its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.
The Stare
With a basin of warm water and a towel
I am shaving my father
late on a summer afternoon
as he sits in a chair in striped pajamas.
He screws up his face this way and that
to make way for the razor,
as someone passes with a tray,
as someone else sobs in a corner.
It is impossible to remember
such closeness,
impossible to know too
whether the object of his vivid staring is
the wavering treetops,
his pale reflection in the window,
or maybe just a splinter of light,
a pinpoint caught within the glass itself.
Surprise
This—
according to the voice on the radio,
the host of a classical music program no less—
this is the birthday of Vivaldi.
He would be 325 years old today,
quite bent over, I would imagine,
and not able to see much through his watery eyes.
Surely, he would be deaf by now,
the clothes flaking off him,
hair pitiably sparse.
But we would throw a party for him anyway,
a surprise party where everyone
would hide behind the furniture to listen
for the tap of his cane on the pavement
and the sound of his dry, persistent cough.
Poetry
Call it a field where the animals
who were forgotten by the Ark
come to graze under the evening clouds.
Or a cistern where the rain that fell
before history trickles over a concrete lip.
However you see it,
this is no place to set up
the three-legged easel of realism
or make a reader climb
over the many fences of a plot.
Let the portly novelist
with his noisy typewriter
describe the city where Francine was born,
how Albert read the paper on the train,
how curtains were blowing in the bedroom.
Let the playwright with her torn cardigan
and a dog curled on the rug
move the characters
from the wings to the stage
to face the many-eyed darkness of the house.
Poetry is no place for that.
We have enough to do
complaining about the price of tobacco,
passing the dripping ladle,
and singing songs to a bird in a cage.
We are busy doing nothing—
and all we need for that is an afternoon,
a rowboat under a blue sky,
and maybe a man fishing from a stone bridge,
or, better still, nobody on that bridge at all.
Nine Horses Page 6
