Left nothing undone!
*
The woods decay,
the woods decay and fall,
and so do I, so yeah,
I worry about stumbling
through a dimensional flaw
into an alternate universe,
one all purple rays
or a giant airport terminal,
one that is light-years
of the interior of a pear—
worth seeing for a minute,
if I could get back.
But that’s the trick.
There was a universe
where my shoulder brushed the jamb
of a small child’s room
but I can’t get back.
I remember
really an ocean of roses,
but I can’t get back.
The light on his face
changing to dead,
and I can’t get back.
Each second, the flicker
between re-scans of a screen,
and I can’t get back.
*
Now that my ears are iffy
(you are?)
more and more
I hear doors slamming
through my feet,
trash rumbling off
through my feet,
stirring seeds,
fall coming, skitter in the walls,
through that airy
unscratchable spot
between my shoulders.
Off the top of my head
(higher than ears)
what you say
sounds dimmer than what you said,
sounds like
mail jammed in the slot,
a dog left long alone, the wind,
sounds like
the sun climbing a stone stair,
a stone’s slow sigh in the sun.
Now that I can’t hear
what you say, it means
so much, now that I don’t hear
exactly, it can mean
anything, everything.
It means what I hoped.
It means what you hoped
it meant.
All of your secrets
I know, I know, but whose—
I’ve been in you
and out of you,
reading as you read, I’ve
been you.
I know everything,
but your name, your name, your name…
*
Remember the joke about lifers
(jokes, I didn’t delete!)
who know the jokes by heart,
so they just say 12,
they just say 43
and get laughs. Well:
I just say 2, I say
3rd season of the year,
I say just 30 years, I say
that quirk of gladness
that’s been in her face since she was 7,
without the run-up
of deleted fields,
the bird-crossed
deleted pain and wonder
as November twilight
deletes deletes deletes.
*
My great poems are: deleted.
What satisfaction, though,
to know they were written!
How magisterial
they must have been.
Faintly embarrassing their deleted
global sweep,
their wise but deleted
moan on behalf of all,
their poise delete delete
so much more automatic than my own.
Their great unanswerable last line,
You know what I mean!
So now the onset
of the final simplicity
that comes after great poems
which in anyone who hadn’t
written such great poems
might just be senility!
With the mountainous
assurance of innocence
so rare in these late days,
with the mountainous freshness
of the first time,
I’ll vouchsafe to Millions
that damburst of clichés
I’ve been saving up for decades!
That’s what I’ll DO!
That’s what I’m doing!
They’ll like me better,
I’ll like them. I’ll be happy
as all the other dumbfuck poets,
astonished and glad
to find that unexpectedly,
all that occurs to me—
every damn word—
is true. It’s SO TRUE!!!
*
Now that I’m ready,
I get to be,
faster and faster,
the Posterity that forgets me!
O Reader, O Future
even you
are behind me!
Delete delete delete!
*
[Did you hear? It was Keats
and his gathering swallows.
He wrote that manic
Songs for Senility—
and him not 60—
and then and THEN…
it was SO ironic!]
Room Temperature
That coffee you forgot to drink,
this light, eight minutes from the sun,
words I thought for a second
the hottest ever written.
IV. Small Hours
Shore Town, Winter
Now that it’s January
in Victorian New Jersey,
the aqua and magenta
gingerbread of triple-deckers
is past incongruous, way past forlorn,
and all the way to the Grand Canyon’s
weird silence,
the loud absence
of the forces of improbable scale and precision
that must have made this
(and what a job to paint it!)
for their very own,
then flip-flopped down the boardwalk
and out of the galaxy,
leaving the sea,
pretty calm this evening,
the tide trending in,
the moon and sun, this winter twilight,
just about equally dim.
When Matthew Arnold settled one elegiac hand
on a pale shoulder, gesturing out
over the Channel, he saw France
quietly letting go its light.
