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that he can’t miss the chance
to soar on shamefully unfeathered
naked vigilance alone.
Arduous ease,
watchful agility,
and calculated inspiration. Do you see
how he waits to pounce in flight; do you know
how he plots from head to toe
against his very being; do you know, do you see
how cunningly he weaves himself through his own former shape
and works to seize this swaying world
by stretching out the arms he has conceived—
beautiful beyond belief at this passing
at this very passing moment that’s just passed.
A Paleolithic Fertility Fetish
The Great Mother has no face.
Why would the Great Mother need a face.
The face cannot stay faithful to the body,
the face disturbs the body, it is undivine,
it disturbs the body’s solemn unity.
The Great Mother’s visage is her bulging belly
with its blind navel in the middle.
The Great Mother has no feet.
What would the Great Mother do with feet.
Where is she going to go.
Why would she go into the world’s details.
She has gone just as far as she wants
and keeps watch in the workshops under her taut skin.
So there’s a world out there? Well and good.
It’s bountiful? Even better.
The children have somewhere to go, to run around,
something to look up to? Wonderful.
So much that it’s still there while they’re sleeping,
almost ridiculously whole and real?
It keeps on existing when their backs are turned?
That’s just too much—it shouldn’t have.
The Great Mother barely has a pair of arms,
two tiny limbs lie lazing on her breasts.
Why would they want to bless life,
give gifts to what has enough and more!
Their only obligation is to endure as long as earth and sky
just in case
of some mishap that never comes.
To form a zigzag over essence.
The ornament’s last laugh.
Cave
There’s nothing on the walls
except for dampness.
It’s cold and dark in here.
But cold and dark
after a burnt-out fire.
Nothing, but nothing remaining
from a bison drawn in ocher.
Nothing—but a nothing left
after the long resistance
of the beast’s lowered brow.
So, a Beautiful Nothing.
Deserving a capital letter.
A heresy against humdrum nothingness,
unconverted and proud of the difference.
Nothing—but after us,
who were here before
and ate our hearts
and drank our blood.
Nothing, to wit:
our unfinished dance.
Your first thighs, arms, necks, faces
by the fire.
My first sacred bellies
filled with minuscule Pascals.
Silence, but after voices.
Not a sluggish sort of silence.
A silence that had its own throats once,
its flutes and tambourines.
Grafted here like a wilding
by laughter and howls.
Motion
You’re crying here, but there they’re dancing,
there they’re dancing in your tear.
There they’re happy, making merry,
they don’t know a blessed thing.
Almost the glimmering of mirrors.
Almost candles flickering.
Nearly staircases and hallways.
Gestures, lace cuffs, so it seems.
Hydrogen, oxygen, those rascals.
Chlorine, sodium, a pair of rogues.
The fop nitrogen parading
up and down, around, about
beneath the vault, inside the dome.
Your crying’s music to their ears.
Yes, eine kleine Nachtmusik.
Who are you, lovely masquerader.
No End of Fun
So he’s got to have happiness,
he’s got to have truth, too,
he’s got to have eternity—
did you ever!
He has only just learned to tell dreams from waking;
only just realized that he is he;
only just whittled with his hand né fin
a flint, a rocket ship;
easily drowned in the ocean’s teaspoon,
not even funny enough to tickle the void;
sees only with his eyes;
hears only with his ears;
his speech’s personal best is the conditional;
he uses his reason to pick holes in reason.
In short, he’s next to no one,
but his head’s full of freedom, omniscience, and the Being
beyond his foolish meat—
did you ever!
For he does apparently exist.
He genuinely came to be
beneath one of the more parochial stars.
He’s lively and quite active in his fashion.
His capacity for wonder is well advanced
for a crystal’s deviant descendant.
And considering his difficult childhood
spent kowtowing to the herd’s needs,
he’s already quite an individual indeed—
did you ever!
Carry on, then, if only for the moment
that it takes a tiny galaxy to blink!
One wonders what will become of him,
since he does in fact seem to be.
And as far as being goes, he really tries quite hard.
Quite hard indeed—one must admit.
With that ring in his nose, with that toga, that sweater.
He’s no end of fun, for all you say.
Poor little beggar.
A human, if ever we saw one.
COULD HAVE
1972
Could Have
It could have happened.
It had to happen.
It happened earlier. Later.
Nearer. Farther off.
It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first.
You were saved because you were the last.
Alone. With others.
On the right. The left.
Because it was raining. Because of the shade.
Because the day was sunny.
You were in luck—there was a forest.
You were in luck—there were no trees.
You were in luck—a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake,
a jamb, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant.
You were in luck—just then a straw went floating by.
As a result, because, although, despite.
What would have happened if a hand, a foot,
within an inch, a hairsbreadth from
an unfortunate coincidence.
So you’re here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve?
One hole in the net and you slipped through?
I couldn’t be more shocked or speechless.
Listen,
how your heart pounds inside me.
