New and Selected Poems (24 page)

 

11

 

Bird comforting the afflicted
With your song,
The one or two lying awake
In the vast slumber
Of small town and countryside,

 

Who know nothing of each other
As they listen intently
To every little tweet
Afraid they'll do something
To make it hush.

 

In the cool, silvery light,
The outline of the window visible,
Some trees in the yard
About to let go of the night,
The others in no big hurry.

 

 

 

XIII

 

So far I've met here two Homers and one Virgil.
The town is like a living anthology of classic literature.
Thunder and lightning almost every afternoon.
When neighbors meet, they slap mosquitoes
On each other's foreheads and go off red in the face.

 

I'm lying in a hammock next to a burning barn
Watching a birch tree in the yard.
One minute it wrestles with the wind and smoke,
The next it raises its fists to curse the gods.
That, of course, makes it a Trojan
To the Greeks just arriving on a fire engine.

In pursuit of happiness, you may yet
Draw close to it momentarily
In one of these two leather-bound chairs
With the help of scissors and a comb,

 

Draped to the chin with a long white sheet,
While your head slips through
The invisible barber's greasy fingers
Making your hair stand up straight,

 

While he presses the razor to your throat,
Causing your eyes to spring open
As you discern in the mirror before you
The full length of the empty barbershop

 

With two vacant chairs and past them
The street, commensurately empty,
Except for the pressed and blurred face
Of someone straining to look inside.

Old men have bad dreams,
So they sleep little.
They walk on bare feet
Without turning on the lights,
Or they stand leaning
On gloomy furniture
Listening to their hearts beat.

 

The one window across the room
Is black like a blackboard.
Every old man is alone
In this classroom, squinting
At that fine chalk line
That divides being-here
From being-here-no-more.

 

No matter. It was a glass of water
They were going to get,
But not just yet.
They listen for mice in the walls,
A car passing on the street,
Their dead fathers shuffling past them
On their way to the kitchen.

Another dreary day in time's invisible
Penitentiary, making license plates
With lots of zeros, walking lockstep counter-
clockwise in the exercise yard or watching
The lights dim when some poor fellow,
Who could as well be me, gets fried.

 

Here on death row, I read a lot of books.
First it was law, as you'd expect.
Then came history, ancient and modern.
Finally philosophy—all that being-and-nothingness stuff.
The more I read, the less I understand.
Still, other inmates call me professor.

 

Did I mention that we had no guards?
It's a closed book who locks
And unlocks the cell doors for us.
Even the executions we carry out
By ourselves, attaching the wires,
Playing warden, playing chaplain

 

All because a little voice in our head
Whispers something about our last appeal
Being denied by God himself.
The others hear nothing, of course,
But that, typically, you may as well face it,
Is how time runs things around here.

In my great-grandmother's time,
All one needed was a broom
To get to see places
And give the geese a chase in the sky.

 

•

 

The stars know everything,
So we try to read their minds.
As distant as they are,
We choose to whisper in their presence.

 

•

 

Oh, Cynthia,
Take a clock that has lost its hands
For a ride.
Get me a room at Hotel Eternity
Where Time likes to stop now and then.

 

•

 

Come, lovers of dark corners,
The sky says,
And sit in one of my dark corners.
There are tasty little zeros
In the peanut dish tonight.

Night fell without asking
For our permission.
Mary had a headache,
And my eyes hurt
From squinting at the newspapers.

 

We could still make out
A few old trees in the yard.
They take it as it comes.
Separate truths
Do not interest them.

 

We'll have to run for it, I said,
And had no idea what I meant.
The coming of the inevitable,
What a strange bliss that is,
And I had no idea what she meant.

The mail truck goes down the coast
Carrying a single letter.
At the end of a long pier
The bored seagull lifts a leg now and then
And forgets to put it down.
There is a menace in the air
Of tragedies in the making.

 

Last night you thought you heard television
In the house next door.
You were sure it was some new
Horror they were reporting,
So you went out to find out.
Barefoot, wearing just shorts.
It was only the sea sounding weary
After so many lifetimes
Of pretending to be rushing off somewhere
And never getting anywhere.