This is America, we see nothing
but size, sky and ocean
working on gray-green
not much of anything,
though in this later century
we, also, hear the grating roar,
mixed maybe with a syringe or two
and indestructible packing, but never mind,
the hiss and click
of calciferous debris that Arnold heard
Sophocles hear as human misery.
Waves in themselves, turning to her
he whispered (and I whisper),
are huge but powerless.
Their megatons
collapsing on a single shell
leave it unfazed,
but hardness of touch, quickness of suspicion,
the quickening step
past pain:
shells break, we break, each other.
Ah love, etcetera.
Weary of detail,
Arnold’s particular deity
has chilled out to think about the Big Picture,
and on his darkling plain
they’ve closed the stores,
as if in a day or two
his sun will go red giant
and scrape the planet down to the stone.
But the Sea of Faiths,
in the broadest sense, is doing
just fine, thank you. Endlessly it reproduces
Taco Bells and Jiffy Lubes
along our hardening arterials.
Not a day goes by
without the world record
ing
zillions of world records,
no day that our collective résumés
fail to add a zillion lines,
and those who declare
for Higher Things enrich
in desert compounds the uranium
of Zeal’s white glare.
Over and over,
just when it seems we’re blessedly
running out of gas,
idiot saints
figure out how to make money
from going on just as before.
Ah love, the news is old
that the wind slides through carless lots
and slaps flat on chainlink:
more than a century,
now, it’s been the end of the world,
and this long, long twilight,
this last Alas, has lost its power
either to frighten or console.
On a similar shore
You and I are old, Ulysses crooned
but then again
’Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
We call it a day,
heading for Parkway North,
not too downcast to be lifted
by a car absurdly loud with teens
and a music that drowns ours
as they pass us, entering
this paused flick
of dark hotels and meters on Expired
hoping for solace and a Sign! a Sign!
and sure, if anything is sure, to find
both less and more than we have found
on a winter Sunday
in the flickering neon
of this new old new old world
that says No Vacancy and means
We are empty, and we plan to stay that way.
Tableau
Remember the one about the two intellectuals
walking the unwild woody trails
just out of sight of the houses? There among postsymbolic deer
unspooked by their conspicuous thrashing, they stumble
over rocks and branches, arms out, almost touching,
talking about, what else, poetry and their kids,
and wildly happy. The sky like a page
just turned to, your face just turned to me,
just that.
The way things broken off
a little too soon can last forever.
Postmortem Georgic
If I die in June, the true end of our year,
exchange the storms for screens and summon the technician
to check the coolant pressure in the central air
before the dog days when the black drive wavers
and no bright metal can be touched, and then swap out the filters,
and now that our little grove of maple, oak and hickory
has shed into the gutters (oh deeper than you imagine)
petals and dust and unfelt leaves, flush them out
lest thunderheads that build in the searing afternoon,
toppling, leave them weeping around you.
Yes, if I die in summer you will be hard-pressed
to keep the shrubs clipped back and the grass down
till the heat browns it, and to counteract metastases
of chickweed, black medic and poison ivy.
Circle the house now with broad bands of pyrethrins
to dam the streams of carpenter ants, and if they keep coming
seek out their nests in stumps and the garden’s railroad ties,
and kill them, if you have the heart (as I might not)
to battle life, having so little left of your own.
Trundle the recycling to the curb infallibly
on alternate Mondays, or if in weekless summer you forget
what day it is, do it any day and wait till it is taken
as all things are. Repair the small appliances that faltered
while you were drowned with work and could not bother,
or let them go, since little these days is worth repairing,
and service the car for journeys you have been putting off
that you cannot put off longer, now the world grows old,
or do not, and tell the world it must come to you.
But after all, I would never die in summer. Say to our children
as usual his mind has wandered, only this time so far
he has not come perfectly back, and then think the click,
a little too long, of setting your glass on the endtable
in the twilit air you cannot tell from your skin, is the click
of me also invisibly near you setting mine down.
