Your Name Here: Poems (3 page)

Why is that bird ignoring us,

pausing in mid-flight, to take another direction?

Is it feelings of guilt about the spool

it dropped on the bank of a stream,

into which it eventually rolled? Dark spool,

moving oceanward now—what other fate could have been yours?

You could have lived in a drawer

for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state. Now you are free

to call the shots pretty much as they come.

Poor, bald thing.

You are my most favorite artist. Though I know

very little about your work. Some of your followers I know:

Mattia Preti, who toiled so hard to so little

effect (though it was enough). Luca Giordano, involved

with some of the darkest reds ever painted, and lucent greens,

thought he had discovered the secret of the foxgloves.

But it was too late. They had already disappeared

because they had been planted in some other place.

Someone sent some bread up

along with a flask of wine, to cheer him up,

but the old, old secret of the foxgloves, never

to be divined, won’t ever go away.

I say, if you were toting hay up the side of a stack

of it, that might be Italian. Or then again, not.

We have these things in Iowa,

too, and in the untrained reaches of the eyelid

hung out, at evening, over next to nothing. What was it she had said,

back there, at the beginning? “The flowers

of the lady next door are beginning to take flight,

and what will poor Robin do then?” It’s true, they were blasting off

every two seconds like missiles from a launching pad, and nobody wept, or even cared.

Look out of the window, sometime, though, and you’ll see

where the difference has been made. The song of the shrubbery

can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,

of how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another

until we come to a wide avenue whose median

is crowded with trees whose madly peeling bark is the color of a roan,

perhaps, or an Irish setter. One can wait on the curb for the rest

of one’s life, for all anyone cares, or one can cross

when the light changes to green, as in the sapphire folds

of a shot-silk bodice Luca Giordano might have bothered with.

Now
it’s life. But, as Henny Penny said to Turkey Lurkey, something

is hovering over us, wanting to destroy us, but waiting,

though for what, nobody knows.

In the night of the museum, though, some whisper like stars

when the guards have gone home, talking freely to one another.

“Why did that man stare, and stare? All afternoon it seemed he stared

at me, though he obviously saw nothing. Only a fragment of a vision

of a lost love, next to a pool. I couldn’t deal with it

much longer, but luckily I didn’t have to. The experience

is ending. The time for standing to one side is near

now, very near.”

We are constantly running checks.

Quantity control is our concern here, you see.

No batch is allowed to leave the premises

without at least a superficial glance along the tops

of the crates. For who knows how much magic

may be imprisoned there?

Likewise, when the product reaches the market

we like to kind of keep an eye on things there too.

Complaints about the magic

have dwindled to a mere trickle in recent years.

Still you never know if some guy’s going to get funny

and tamper with the equation, causing

apocalyptic sighs to break out in the streets,

barking dogs, skidding vehicles, and the whole consignment

of ruthless consequences. That is why we keep a team of experts

on hand, always awake, alert for the slightest thread of disorder

on someone’s pants. In spring these incidents can double, quadruple, even.

Everything wants to be let out of its box come April or May

and we have to test-drive the final result before it’s been gummed

into the album dark farces regulate. Someone, then, must be constantly

on duty, as well as a relief contingent, for this starry mass

to continue revolving.

Like an apple on the ground

it looks at you. The neighborhood police were kind,

arrested a miscreant, though he was never brought to trial,

which is normal for this type of event.

Meanwhile spring edges inexorably into summer,

where, paradoxically, there is more activity but less to show for it.

The merry-go-rounds begin turning in the carnivals of August.

Best to leave prison till winter, once the honor system has broken down.

A stalemate could pollute new beginnings.

November tells it best, in a whisper almost,

so that there is surprisingly little letdown,

only this new background, a finer needle to thread.

A chance balloon drew these settlers nigh.

It was the year of green honey that sprouts

between the toes of the seated god. “None

can explain it further.” No explanations,

not from me.

I sat in the bakery, rumpled, unshaved,

pondering a theorem. What you said the hotel was.

Someone else’s towel approached me in the laundry.

“Ouch was what I said.” This has been more than I know of,

brimming with indifference, some American in Europe.

He let me off at the corner of some strange country.

The signs were in English. No one cared if

you knew the rubbish was filth.

He carried me from the room in which people were sitting.

They always think they know better, even as they confess

their ignorance blindly, to the first stranger they know.

I see, it’s a market garden, or was

some seasons ago. In this dark stubble I abide.

A messenger came with tidings. I’m sorry,

I’ve had enough tidings.

Giddy with surprise, he crawled upward

toward where I was toasting myself.

A male muse I suppose. I’ve listened to that

before, too. All I want is to be let out

to travel on the gravel. You still don’t

get it, this is a seat. All right, I want my seat,

I said.

That’s no easy manner. The blond moon came untied,

drifted through blue-black wisps

of a woodpile somewhere. Must I follow her too?