 

This morning, it felt like Sunday.
The heavens did their part
By casting no shadow along the boardwalk
Or the row of vacant cottages,
Among them a small church
With a dozen gray tombstones huddled close
As if they, too, had the shivers.

 

 

 

XIV

 

Swaying handcuffed
On an invisible scaffold,
Hung by the unsayable
Little something
Night and day take turns
Paring down further.
My mind's a ghost house
Open to the starlight.
My back's covered with graffiti
Like an elevated train.
Snowflakes swarm
Around my bare head
Choking with laughter
At my last-minute contortions
To write something on my chest
With my already bitten,
Already bleeding tongue.

City of poorly loved chairs, bedroom slippers, frying pans,
I'm rushing back to you
Passing every car on the highway,
Searching for you with my bright headlights
Down the dark, empty streets.

 

O you heartless people who can't wait
To go to the beach tomorrow morning,
What about the black-and-white photo of the grandparents

You are abandoning?
What about the mirrors, the potted plants and the
        coat hangers?

 

Dead alarm clock, empty birdcage, piano I never play,
I'll be your waiter tonight
Ready to take your order,
And you'll be my distinguished dinner guests,
Each one with a story to tell.

Juggler of hats and live hand grenades.
Tumbler, contortionist, impersonator,
Living statue, wire walker, escape artist,
Amateur ventriloquist and mind reader

 

Doing all that without being detected
While leisurely strolling down the street,
Buying a newspaper on some corner,
Bending down to pat a blind man's dog,

 

Or sitting across from your wife at dinner,
While she prattles about the weather,
Concentrating instead on a trapeze in your head,
The tigers pacing angrily in their cage.

Give me a long dark night and no sleep,
And I'll visit every place I have ever lived,
Starting with the house where I was born.
I'll sit in my parents' dimmed bedroom
Straining to hear the tick of their clock.

 

I'll roam the old neighborhood hunting for friends,
Enter junk-filled backyards where trees
Look like war cripples on crutches,
Stop by a tree stump where Grandma
Made roosters and hens walk around headless.

 

A black cat will slip out of the shadows
And rub herself against my leg
To let me know she'll be my guide tonight
On this street with its missing buildings,
Missing faces and few lingering ghosts.

For those troubled in mind
Afraid to remain alone
With their own thoughts,
Who quiz every sound
The night makes around them,

 

A discreet tap on the door,
A whispered invitation
To where they have all gathered
In a room down the hall
Ready to entertain you

 

In a voice of your parents,
The pretty girl you knew once,
One or two dead friends
All pressing close to you
As if wishing to share a secret,

 

The one with slick black hair
Leaning into your face,
Eyes popping out of his head,
His mouth hanging down
Like a butcher's bloody scale.

It must have a reason for concealing
Its many surprises from us,
And that reason must have something to do
With either compassion or malice.

 

I know that most of us fear it,
And that surely is the explanation
We've never been properly introduced,
Though we are neighbors

 

Who run into each other often
By accident and then stand there
Speechless and embarrassed,
Before pretending to be distracted

 

By some children walking to school,
A pigeon pecking at a pizza crust
Next to a hearse filled with flowers
Parked in front of a small, gray church.

Lay the knife and fork by your plate.
Here, where it's always wartime,
It's prudent to break bread unobserved,
Take small sips of wine or beer
Sneaking glances at your companions.

 

June evening, how your birds worry me.
I can hear them rejoicing in the trees
Oblivious of the troubles that lie ahead.
The fly on the table is more cautious
And so are my bare feet under the table.

 

Hundreds of bloody flags fleeing at sunset
Across the darkening plains.
Some general leading another army into defeat,
While you pour honey over the walnuts,
And I wait my turn to lick the spoon.

Taken as a whole, it's a mystery.
An apparent order concealing a disorder
That would shake us to the core
Were we ever to grasp its senselessness,
Its infinite, raging madness,

 

Which, for all we know, may be contagious
And explains our terror
At seeing these crowds at the end of day
Convinced a murderer or a lunatic
We'll be hearing about on the late news
Strolls among them now peacefully,