And soon is home, and home is when at last
Your any moment now sensation brings
Out of the day's dull glint and inching flow
The look and bearing of a just for me
Unearned, unjustified, imagined face
That's all I need, so long as it's arriving,
That's mine till your real face eff aces it.
But not today, not now, not ever again.
No one but me is left here outside the house
Where you by being dead are more alive
To me than ever, you who have no other
Purpose now, no other way of being,
Than to appear by never quite appearing,
Whenever I need you, any time I want
Clearer and still clearer in the aftermath
Of your not yet but soon about to happen.
Flowerpot
I lay back on the carpeted bott om step
Of the stairwell that like a well extended
Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,
Up where the china man under the wide-brimmed hat
That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held
No flower across the sill no one could reach.
There was a television on somewhere
Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,
Someone was saying. Someone was saying something
About a blockade and a quarantine,
Who would blink first, lose face, or push the butt on.
A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.
The china man however didn't care.
Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,
He was content to be a clot of darkness
Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—
The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,
The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.
And everywhere within the light's slow fall
Infinities of particles were falling
Into the flowerpot they'd never fill.
The Family
Three million years ago, three barefoot people—
A father and mother and a litt le child—
Were walking close together in moist ash.
I saw their footprints in a photograph—
The child walked beside his mother, the father
A step or two ahead, and it was raining,
Fat raindrops pocked the ash around their feet,
The ash that later hardened under ash
Preserved in ash the way the mother paused,
Turned left a moment, not sure where she should go,
Looking behind her at the home she fled?
At the volcano exploding in the distance?
Anonymous as Lot's wife, turning around—
In sorrow or relief? As if a blank
Impenetrable cloud, extending back
In time forever opened only there
Just then, and briefly, for only ninety feet,
Before it closed again for good behind them,
Whoever they were, wherever they were going,
On a rainy day three million years ago,
Walking together barefoot in the ash.
Light Switch
The bad news was the sun was mortal too.
One day it would just burn out. The good news was
We'd all be long gone by the time it happened.
The good news was there wasn't any place
Inside the house I couldn't find extinctions
To study and by studying prepare
Myself for what I wouldn't live to see:
The way the angry litt le ball of fire
From a struck match would vanish when I shook it
Into a loosening skeleton of smoke;
Or how the world that watched me from the TV screen
Swallowed itself the moment I turned it off.
The good news was the light switch in my room,
The way I'd flick it on and off so quickly
That when the room went black an after-room
Lit by a spectral light would drift on the blackness,
The bed, the desk, the streetlamp in the window,
Drifting before me till the black seeped through.
I watched it till it wasn't anymore
To feel as if I understood. That was
The good news. The bad news was it did no good.
Sickbed
There were two voices in the fever dream:
Hers speaking from another room, and theirs,
The teenyboppers', singing from the screen.
Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks,
And thankful worries, who did what to whom,
And why, and thank God it wasn't worse, poor bastard,
Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short
Shorts, we wear short shorts, over and over
Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last,
Was out of it, and someone else, thank God,
Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what
A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll,
She let herself go when the bum walked out.
Thank God they never had a child. Thank God
They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog.
Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang
To me on litt le stages on the stage
Where boys and girls were dancing all around them,
Singing and dancing where it wasn't worse,
Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder
Who to thank for just how bad it was.
Coffee Cup
Consider the cup of coff ee, black as night,
At night, all night, beside her on the table,
Under the kitchen light where she would sit
Staring at nothing, still as a photograph.
Consider th
e way at first the steam would rise,
Like phantoms twisting up against each other
Struggling to pull away from the black lake
That burned them every which way into nothing.
Consider the cup of coff ee as it cooled,
The glassy black of it on which the light
Above floated a tiny version of itself.
How like an eye it might have looked to her,
The bright pupil there, the negative of hers,
If she had seen it, although she never did,
Never so much as lifted up the cup,
Never so much as touched it, staring off
At nothing as it went from hot to cold,
To colder while you watched her from the hallway,
Back in the dark beyond the doorway's frame,
Unseen, unseeable, and completely safe
As the cold eye in the mirror of the cup.
Cigarette Smoke
The cigarett e leaning in the ashtray's groove,
On the side table beside the easy chair,
Before the never-turned-off television,
Released a single strand of smoke straight up
In a slender column that looked like it would go
On stretching in a straight line to the ceiling,
Though always at the same point—maybe a foot
Or so above the ashtray—it would waver,
And bend and branch, the branches branching too,
Thinning to veins, the veins to capillaries
Entangling and knott ing up each other
Into a bluish opalescent cloud.
