New and Selected Poems (22 page)

 

The waiters will kick off their shoes.
The cat will get a whole trout for dinner.
The cashier will stop counting receipts,
Scratch her ass with a pencil and sigh.

 

The boss will pour himself another brandy.
The mirrors will grow tired of potted palms
And darken slowly the way they always do
When someone runs off with a roast chicken.

Sky's gravedigger,
Bird catcher,
Dark night's match seller—
Or whatever you are?

 

A book-lined tomb,
Pots and pans music hall,
Insomnia's sick nurse,
Burglar's blind date.

 

Also you
Stripper's darkened stage
Right next to a holy martyr
Being flayed by the setting sun.

Of the light in my room:
Its mood swings,
Dark-morning glooms,
Summer ecstasies.

 

Spider on the wall,
Lamp burning late,
Shoes left by the bed,
I'm your humble scribe.

 

Dust balls, simple souls
Conferring in the corner.
The pearl earring she lost,
Still to be found.

 

Silence of falling snow,
Night vanishing without trace,
Only to return.
I'm your humble scribe.

All they need
Is one little red dress
To start swaying
In that empty closet

 

For the rest of them
To nudge each other,
Clicking like knitting needles
Or disapproving tongues.

The softness of this motel bed
On which we made love
Demonstrates to me in an impressive manner
The superiority of capitalism.

 

At the mattress factory, I imagine,
The employees are happy today.
It's Sunday and they are working
Extra hours, like us, for no pay.

 

Still, the way you open your legs
And reach for me with your hand
Makes me think of the Revolution,
Red banners, crowd charging.

 

Someone stepping on a soapbox
As the flames engulf the palace,
And the old prince in full view
Steps to his death from a balcony.

Where the path to the lake twists
Out of sight, a puff of dust,
The kind bare feet make running.
A low branch heavy with leaves
Swaying momentarily
In the dense and somber shade.

 

A late bather disrobing for a dip,
Pinned hair coming undone soon to float
As she flips on her back letting
The sleepy current take her
Over the dark water to where the sky
Opens wide, the night blurring

 

Her nakedness, the silence thick,
Treetops like charred paper edges,
Even the insects oddly reclusive,
The rare breath of wind in the leaves
Fooling me to look once again,
Until the chill made me rise and go in.

Discreet reader of discreet lives.
Chairs no one ever sits in.
Motes of dust, their dancing days done.
Schools of yellow fish
On the peeling wallpaper
Keeping their eyes on you.
It's late for today, late.
A small crucifix over the bed
Watches over a stopped clock.

 

•

 

Sewing room, linty daylight
Through a small window.
You will never be in my shoes, Eternity.
I come with an expiration date.

My scissors cut black cloth.
I stick silver pins into a tailor's dummy,
Muttering some man's name
While aiming at its heart.

 

•

 

Raleigh played cards with his executioners.
I sit over a dead mouse in the kitchen.
Hot night, the windows open,
The air rich with the scents of lilacs
And banked fires of backyard grills.
My lovely neighbor must be sleeping naked,
Or lighting a match to see what time it is.

 

•

 

The torment of branches in the wind.
Is the sea hearing their confession?
The little white clouds must think so.
They are rushing over to hear.
The ship on the way to paradise
Seems stuck on the horizon,
Pinned by one golden pin of sunlight.
Only the great rocks act as if nothing's the matter.

 

•

 

In a city where so much is hidden:
The crimes, the riches, the beautiful women,
You and I were lost for hours.
We went in to ask a butcher for directions.
He sat playing the accordion.
The lambs had their eyes closed in bliss,
But not the knives, his evil little helpers.
Come right in, folks, he said.

 

•

 

Conscience, that awful power,
With its vast network of spies,
Secret arrests at night,
Dreaded prisons and reform schools,
Beatings and forced confessions,
Wee-hour crucifixions.
A small, dead bird in my hand
Is all the evidence they had.

 

•

 

The sprawling meadow bordered by a stream,
Naked girl on horseback.
Yes, I do remember that.
Sunlight on the outhouse wall,
One little tree in the yard afraid of darkness,
The voice of the hermit thrush.

 

•

 

Thoughts frightened of the light,
Frightened of each other.
They listen to a clock ticking.
Like flock of sheep led to slaughter,
The seconds keep a good pace,
Stick together, don't look back,
All worried, as they go,
What their shepherd may be thinking.

 

•

 

A sough of wind in the open window
Making the leaves sigh.
“I come to you like one
Who is dying of love,”
God said to Christine Ebner
On this dull, sultry night.
“I come to you with the desire
Of bridegroom for his bride.”

 

•

 

Soul's jukebox
Playing golden oldies
In the sky
Strewn with stars.
When I ask God
What size coin it takes
I'm greeted
With stunned silence.

