The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (3 page)

at the far edge of earth, night

is going away. another

poem begins. slumped over

the typewriter i must get this

exactly, i want to make it

clear this morning that your

face, as it opens

from its shadow, is more

perfect than yesterday; and

that the light, as it

hesitates over the approach

of your smile, has given this

aching bed more than warmth,

more than poems; someway

a generous rose, or a very

delicate arrangement of sounds,

has come to peace in this new room.

as i look on your struggle i remember

i have seen arriving from movie theaters

the forms of people

disgraced, slanting heavily out of the cold,

their coats, the muscles under the skin

fraying, given up to the air.

and later, near morning,

i have seen their figures compelled

from the panic and emptiness of the town asleep

into all-night diners, which flounder, exhausted.

outside the towns the wide plains

are delirious

with frozen animals,

and the sky is rising with moons and moons.

these faces lifted over the street

are not moons. even so, they are

lost somewhere between worlds and home,

in a town that can't quite hold onto the earth.

i listen to your tiny,

unbelieving anguish,

and i wonder if i have known

these faces in another time;

and i think that you have come here, drifting

through universes of cold

because no longer, no longer

could the womb contain your loneliness.

for the astronauts on the occasion

of their re-entry

for the first few instants in

this jungled machine we were all

at once human. then

we became confused monsters,

and then we were, as before,

sardines waiting to land hung

over like sardines.

for the first few instants

we had been dragged

outside of everything. but

the cracks began to show, each

of us was too much the

other, and we were once

again inside our terribly good

balloon, revolving and knowing

far too much.

the first day we slept

little, we examined and counted

the stars. we thought we should. and now

we sleep most of the time, dreaming

ourselves away from this haze

of tubes and gauges. we have learned: we

have been brought here to

wait, and to learn

to live packed

in forever, waiting to be pried

out. to live here truly

washed by the sea, turning end

over end, waiting to halt,

and breathe, but never

halting. waiting to slide at

last toward the freshly lighted

earth, there to wait and dive again far

down into tubes and fantasies.

the moon lies

there beyond us, cringing toward the neat

package of stars, not

waiting. below, in dreams, the earth scatters

in all directions way from

itself, and yearns

toward us, toward our distant perfection.

for Bob Zimmerman

drunk here in the railway depot

i can recall your train budging

forward in that other depot, that first

squash of steam making

your window real and solid. that is

why i am jumping down onto

the tracks, or because i am a gazelle.

i left later, by bus, and now

the city is gray and vacant, so i

am bounding out of the depot along

the tracks though i think

i am here to see someone

off. the train moved and you were

windowed in and everything was

final. or i might have left

by plane from the airport. no,

it was bus. i am supposed to

wave goodbye to a girl. that

was the last time i

saw you, so i will keep

moving down the tracks because

i
am
some kind of zebra, because

these railway tracks are mashing

like ridiculous snowshoes into

the distance. she thinks i am

cute, in a grubby, nonsexual

way. it was summer then; now

it is winter, with all

the roads stationed outside

the houses and the snow coming

to get them. it should have been

night, and it is.

…wake up in the morning:

a critical editorial, or a Herb Block cartoon
.

R
ICHARD
N
IXON

wake up

in the morning: a critical

editorial, or a herb block

cartoon. sometimes, if my wife

would just leave me alone things

would be all right. you should see

this cartoon,

or the poor sogginess

of this bacon, you don't believe this

country's going down

and not up. the sewers

demand attention. the potomac

is swallowing up all the love,

and society is

killing itself, for love. if i

had a dog there would be

more love in it for me. if

i had something in my hands.

this is a good dream, even if the falling is

no less real, and even if my feet will crumble

on the lurking ground. my throat itches, and i am

awake in this room which is no less vacant for

all my presence and there are no aspirin. here

is the sun with its tired surprise, the morning. there

are the cars and streets moving in the usual

fashion. the room wants to be rid of me. it must

fall open and communicate with other dim,

stifled rooms when i have slaughtered my body in

the sheets and fumbled streetward to sooth the itch. what

do you learn, room? what have you told, why are the stains

and the accusing glasses pointing so when i

return? there was the girl some time ago.
she
would

want to know where the guilt comes from, that hums over

the bed and descends, like an uncaring thumb, to

blot me out. she would help me, when the universe

has fooled me again, and the joke has gone too far,

when the itch, climbing, deep, remains after bottle

after bottle, and i inch toward death and i

must poke my body into a thousand vacant

darknesses before i strike the correct sleep, and dream.