Must I follow her too?

Whatever it says you must do.

You had calm days in store, now they have come undone.

Worries stretch before you into the distance.

Perhaps distance is what you had,

once, and must now drink. Only forty years ago

early skyscrapers arched their backs, waiting to be fed.

And still the feeling comes on.

Swan filets and straw wine,

an emphatic look to the driveway

whose golf clubs are scattered feelingly.

You can undress and sit down

on the corduroy doormat blowing

and when the Weird Sisters come calling

pretend to be talking to yourself.

Trouble is they don’t come calling,

suffering as they do from terminal agoraphobia.

A frog juts from a pinecone.

My goodness was that you back there?

You sure know

how to give a feller a good scare.

I’d thought it was just bats

dripping tar on the heads of the guests and the footmen.

You see so little live action in this town

and then everybody wants to cooperate

or celebrate, sort of. I can do that too.

Always. Have a good time.

Something might come out in group therapy:

your velvet soul as I just realized it.

Please come back. I liked you so much.

Thistles, dandelions, what do we care?

The

ghoulish

resonance

of

a

cello

resonates in a neighbor’s cabana.

What do I know of this?

I

am

sitting

on a pile of dirt in a neighbor’s back yard.

Was there something else to do?

Long ago we crept for candy

through the neighbor’s gutter

but found only candy wrappers

of an unknown species: “Sycamores,”

“Chocolate Spit,” “Slate-Gray Fluids,”

“Anamorphic Portraits of Old Goriot.”

The way a piece of candy seems to flutter

in the prismatic light above a clothesline, stops,

removes all its clothes.

There was a bucket

of water

to wash in,

fingerposts pointing the way to the next phenomenon:

sugar falling gently on strawberries, snow on a pile of red eggs.

None of us was really satisfied,

but none of us wanted to go away, either.

The shadows of an industrial park loomed below us,

the brass sky above.

“Get off your duff,” Reuel commanded.

(He was our commander.)

“You are like the poet Lenz, who ran from house to forest

to rosy firmament and back

and nobody ever saw his legs move.”

Ah,

it is good

to be back

in the muck.

Massachusetts rests its feet

in Rhode Island,

as crows rest in cowslips

and cows slip in crowshit.

I may have been called upon to write

a poem different from this one.

OK, let’s go. I want to please everybody

and this is my song:

In Beethoven Street I handed you a melon.

Round and pronged it was, and full of secret juice.

You, in turn, handed me over to the police

who thought (correctly) that I was the spy

they had been looking for these past seven months.

They led me down to their station, you need to know,

where they questioned me for days on end.

But my answers were always questions, and so they let me go,

exasperated by their inability to answer.

I was a free man!

I walked up Rilke Street

chattering a little hymn to myself.

It went something like this:

“Beware the monsters, but take care

that you are not yourself one.

Time is kind to them

and will take care of you,

asleep on your grandmother’s couch, sipping cherry juice.”

How did the pigs get through the window screens at night?

By morning it was all over.

I had never sung to you, you never coaxed me to

from your balcony, and all trains run into night

that collects them like paper streamers, and lays them in a drawer.

Unable to leave the sight of you

I draw little crow’s feet in my notebook, in the sunlight

that comes at the end of a sudden day of tears

waiting to be reconciled to the fascinating madness of the dark.

My mistress’ hands are nothing like these,

collecting silken cords for a day when the wet wind plunges

through colossal apertures.

Suddenly I was out of hope. I crawled out on the ledge.

The air there was frank and pure,

not like the frayed December night.

Waste time on these riddles?

Because what would I lecture on then?

The master that comes after, after all,

brushes them aside or burns them.

Am I therefore not very strong?

Will my arch be built, strung along the sand

within sight of olive trees? No,

I am cut of plainer cloth, but it dazzles me

in the evening by the moonlight.

L’heureuse,
they called her.

Day after day she gazed at the blue gazing globe

in her sunlit garden, saying nothing.

Noticing this, the old stump said nothing too.

Finally it couldn’t stand it any longer:

“Can’t you
be
something? You have the required manners

and your dress is a shifting of pea-green shot with sea-foam.”

I know I shall one day come to the reason

for manners and intercourse with persons.

Therefore I launch my hat on this peg.

Here, there are two of us. Take two.

Turning and turning in the demented sky,

the sugar-mill gushes forth poems and plainer twists.

It can’t account for the roses in our furnace.

A motherly chimp leads us away

to a table overflowing with silverware and crystal,

crystal smudgepots so the old man could see through tears:

He is the one you ought to have invited.

Once upon a time there were two brothers.

Then there was only one: myself.

I grew up fast, before learning to drive,

even. There was I: a stinking adult.

I thought of developing interests

someone might take an interest in. No soap.

I became very weepy for what had seemed

like the pleasant early years. As I aged