New and Selected Poems (5 page)

 

and the other a swallow
I think how in the summertime
there's no one out there
except the clouds in the blue sky
except the dusk in the blue sky
I think how in autumn
there's a man harnessed out there
a bearded man with the bit stuck in his mouth
a hunchback with a blanket over his shoulders
hauling the wheel
heavy as the earth

 

•

 

don't you hear I say don't you hear
the wheel talks as it turns

I have the impression that it's hugging me closer
that it has maternal instincts
that it's telling me a bedtime story
that it knows the way home
that I grit my teeth just like my father

 

I have the impression
that it whispers to me
how all I have to do
to stop its turning
is to hold my breath

That's the only image
That turns up.

 

A wall all by itself,
Poorly lit, beckoning,
But no sense of the room,
Not even a hint
Of why it is I remember
So little and so clearly:

 

The fly I was watching,
The details of its wings
Glowing like turquoise.
Its feet, to my amusement
Following a minute crack—
An eternity
Around that simple event.

 

And nothing else; and nowhere
To go back to;
And no one else
As far as I know to verify.

A child crying in the night
Across the street
In one of the many dark windows.
That, too, to get used to,
Make part of your life.
Like this book of astronomy
Which you open with equal apprehension
By the light of table lamp,
And your birdlike shadow on the wall.
A sleepless witness at the base
Of this expanding immensity,
Simultaneous in this moment
With all of its empty spaces,
Listening to a child crying in the night
With a hope,
It will go on crying a little longer.

How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death's laundry.

The beautiful daughters
Setting death's supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address is somehow wrong,
Even death can't figure it out
Among all the locked doors . . .
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death's side of the bed.

He is thinking of us.
These leaves, their lazy rustle
That made us sleepy after lunch
So we had to lie down.

 

He considers my hand on her breast,
Her closed eyelids, her moist lips
Against my forehead, and the shadows of trees
Hovering on the ceiling.

 

It's been so long. He has trouble
Deciding what else is there.
And all along the suspicion
That we do not exist.

On the first page of my dreambook
It's always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.

 

I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn't be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.

I grew up bent over
a chessboard.

 

I loved the word
endgame
.

 

All my cousins looked worried.

 

It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.

 

A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.

 

That must have been in 1944 .

 

In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.

 

The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.

 

I'm told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.

 

I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.

 

In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.

The epoch of a streetcar drawn by horses,
The organ-grinder and his monkey.
Women with parasols. Little kids in rowboats
Photographed against a cardboard backdrop depicting an idyllic sunset
At the fairgrounds where they all went to see
The two-headed calf, the bearded
Fat lady who dances the dance of seven veils.

 

And the great famine raging through India . . .
Fortunetelling white rat pulling a card out of a shoebox
While Edison worries over the lightbulb,
And the first model of the sewing machine
Is delivered in a pushcart
To a modest white-fenced home in the suburbs,

 

Where there are always a couple of infants
Posing for the camera in their sailors' suits,
Out there in the garden overgrown with shrubs.
Lovable little mugs smiling faintly toward
The new century. Innocent. Why not?
All of them like ragdolls of the period
With those chubby porcelain heads
That shut their long eyelashes as you lay them down.

 

In a kind of perpetual summer twilight . . .
One can even make out the shadow of the tripod and the black hood
That must have been quivering in the breeze.

One assumes that they all stayed up late squinting at the stars,
And were carried off to bed by their mothers and big sisters.
While the dogs remained behind:
Pedigreed bitches pregnant with bloodhounds.

To get into it
As it lies
Crumpled on the floor
Without disturbing a single crease

 

Respectful
Of the way I threw it down
Last night
The way it happened to land

 

Almost managing
The impossible contortions
Doubling back now
Through a knotted sleeve

The Virgin Mother walked barefoot
Among the land mines.
She carried an old man in her arms
Like a howling babe.

 

The earth was an old people's home.
Judas was the night nurse,
Emptying bedpans into the river Jordan,
Tying people on a dog chain.

 

The old man had two stumps for legs.
St. Peter came pushing a cart
Loaded with flying carpets.
They were not flying carpets.

 

They were piles of bloody diapers.
The Magi stood around
Cleaning their nails with bayonets.
The old man gave little Mary Magdalene

 

A broken piece of a mirror.
She hid in the church outhouse.
When she got thirsty she licked
The steam off the glass.

 

That leaves Joseph. Poor Joseph,
Standing naked in the snow.
He only had a rat
To load his suitcases on.

 

The rat wouldn't run into its hole.
Even when the searchlights came on
Up in the guard towers
And caught them standing there.

My mother works here,
And so does my father.

 

It's the night shift.
At the assembly line,
They wind toys up
To inspect their springs.

 

The seven toy members
Of the firing squad
Point their rifles,
And lower them quickly.

 

The one being shot at
Falls and gets up,
Falls and gets up.
His blindfold is just painted on.

 

The toy gravediggers
Don't work so well.
Their spades are heavy,
Their spades are much too heavy.

 

Perhaps that's how
It's supposed to be?

Then there was Johann,
the carousel horse—
except he wasn't really a carousel horse.

 

He grew up in “the naive realism of the Wolffian school
which without close scrutiny regards
logical necessity and reality as identical.”

 

On Sundays, his parents took him
to the undertaker's for cookies.
“All these people flying in their dreams,”
he thought.

 

Standing before the Great Dark Night of History,
a picture of innocence
held together by his mother's safety pins,
short and bowlegged.

 

Cool reflection soon showed
there were openings among the signatories of
      death sentences . . .
plus free high leather boots that squeak.

 

On his entrance exam he wrote:
“The act of torture consists of various strategies
meant to increase the imagination
of the
Homo sapiens
.”

 

And then . . . the Viennese waltz.

for Russ Banks

 

The ear threading
the eye

 

all night long
the ear
on a long errand
for the eye

 

through the thickening
pine
white birch
over no-man's-land

 

pebbles
is it
compact in their anonymity
their gravity

 

accidents of location
abstract necessity

 

water
which takes such pains

 

to convince me
it is flowing

 

•

 

Summoning me
to be
two places at once

 

to drift
the length
of its chill
its ache

 

hand white
at the knuckles

 

live bait
the old hide-and-seek
in and out
of the swirl

 

luminous verb
carnivorous verb
innocent as sand
under its blows

 

•

 

An insomnia as big
as the stars'

 

always
on the brink—
as it were
of some deeper utterance

 

some harsher
reckoning

 

at daybreak
lightly
oh so lightly
when she brushes
against me

 

and the hems of her long skirt
go trailing

 

a bit longer

 

•

 

Nothing
that comes to nothing
for company

 

comes the way a hurt
the way a thought
comes

 

comes and keeps coming

 

all night meditating
on what she asks of me
when she doesn't

 

when I hear myself say
she doesn't

Ah the great
        the venerable
whoever he is

 

        ahead of me
huge load
        terrific backache

 

        wherever
a chair's waiting
        meadow
sky
        beckoning

 

he is the one
        that's been
there
        without instructions
and for no wages

 

        a huge load
on his back
        and under his arm
thus
        always

 

        all in place
perfect
        just as it was
sweet home

 

        at the address
I never even dreamed of
        the address
I'm already changing

 

        in a hurry
to overtake him
        to arrive
not ahead

 

        but just as
he sets down
        the table
the thousand-year-old
        bread crumbs

 

        I used to
claim
        I was part
of his load