Falling from the Sky
Magic is dying out, although the heights
still pulse with its vast force. On August nights
you can’t be sure what’s falling from the sky:
a star? or something else that still belongs on high?
Is making wishes an old-fashioned blunder
if heaven only knows what we are under?
Above our modern heads the dark’s still dark,
but can’t
some twinkle in it explain: “I’m a spark,
I swear, a flash that a comet shook loose
from its tail, just a bit of cosmic rubble;
it’s not me falling in tomorrow’s news,
that’s some other spark nearby, having engine trouble.”
Wrong Number
At midnight, in an empty, hushed art gallery
a tactless telephone spews forth a stream of rings;
a human sleeping now would jump up instantly,
but only sleepless prophets and untiring kings
reside here, where the moonlight makes them pale;
they hold their breath, their eyes fixed on some nail
or crack; only the young pawnbroker’s bride
seems taken by that odd, ringing contraption,
but even she won’t lay her fan aside,
she too just hangs there, caught in mid-nonaction.
Above it all, in scarlet robes or nude,
they view nocturnal fuss as simply rude.
Here’s more black humor worthy of the name
than if some grand duke leaned out from his frame
and vented his frustration with a vulgar curse.
And if some silly man calling from town
refuses to give up, put the receiver down,
though he’s got the wrong number? He lives, so he errs.
Theater Impressions
For me the tragedy’s most important act is the sixth:
the raising of the dead from the stage’s battlegrounds,
the straightening of wigs and fancy gowns,
removing knives from stricken breasts,
taking nooses from lifeless necks,
lining up among the living
to face the audience.
The bows, both solo and ensemble—
the pale hand on the wounded heart,
the curtsies of the hapless suicide,
the bobbing of the chopped-off head.
The bows in pairs—
rage extends its arm to meekness,
the victim’s eyes smile at the torturer,
the rebel indulgently walks beside the tyrant.
Eternity trampled by the golden slipper’s toe.
Redeeming values swept aside with the swish of a wide-brimmed hat.
The unrepentant urge to start all over tomorrow.
Now enter, single file, the hosts who died early on,
in Acts 3 and 4, or between scenes.
The miraculous return of all those lost without a trace.
The thought that they’ve been waiting patiently offstage
without taking off their makeup
or their costumes
moves me more than all the tragedy’s tirades.
But the curtain’s fall is the most uplifting part,
the things you see before it hits the floor:
here one hand quickly reaches for a flower,
there another hand picks up a fallen sword.
Only then, one last, unseen, hand
does its duty
and grabs me by the throat.
Voices
You can’t move an inch, my dear Marcus Emilius,
without Aborigines sprouting up as if from the earth itself.
Your heel sticks fast amidst Rutulians.
You founder knee-deep in Sabines and Latins.
You’re up to your waist, your neck, your nostrils
in Aequians and Volscians, dear Lucius Fabius.
These irksome little nations, thick as flies.
It’s enough to make you sick, dear Quintus Decius.
One town, then the next, then the hundred and seventieth.
The Fidenates’ stubbornness. The Feliscans’ ill will.
The shortsighted Ecetrans. The capricious Antemnates.
The Labicanians and Pelignians, offensively aloof.
They drive us mild-mannered sorts to sterner measures
with every new mountain we cross, dear Gaius Cloelius.
If only they weren’t always in the way, the Auruncians, the Marsians,
but they always do get in the way, dear Spurius Manlius.
Tarquinians where you’d least expect them, Etruscans on all sides.
If that weren’t enough, Volsinians and Veientians.
The Aulertians, beyond all reason. And, of course,
the endlessly vexatious Sapinians, my dear Sextus Oppius.
Little nations do have little minds.
The circle of thick skulls expands around us.
Reprehensible customs. Backward laws.
Ineffectual gods, my dear Titus Vilius.
Heaps of Hernicians. Swarms of Murricinians.
Antlike multitudes of Vestians and Samnites.
The farther you go, the more there are, dear Servius Follius.
These little nations are pitiful indeed.
Their foolish ways require supervision
with every new river we ford, dear Aulus Iunius.
Every new horizon threatens me.
That’s how I’d put it, my dear Hostius Melius.
To which I, Hostius Melius, would reply, my dear
Appius Papius: March on! The world has got to end somewhere.
The Letters of the Dead
We read the letters of the dead like helpless gods,
but gods nonetheless, since we know the dates that follow.
We know which debts will never be repaid.
Which widows will remarry with the corpse still warm.
Poor dead, blindfolded dead,
gullible, fallible, pathetically prudent.
We see the faces people make behind their backs.
We catch the sound of wills being ripped to shreds.
The dead sit before us comically, as if on buttered bread,
or frantically pursue the hats blown from their heads.
Their bad taste, Napoleon, steam, electricity,
their fatal remedies for curable diseases,
their foolish apocalypse according to Saint John,
their counterfeit heaven on earth according to Jean-Jacques . . .