We were driving to your funeral
& our father was not crying
because he has a way
of tying ribbons around grief.
It was the year we learned
the piercing that prefaces the blood
holds the most delicate of darknesses.
Then it was the year we opened
all our faucets & waited for the sea
to bleed to death. Then it was the year
we set fire to your mitt. Then, suddenly
the year we started to believe
every thorn was just a bridge.
Then the year all we talked about
was boxing. Then the year
my stomach hurt all year, & then
the year no one spoke of you.

If there were an antonym for suicide
we could all choose when to be born.
I would have been born after that day
so I could not remember you.
So my fingers would stop pointing
at all the things that aren't there.

My first glance takes in
an army, tens of thousands ready
armed. As a mirror reflects
indistinctly and with a feeble
light, so it cracks and
soon fades. From its surface a clear
image of the beholder.

In these paintings: harbors, promontories,
shores, rivers, fountains,
fanes, groves, mountains, flocks, and of
course shepherds. Sometimes mythological
episodes, figures of the gods, the
battles at Troy, wanderings of Ulysses.

Scorned in these days of bad taste.

Now we have frescos of mon-
strosities, candelabra supporting
shrines, stalks with human heads.

Malachite green, Armenian
blue, red earths in
abundance, vermilion like a drug.

The man who changes a landscape
by moving a stone, has changed it.
The house is built of stone on stone.
Hungrily, ivy seizes the wall.

The bell sounds for an assembly.
Someone has come to change the world.
The view to a plain, from a high window,
reveals the dust of a coming army.

Cries happen. The sky is troubled.
The broken fragments of a house
jostle, now, with weeds and saplings.
From a cracked floorplan, a village grows.

A gust of renewal. The breeze
through stirring grass emits
a fiercer exhalation than the words
which promise promises.

Except for the downward propulsion
that is in them, the words have no meaning.
Their gravity is hidden from their users.
No one is content to stay where he is.

The city swallows the village
and is, in turn, destroyed. Birds cruise
the Autumn plain and fall
to the severe mouth of thunder.

A lizard blinks from a window crack.
Cobwebs drowse in the sunlight.
Between sleep and attention, the lizard's
rapid throat breathes silence.

There is a feeling no one has spoken,
as if arrested by supreme shyness,
an intimation someone would like to speak,
wind through stubble, a legendary sigh ...

Behind the blank opening of a door
made dark by sunshine, the proprietor
is standing in a pool of shadow
like one who must be impelled into the light.

Existing always on the edge of extinction,
it will be important to remember the next step
so the fall of a leaf may still be heard
by someone who should not be in the orchard.

1.

A woman of the citizen party—what's that—
is writing history backward

her body   the chair she sits in
to be abandoned   repossessed

The old, crusading, raping, civil, great, phony, holy, world,
     second world, third world, cold, dirty, lost, on drugs,

gangrenous, maiming, class
war lives on

a done matter she might have thought
ever undone though   plucked

from before her birthyear
and that hyphen coming after

She's old, old, the incendiary
woman

endless beginner

whose warped wraps you shall find in graves
and behind glass plundered

Read the complete story

Disturbed over her marvel I heard her say
something nocturnal I saw
mystery as merely change I saw
envy and the illegitimate mile I saw
under the formal atrocity at the messy embankment
all these and vocabulary lagging behind its science
tramp unknown soldier cop
talking strange talk
under an altered light under daze
I heard her say tomorrow as if she knew
I heard her say come back
and I choose you
as analogue of the yet to be.
Do not foreclose
investigation, but come along.
I will try not to protract my look into
now I will continue as if
you were next if you will I heard a man say
on the radio the other day, well, yesterday
talking about headaches
if you will
and today I had a look at
a Chinese cabinet only it is not clear
it is Chinese it
may be from another country I took
measurements nevertheless
for my next life I am thinking of requesting librarian
although I am as yet not on a list
of possible survivors I am
thinking of erasing the word sorrow from
the world, hurting under an illusory pennant
master of ceremonies hidden behind its junk
I am thinking of coming back as
part of your coat as a tree is part wind.