There had to be a reason why it split
And whorled and tangled in that slow turbulence,
And why the cloud it turned into would rise
Just so high and then hang there like a halo
Under the lamplight just above her head,
While on the screen a movie star who'd died
Was somehow standing on a subway vent
And laughing as she tried to hold her white
Dress down against the wind that lifted it.
Piano Bench
Back in an alcove off the upstairs room,
Against the wall, the tall piano slept
Beside the record player that had no needle,
Beside a crate of albums. The tall piano slept,
And nobody would wake it. Under the lid
Too heavy for me to lift, the keys would dream
All day of songs in the piano bench,
Locked up on sheets of paper, behind bars,
The way the records locked up their songs as well
Inside the tight cell of concentric grooves
I'd hold a fingernail to just to see
If I could spring them while the record spun.
The piano slept, and nobody could wake it.
Nobody could stop the keys under the lid
From dreaming all the melodies they dreamed
When no one else was home, in the empty house,
When the radio and the TV downstairs
Were sleeping too, the silence through the day
Now like a round of voiceless voices all
Around me singing songs I couldn't hear
While the turntable turned under my finger.
Dryer
I sat before the porthole to watch the clothes
Billowing and collapsing round and round
For hours inside the perforated drum.
As if I watched the world from outer space,
In an accelerated sky, white clouds
Of underwear and T-shirts massed and parted,
Slid away to mass again, in never quite
The same white vortices within vortices
You couldn't see down to the bott om of.
I watched geologies of color, deep time
Of mountain ranges rising from a sea
They just as quickly sank into again;
Pangaea breaking into continents,
Continents into islands, and the islands
Into that reef of blue cuff , green peninsula
Of pant leg, flashing up and driven down,
Churning itself upon itself, in cycles
Neither diff erent nor the same, over
And over for five billion years until
The bell rang as the drum stopped, and it all
Fell past the porthole into what it was.
Bathtub
Aside from sleep, there were two ways to practice:
One was to lie back in the bath and stay there
Still as the stillest water my stillness made
Until I couldn't feel it anymore,
The heat of it, despite how hot it was.
As if my body had become no body,
Suspended in a nothing that could turn
Back into burning only when I moved.
The other way was picturing the pink
Gum hard as marble someone I didn't know
Had left on the bott om of my desk at school,
The desk carved with initials no one knew,
Forgotten, in that row of desks inside
That classroom in a vast hall of classrooms
On the third floor of the elementary school
At three o'clock on Sunday in the thick
Of summer when the bell rings for no reason,
And the silence in the moment after
Is suddenly everywhere an avalanche
Of silence that in the moment after that
Becomes again the silence that it is.
Family Pictures
At first it was the old dead on the wall
Above the fireplace nobody lit,
Who kept watch on the empty living room;
Solemn or smiling, who never looked away
From the fluff ed cushions of the reading chair,
The glass-topped coff ee table where a stack
Of Mona Lisa coasters lay beside
A giant picture book nobody opened.
All day and night, they watched the plastic-covered
Couches that I was not to sit on ever,
The crystal goblets I was not to touch
Behind a locked door in the cabinet
Where silver hid inside a felt-lined box.
And then each year, it seemed, more dead would join them,
Some old, some younger, some my parents' age,
And even one or two my own, in clothes
I could imagine wearing, seeing myself
Up there among them keeping a close eye too
On everybody coming after me
Who needed to be reminded constantly
That nothing in the living room was theirs.
Color
How did God move? And anyway why would he?
Where would he go, where could he ever need
To go if he was everywhere already?
How could I think of it, or picture it—
God moving "over the blank face of the void"—
Except as color, instantaneous as color?
And what was color really but a vital
Absence living where it was and wasn't,
Insolid soul of visibility,
The unseen of seeing all at once and too
Continuously for the eye to see
The trackless path it traces to the eye:
The finch's yellow now-there-not-there flashing
Among the leaves, and the leaves too, their green
Degrees, gradations, shifting moods, a green
Or yellow fire unfixed and alive
And flaring out indiff erent to the sight
It woos and enters, indiff erent to the bird,
The leaf, the very air it all at once
Continuously dwells in and deserts,
Awake and wakeless, light-borne, born of light?
Faucet
The faucet dripped one slow drip from its lip,
A slight convexity at first of metal
Distilled from metal to a silvery blur,
Opaque as mercury, that thickened to
A see-through curvature, a mound that swelled
As streams I couldn't see poured in and filled it,
Stretched by its own weight to a rounder shape