singly, this shadow, it falls down to each
as he opens the door of his car,
it wholly becomes the space
behind each door, beneath each lid, top and cover
he has closed, and turns from now.
The instant he ceases smiling
at his victims and beneficiaries and closes
his mouth he is filled so with blackness
it spills behind him even
in the broad noon.
Yet as he fumbles for correct change only, and is angry,
observes the long-stemmed roses
opening in the greenhouses
in the winter, and is afraid,
you find that you love him:
see how he polishes his car
though it holds the whisper of his death, be filled
with joy as he expends
himself like a breath
into this, the loveliest of air,
climbing into that instrument that goes quietly,
driven by bright fire.
The Two
The airplane is like silver
that bears the two of them
to Mexico under the sun
to be divorced. Disembarking
they begin to bicker
over small matters: She
wants to be divorced
in the morning, refreshed,
but he says forget all about
the morning, I want to do it now.
You cheap, continually drowning me,
she says, by God
I want a divorce. He says fine,
you’ve got it: right now.
She replies she would like to wait
till morning. This goes on.
The two work their hatred
till it is like a star reduced
to the dimensions of a jewel.
The airport is quiet. The janitor’s
broom whispers to the floor,
the day talks to the night,
saying just what the ocean says
to the land, what the blood
is saying to the heart,
contained, but coming, going.
Looking Out the Window Poem
The sounds of traffic
die over the back lawn
to occur again in the low
distance.
The voices, risen, of
the neighborhood cannot
maintain that pitch
and fail briefly, start
up again.
Similarly my breathing rises
and falls while I look out
the window of apartment
number three in this slum,
hoping for rage, or sorrow.
They don’t come to me
anymore. How can I lament
anything? It is all
so proper, so much
as it should be, now
the nearing cumulus
clouds, ominous,
shift, they are like the
curtains, billowy,
veering at the apex
of their intrusion on the room.
If I am alive now,
it is only
to be in all this
making all possible.
I am glad to be
finally a part
of such machinery. I was
after all not so fond
of living, and there comes
into me, when I see
how little I liked
being a man, a great joy.
Look out our astounding
clear windows before evening.
It is almost as if
the world were blue
with some lubricant,
it shines so.
There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed
They tell you if you write great poems
you will be lifted into the clouds
like a leaf which did not know
this was possible, you will never
hear of your darkness
again, it will become
distant while you become
holy, look,
they say, at the emptiness
of train tracks and it is poetry
growing up like flowers between
the ties, but those
who say this
are not in control of themselves
or of anything and they must
lie to you in order
that they may at night not bear witness
to such great distances cascading and such
eternities unwinding
around them as to cause even the most powerful
of beds to become silences, it
is death which continues
over these chasms and these
distances deliberately like a train.
Commuting
We understand well that we must hold
our lives up in our arms like the victims
of solitary, terrible accidents,
that we must still hold our lives to their promises
and hold ourselves up to our lives
to be sure always they are larger,
wholer, realer than we ourselves, though we
must carry them.
We on this train with our lives in our laps
are waiting patiently for the next moment
and maybe we will be lifted away by our lives
as are the moments we rise up to hold with us,
or maybe we will just slacken
above our drinks in the club car chatting baseball,
all of us headed
to apply for the same job, all of us qualified,
all of us turning now into snowflakes
too delicate,
yet each holding in itself a tiny
stark particle of darkness
and weight, the heart’s cinder
turning over.
Employment in the Small Bookstore
The dust almost motionless
in this narrowness, this stillness,
yet how unlike a coffin
it is, sometimes letting a live one in,
sometimes out
and the air,
though paused, impends not a thing,
the silence isn’t sinister,
and in fact not much goes on
at the Ariel Book Shop today,
no one weeps in the back
room full of books, old books, no one
is tearing the books to shreds, in fact
I am merely sitting here
talking to no one, no one being here,
and I am blameless.
More,
I am grateful for the job,
I am fond of the books and touch them,
I am grateful that King St. goes down
to the river, and that the rain
is lovely, the afternoon green.
If the soft falling away of the afternoon
is all there is, it is nearly
enough, just
let me hear the beautiful clear voice
of a woman in song passing
toward silence, and then
that will be all for me
at five o’clock.
I will walk
down to see the untended
sailing yachts of the Potomac
bobbing hopelessly in another silence,
the small silence that gets to be a long
one when the past stops talking
to you because it is dead,
and still you listen,
hearing just the tiny
agonies of old boats
on a cloudy day, in cloudy water.
Talk to it. Men are talking to it
by Cape Charles, for them it’s the same
silence with fishing lines in their hands.
We are all looking at the river bearing the wreckage
so far away. We wonder how
the river ever came to be so
gray, and think that once there were
some very big doings on this river,
and now that is all over.
Working Outside at Night
The moon swells
and its yellow darkens
nearer the horizon
and soon all
the aluminum rooftops
shall appear, orange
and distinct beside
the orange sun,
while the diamond
flares in its vacuum
within. It is simple
to be with the shovel,
thoughtless, inhabited
by this divorce,
it is good
the luminous
machinery, silenced,
waits, nice
that the conveyor
belts choked with sand
convey nothing.
When I return home to
coffee at
7:45 the lithe
young girls will be going
to high school, pulling
to their mouths stark
cigarettes through
Arizona’s sunlight.