If I die in autumn, exchange the screens for storms,
and set traps baited with nut butters
along the perimeter of the basement
and foam-caulk all exterior cracks and seams
to foil the mice, checking also the chimney cap
and the screening of the vents to keep out flying squirrels,
native to these woods, though many do not believe in them
with their huge black eyes all pupil, and their rustling above us,
and summon the servicer of the big hollow furnaces,
for when the cold like empty boxcars rumbles in
and the heat is creaking in the aluminum ducts
you will be cold, coldbones, without me,
listening awake to, what is it, the wind,
mysterious disk accesses, creatures flowing in the walls?
Turn the clocks back, slide fresh batteries into smoke detectors,
and reset the timed lights, for the days grow shorter
and you will be driving home in earlier and earlier sunset
and the day will hurt you with its unexpected darknesses,
like the young husband who could not speak his mind,
and now, before the year begins in earnest,
weed out your files, discarding a third of all you have
as the trees will, since leaves, also made for a single year,
grow shabby and slow, and heavy snows would collect in them
cracking limbs off and splitting even the thick trunk,
and travel light, for all you carry you will carry alone.
And when all the leaves are down, even the reluctant oaks,
blow them into the woods, or call someone to blow them,
and then, only then, scoop out the gutters
once again, lest they clog and freeze, sagging with ice-mass,
or call someone to do it. Then drain the mower and park it,
or sell it since you will not want to keep it up
or let the gas sour and the valves gum, since you will not sell it,
and think that of all seasons this is the one I would never miss,
and say to our children he is out for one of his long walks
and the leaves are streaming through his eyes and heart and hair.
If I die in winter, when there is little to do
but wait till winter is over, keep watch on the upstairs windows,
and if they ghost with mist, turn the humidifiers down
lest the paint peel and the sills rot out.
Restock the pantry with beans, onions, and root vegetables,
and the soups you love, salty and fat and thick,
for green leaves and the glare of fruits would hurt the soul
which wishes now to eat darkly and be deep in the ground.
Wind the hoses, draining them first, in coils,
squeeze clockwise the indoor shutoff
and open the outdoor faucets wide, letting the last water out
lest in a coldsnap some pipe snap.
Now broadcast salt preventively on the drive,
for it is steep, and mornings slick, and snow frequent,
or sleep in and wait till the sun has worked on it,
since in a few hours the sun will work on it,
or a few days or weeks, for what is time now,
and how can I urge them on y
ou now, these endless tasks,
who am not sure in my own mind if they were life
or what kept me from our life. Then tell our children
I have gone to lie in the abstract earth,
breathing stones like sky, restless as always
to fit the huge, sharp planet into my too-small heart.
If I die in the spring, that fruitless season,
scour the markets for the grapes and nectarines
of the other hemisphere, for it is always harvest somewhere,
but stay wary through the middle of March
when wet, heavy snowstorms still may strike, only then
stowing the shovels and bringing out brooms and seeds.
Squeegee the windows till they squeak with clarity
and lime the lawn against sour rains, and if now, already,
carpenter ants are trailing over the sea-blue carpet
defenses have failed and they have nested in the house,
so listen in the walls for a noise like crackling cellophane—
I can tell you where, in the beams between floors
where the slow leak of the shower has spread dampness—
and drill there and spread fatal powders
or do not, since though they chew a house down,
they chew slowly, slowly, slowly and the house
will fall when it falls, and not before your fall.
Start the dehumidifier, lest books demoted to the basement
rot there, or let them, since those we will never read again,
set the clocks forward, and once more change the batteries
in the smoke detectors, or do not, and when the fire insurance
comes due in April, imagine, at least, that you might let it go,
for how in this late cold can we argue against fire?
Yes, if there is justice, though I have said there is none,
I will die in the spring, this season I love least
of beginning all over, I of no patience,
when hope is a door left unlatched in a high wind
banging and banging itself to pieces.
By the Numbers Page 6