miraculously,

there is the sun, coming back.

beneath it the cows wander, more

exhausted, baffled by the sparseness

of the winter grass. were i

a cow staggering over vanishing grass,

i would feel like the man

in the story, the one where

he leaps into his sports car to find

that everything has become an ocean, saying

certainly i did not expect

the sea. yesterday the numerous

actual cars spilled over

solid hills. kissing

my wife i never wished for the sea. in

an agony of exactness, bent

into the tiny measuring dials i did not

yearn for these impossible waves,

or for the stopped movement

of trees. the wrecked,

liquid countryside unfolds

beyond me, and i am the last bubble of air,

searching for air.

licking bare dirt, the nearest cow

raises his head to me, not understanding.

i would tell him about the sun, how it

rolls nearer, hauling the spring.

but he peers at me as if through mist, as i

would peer through the fogged, cracking windows

of my fast car at the half-

distinguished movements of an unusual fish.

for years the scenes bustled

through him as he dreamed he was

alive. then he felt real, and slammed

awake in the wet sheets screaming

too fast, everything moves

too fast, and the edges of things

are gone
. four blocks away

a baseball was a dot against

the sky, and he thought, my

glove is too big, i will

drop the ball and it will be

a home run.
the snow falls

too fast from the clouds
,

and night is dropped and

snatched back like a huge

joke
. is that the ball, or is

it just a bird, and the ball is

somewhere else, and i will

miss it?
and the edges are gone, my

hands melt into the walls, my

hands do not end where the wall

begins
. should i move

forward, or back, or will the ball

come right to me? i know i will

miss, because i always miss when it

takes so long,
the wall has no

surface, no edge, the wall

fades into the air and the air is

my hand, and i am the wall. my

arm is the syringe and thus i

become the nurse, i am you
,

nurse
. if he gets

around the bases before the

ball comes down, is it a home

run, even if i catch it?
if we could

slow down, and stop, we

would be one fused mass careening

at too great a speed through

the emptiness
. if i catch

the ball, our side will

be up, and i will have to bat,

and i might strike out.

if the children were not locked

into georgia, and texas, if

the husband were not packed away

cold, never to be fished

from air, the plunging down

of the handle might be less desperate

but alone now before

this last enemy, she juggles

for any victory. the jerked

handle offers a possible coming home. each

symbol come to rest clicks into

her eyes, because

it
is
there to be had, it

was there once, the old miracle come back

alive, when the bell

sang like a beautiful daughter and it was

harry, upstairs with his broken

leg, ringing for her, yelling, martha come hear

the radio, it's jack benny and he's playing

the violin.

my neighbor's voice occurs within the hall, sadly:

come back inside the house awhile before

you go away. his daughter does not hear

his oldest voice swear

that he will balance forward from that door

forever toward the spaces she

has left. and even i have felt this thing,

this leaning into the ocean like wild,

like aching beasts, my wife was not alone

when, deep in her bone

and tumbling eternally, our child

continued drowning. now, hearing

this man's face change against the tide his girl has gone

away with, i leap to hold my own son.

out there where the morning

is, the automobiles and citizens

are clattering along just

like pieces of the universe. from

my place by the window i can

examine an airplane as it crawls

from speck to speck on the glass.

i know that it is with

the same arrogant mechanical

lust that the pipes of the kitchen sink

are dissolving. i am

ready to believe that everything else is,

too. for instance this

room i am sure is

atom by atom taking leave. but here in

the disappearing room i am not too

heavily alone. printed on the

label of this cookie can is

the one assurance:

each cookie contains a joke.

and i know that this

is somehow good. i can

call my mother and say, mother

it is not what is true, but what

is good that now matters. mother,

mother, even here in this tumbling

jar of selves,

each cookie contains a joke,

each of us offers himself up whole

to some nearly invisible,

tasteless affirmation.

such sensation as we derive is derived

only from the joke. mother,

i am this morning electric. i am spinning

into the staccato punch line,

the end and the crumbling. i will

hear the laughter as it breaks up

and dissolves farther out in space,

as it grinds and echoes against the metal.