Run early get home coffee's automatically made
eat fruit shower dress kiss
wife leaving early hustle
children through the kitchen and out
to the sidewalk—love you be good
get smart be nice love you love you bye.
Now before I start writing this poem
water new grass seed planted
where dog piss brought up dirt.
After hose hiss something
walkie-talkie? in the alley
stop listen notice eventually count
at least six small birds
hunting the interior of our ancient lilac.
Mostly some kind of finch or sparrow
but one woodpecker in there I see
ripping bugs out of old wood.
Birds live this way but trees die
so I ring the chime to scare him off
like I can stop the processes.
Lovely pattern doesn't even
look at me—red crown striking striking
in decay I call landscaping.
Again the walkie-talkie
what the hell is going on I poke my nose
across the fenceline.
Between squad cars behind
my garage
two officers in riot gear
flank a neighbor smoking
a cigarette with his two
cuffed hands.

Those overtime nights in the ice factory, eyeing gauges, greasing gears:
that's one thing. And the hours of clarinet lessons.

All that rain that blathered on the patio, leaves
lifting and twisting, a demented semaphore. I hired myself

to crack that code, kept busy not conceiving you. I peopled
the past, got safely sad about it. I hammered together

a hut in the back of my brain to crawl inside and rest
from the labor of making it. My almost-daughter, my nearly-was-son,

I was frugal, I made you wait till you grew
into the idea of waiting. See? These words hurt no one.

Afternoons, Grandma sent us inside,
but we could never nap. Below the hot

bedroom, stairs sank to a dirt cellar,
crumbling walls that made us wonder

if the house would fall in. Twisted
onions under us, beet-jars, mud-smell dark

of a grave, scratch of mice we'd been told
might crawl up inside our dresses. Hours

dreaming without any rest, sticky in our
thin cottons, till she'd call Linda— Debbie—

Lois— through the hazy curtain, wanting us
to come out again, pick beans or lettuce

from the garden, or carry pails down to
the chokecherry bushes by the stock dam.

We'd follow cattle-paths below the bluff
and back up, then sneak right past her

at the clothesline, climb to the loft where we
could look out beyond the windbreak, across

the fields, watch for truck or tractor, cloud
of dust disturbing the air, sign of the men.

When he stepped ashore
his eyes were the deepest green
as if he dreamt leaves
across the wide Atlantic
to reel him home to Ireland.

Opening his book
I wrote—the wake of bristle
barely dipped in ink
that brushed on dampened paper,
invites a poem pool to light

through the pulse beating
wane of the moon, as land ebbs
from him, the tide line
washing clean the page's span,
making fast the boat—the stars

that brought him back safe
shine further into night skies
wheeling overhead
in a new constellation
less finned nor furred than feathered.

This coming winter
he will dream the vast ocean
back into his eyes.
The morning he'll rise to leave
his eyes will be deepest blue.

At a Chinese restaurant, circa 1980 in Washington DC, an
elderly woman (let's call her "mother") is telling a story to
demonstrate the absence of racism in her character during
the time she lived in the pre-civil rights South: "I've never
told you this before but I was once invited to dinner by a
black minister's wife. Their daughter, a cheerful midget,
was loved by everyone in town, negro and white. Actually,
the minister's wife asked, 'If I invited you to Christmas
dinner, would you come?' But I knew what she meant."
On Christmas day "mother" called a cab and went to an
address in the black section of town. She walked into a
"modest but well kept" house past a dozen or so people on
the porch. None of them came in. She was served an
elaborate meal seated alone at the kitchen table. After
dessert, she thanked the minister's wife, called a cab and
went home. To better understand this story does it help to
notice that the "c"s in Christmas and cab are the same letter
that stands for the speed of light in a vacuum, as in e = mc2