One night you and I were walking.
The moon was so bright
We could see the path under the trees.
Then the clouds came and hid it
So we had to grope our way
Till we felt the sand under our bare feet,
And heard the pounding waves.

 

Do you remember telling me,
“Everything outside this moment is a lie”?
We were undressing in the dark
Right at the water's edge
When I slipped the watch off my wrist
And without being seen or saying
Anything in reply, I threw it into the sea.

 

 

 

XII

 

Surely, he walks among us unrecognized:
Some barber, store clerk, delivery man,
Pharmacist, hairdresser, bodybuilder,
Exotic dancer, gem cutter, dog walker,
The blind beggar singing, O Lord, remember me,

 

Some window decorator starting a fake fire
In a fake fireplace while mother and father watch
From the couch with their frozen smiles
As the street empties and the time comes
For the undertaker and the last waiter to head home.

 

O homeless old man, standing in a doorway
With your face half hidden,
I wouldn't even rule out the black cat crossing the street,
The bare lightbulb swinging on a wire
In a subway tunnel as the train comes to a stop.

That was the year the Nazis marched into Vienna,
Superman made his debut in Action Comics,
Stalin was killing off his fellow revolutionaries,
The first Dairy Queen opened in Kankakee, Ill.,
As I lay in my crib peeing in my diapers.

 

“You must've been a beautiful baby,” Bing Crosby sang.
A pilot the newspapers called Wrong Way Corrigan

Took off from New York heading for California
And landed instead in Ireland, as I watched my mother
Take a breast out of her blue robe and come closer.

 

There was a hurricane that September causing a movie theater
At Westhampton Beach to be lifted out to sea.
People worried the world was about to end.
A fish believed to have been extinct for seventy million years
Came up in a fishing net off the coast of South Africa.

 

I lay in my crib as the days got shorter and colder,
And the first heavy snow fell in the night
Making everything very quiet in my room.
I thought I heard myself cry for a long, long time.

This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction—
And still the sun shines, the sparrows come
Each morning to the bakery for crumbs.
Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds
And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter.
Its owner is making lunch for his ailing grandmother.
He heats the soup and serves it to her in a bowl.

 

The windows are open, there's a warm breeze.
The young trees on our street are delirious to have leaves.
Italian opera is on the radio, the volume too high.
Brevi e tristi giorni visse,
a baritone sings.
Everyone up and down our block can hear him.
Something about the days that remain for us to enjoy
Being few and sad. Not today, Maestro Verdi!

 

At the hairdresser's a girl leaps out of a chair,
Her blond hair bouncing off her bare shoulders
As she runs out the door in her high heels.
“I must be off,” says the handsome boy to his grandmother.
His bicycle is where he left it.
He rides it casually through the heavy traffic
His white shirttails fluttering behind him
Long after everyone else has come to a sudden stop.

Backed myself into a dark corner one day,
Found a boy there
Forgotten by teachers and classmates,
His shoulders slumped,
The hair on his head already gray.
Friend, I said.

 

While you stood here staring at the wall,
They shot a president,
Some guy walked on the moon,
Dolly, the girl we all loved,
Took too many sleeping pills and died
In a hotel room in Santa Monica.

 

Now and then I thought of you,
Listening to the squeak of the chalk
On the blackboard,
The sighs and whispers
Of unknown children
Bent over their lessons,
The mice running in the night.

 

Visions of unspeakable loveliness
Must've come to you in your misery:
Cloudless skies on long June evenings,
Trees full of cherries in our orchard,
To make you ache and want to be with me,
Driving a cab in New York City.

Grandma laughing on her deathbed.
Eternity, the quiet one, listening in.

 

Like moths around an oil lamp we were.
Like rag dolls tucked away in the attic.

 

In walked a cat with a mouthful of feathers.
(How about that?)

 

A dark little country store full of gravediggers' children
        buying candy.
(That's how we looked that night.)

 

The young man pumping gas spoke of his friends: the clouds.
It was such a sad story, it made everyone laugh.

 

A bird called out of a tree, but received no answer.

 

The beauty of that last moment
Like a red sail on the bay at sunset,

 

Or like a wheel breaking off a car
And roaming the world on its own.

Are you authorized to speak
For these trees without leaves?
Are you able to explain
What the wind intends to do
With a man's shirt and a woman's nightgown
Left on the laundry line?
What do you know about dark clouds?
Ponds full of fallen leaves?
Old-model cars rusting in a driveway?
Who gave you the permission
To look at the beer can in a ditch?
The white cross by the side of the road?
The swing set in the widow's yard?
Ask yourself, if words are enough,
Or if you'd be better off
Flapping your wings from tree to tree
And carrying on like a crow.