The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

“Did you have rapport with
the seals?” the judge asked.

“I guess I did have rapport
with the seals,” Giordano said.

Despite the rapport, Basel
fined Giordano $50 for annoying
the seals.

—AP
Wire Service

nothing to drink in

the refrigerator but juice from

the pickles come back

long dead, or thin

catsup. i feel i am old

now, though surely i

am young enough? i feel that i have had

winters, too many heaped cold

and dry as reptiles into my slack skin.

i am not the kind to win

and win.

no i am not that kind, i can hear

my wife yelling, “goddamnit, quit

running over,” talking to

the stove, yelling, “i

mean it, just stop,” and i am old and

i wonder about everything: birds

clamber south, your car

kaputs in a blazing, dusty

nowhere, things
happen
, and constantly you

wish for your slight home, for

your wife's rusted

voice slamming around the kitchen. so few

of us wonder why

we crowded, as strange,

monstrous bodies, blindly into one

another till the bed

choked, and our range

of impossible maneuvers was gone,

but isn't it because by dissolving like so

much dust into the sheets we are crowding

south, into the kitchen, into

nowhere?

this has been a

busy day. in the morning there was

his mother, calling to him

from the garden and he ran

thinking that he was

a tower into the light around her.

he had wanted to

bring her water, or a

small thing. later

he will perhaps harness the afternoon

and send it ahead to pull

us down, or up, who can

say for later?

now is the thing, now

with the light around the house

in the yard and earlier,

before lunch, when he saw his father

at the well sending the pail

far down into the cooler, hidden

water; earlier, when he saw

his father reaching down like

that into the water, and did not

recognize the composition of a

memory, or how they, these people, are

often composed of memories.

the woman whose face has just finished breaking

with a joy so infinite

and heavy that it might be grief has won

a car on a giveaway show, for her family,

for an expanse of souls that washes from a million

picture tubes onto the blank reaches

of the air. meanwhile, the screams are packing

the air to a hardness: in the studio

the audience will no longer move, will be caught

slowly, like ancient, staring mammals, figuring

out the double-cross within the terrible progress

of a glacier. here, i am suddenly towering

with loneliness, repeating to this woman's

only face,
this time, again, i have not won
.

by now even the ground

deep under the ground has dried.

the grass becoming green

does not quite remember the last year,

or the year before, or the centuries

that kept passing over. all of these blades thought

that america's grief over the ruptured

flesh of its leaders

was another wind going into the sky.

a rabbit stiffens

with hard sorrow up from the grass

and runs. well,

it is another spring and in the clouds

it is the ranging spectacle of a crowd

of congressmen accusing one another, each

moving in his own shadow against the next.

sometimes you know

things: once at a

birthday party a little

girl looked at her new party

gloves and said she

liked me, making suddenly the light much

brighter so that the very small

hairs shone above her lip. i felt

stuffed, like a swimming pool, with

words, like i knew something that was in

a great tangled knot. and when we sat

down i saw there were

tiny glistenings on her

legs, too. i knew

something for sure then. but it

was too big, or like the outside too

everywhere, or maybe

hiding inside, behind

the bicycles where i later

kissed her, not using my tongue. it was

too giant and thin to squirm

into, and be so well inside of, or

too well hidden to punch, and feel. a few

days later on the asphalt playground i

tackled her. she skinned her

elbow, and i even

punched her and felt her, felt

how soft the hairs were. i thought

that i would make a fine football-playing

poet, but now i know

it is better to be an old, breathing

man wrapped in a great coat in the stands, who

remains standing after each play, who knows

something, who rotates in his place

rasping over and over the thing

he knows: “whydidnhe
pass?
the other

end was wide
open
! the end

was wide
open
! the end was wide
open…
”