These last few months
have been awful, and when
around five the roosters
alone on neighboring
small farms begin
to scream like humans
my heart just lies down,
a stone.
An Inner Weather
This is the middle of the night.
There are no stars. It’s been lightly snowing
a while, and it is silent. Many men are sleepless,
and for some, within, it is blazing noon.
The commander cries in the street dirt,
the apprentice rides on the mayor.
And yet one pool of light
is succeeded by another tonight,
as always, amid silence, beneath the lamps,
but even these impenetrable things
waver, and aren’t quite real,
and we take no comfort from them.
For the fathers parade as leering women,
the entrails of pets drape the sewer-grates.
Our shadows are black stumps.
Some of us fire
with our mouths open,
amazed, firing.
The cup is overturned by the dagger
and blood dots the window-glass.
This is the way of it
for many men this quiet night of snow.
The snow descends in a sparkling light but many are blind,
walking out without jackets as if into the sun,
and they would not say anything of the snow,
but would say only this
of the weather, that something falling burns on them.
The Supermarkets of Los Angeles
The supermarkets
of Los Angeles are blinding,
they are never closed,
they are defended
by the mountains
on the North, on
the Southeast by the
desert and on
the West by the large,
sad Pacific Ocean.
We enter such
brilliance as we entered
the world, without
shopping list, perfectly.
It is unpleasant,
but each is thinking
he may be here
to escape still worse.
What? There is nothing
out there other
than late winter,
Hollywood, the moments
before morning.
We are never alone
here: above our heads, though
close enough nearly
to touch, is television,
in which may be disclosed
our own faces. They do not
become us. They are
the little faces we wore
as children, now wrinkled,
as if we were not grown
but only aged. We want
to cleanse those wrinkles
of accumulate filth,
these faces whose names
are being withheld, so tiny
in the relaxed fist of
Los Angeles, hearing
Los Angeles singing
to the murdered. We see
the eyes, and we see
what the eyes see,
we see the mouths moving
in utter silence, but of
course we know exactly
what the mouths are saying.
“This Is Thursday. Your Exam Was Tuesday.”
It is a fine, beautiful
and lovely time of warm dusk,
having perhaps just a touch
too much
enveloping damp;
but nice, with its idle strollers,
of whom I am one,
and it’s true,
their capacity for good
is limitless, you can tell.
And then—ascending
over the roofs, the budded tips
of trees, in the twilight, very whole
and official,
its black
markings like a face
that has loomed in every city
I have known—it arrives,
the gigantic yellow warrant
for my arrest,
one sixth the size
of the world. I’m speaking
of the moon. I would not give
you a fistful of earth for
the entire moon, I might as well tell you.
For across the futile and empty
street, in the excruciating
gymnasium, they
are commencing—
degrees are being bestowed
on the deserving,
whereas I’m the incalculable
dullard in the teeshirt here.
Gentlemen of the moon:
I don’t even have
my real shoes on. These are some reformed
hoodlum’s shoes, from the Goodwill. Let
me rest, let me rest in the wake
of others’ steady progress,
closing my eyes,
closing my heart,
shutting the door
in face after face
that has nourished me.
Falling
There is a part
of this poem where you must
say it with me, so
be ready, together we will make
it truthful, as there is gracefulness
even in the motioning of those
leafless trees, even in
such motion as descent. Fired,
I move downward through it all again
in an aquarium of debt, submerging
with the flowering electric
company, with March the 10th, 1971,
its darkness, justice and mercy
like clownfish, funnily striped.
Let them both as a matter of policy
redevour the light that
escapes them, Shakespeare
had just candles, lamps,
Milton had only the
dark, and what difference? as
poetry, like failure, is fathered
in any intensity of light, and light
in all thicknesses of darkness,
as your voice, you out there,
wakes now, please, to say
it with me: There
are descents more final, less graceful
than this plummeting
from employment; it is the middle of a false
thaw, the ice undercoating
of a bare branch is
in the midst of falling. Where
can it all be put except
in this poem, under us, breaking this fall,
itself falling
while breaking it? Look
at this line, stretching out, breaking even as it
/> falls to this next, like a suicide,
the weather singing
past his face, and arising to kill him
this first last line in weeks.
Students
They hold out their hands crushed
by misfortunes and I kiss
my fingers, touch my lips.
When they talk I can’t help it,
I recede,
the words fall down and break.
I shut all the windows of my house
and look out onto the green lawn and am ashamed.
Students, for me, life
is just the ice-pick lying
beside the letter from the County Clerk
of Court, and the hesitation
of a hand between them,
hand I can’t get
my own hand out of.
And the world—it’s merely this place
of unfair vending machines
and women with short hair dyed red
who order another, and weep, and are unmasked.
Then later the world
is a repetitive street.
The hour is too late,
all, all is closed.
The red-haired woman touches the single
discolored tile in the bathroom.
She touches the marks the elastic
makes on her belly, her shoes awry.
She journeys
into the vast bed.
She reaches to the lamp
and makes it dark, relaxing.
She is not rising or even moving
but like many people at the verge of the dream
she feels as though she begins, now, to fly.
What This Window Opens On
Several of those faces on the avenue
are blossoming
The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Page 4
