That whine is the sound
of waste, rot, the frantic,
grinding inability to attend
to anything but sere thwarting
of yourself, a dry corrosion
which some say they know,
but you and I —
(my jaw clenched as you
turn a page,
you with a heart like drywall,
I who would
lace my arms with razors,
then press them
slowly to your lips,
the metal taste
mixing with flesh,
and through gritted teeth
I making the sound
of you, you, you
do not know, meaning
only me, me)
On the first warm day,
the aides fret about his pate,
fetch his hat. I push him
out the automatic doors
into the pallid sun.
Dad thinks we should
stay put until all the Indians
are back in their tepees,
but right now he’ s off to teach
a Latin class. Where are his keys?
They’ re a few miles away,
in the past, where he’ s no longer
active in the community.
I steer him along the asphalt paths
of the grounds: bark mulch,
first green shoots,
puddle of coffee by a car.
Between the train's long slide and the sun
ricocheting off the sea, anyone
would have fallen silent in those words,
the language of age in her face, the birds
cawing over the broken earth, gathering near its stones
and chapel doors. In the marina, the sea and its bones
have grown smaller. Though the tide is out,
it is not the tide nor the feathers nor the cat
that jumps into the street, the dust
lifting with each wing and disappearing. The rust-
colored sheets that wrap the sails of ships,
When you take the lost road
You come to the snow
And when you find the snow
You get down on your hands and knees
Like a sick dog
That’ s been eating the grasses of graveyards
For twenty centuries.
When you take the lost road
You find woman
Who has no fear of light
Who can kill two cocks at once
Light which has no fear of cocks
And cocks who can’ t call in the snow.
To the north, along Orange Blossom Trail,
thick breath of sludge fires.
Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie
who loves the freezing trees
but cannot save them.
Snow fine as blown spiders.
The news: nothing.
Large rats breed on the beach
driving smaller ones here.
Today both traps sit sprung.
Perfect disc of moon, huge
and simmering
low on the capital’ s filthy horizon — ¡ Ay,
qué luna más hermosa! she says
pushing the stroller slowly down Atocha.
And gorgeous too the firm-thighed
boys from Lisbon
a block away, who work
Kilometer Zero’ s sidewalk, the neon
shoestore they lean against
cupping the flames
of passing strangers.
City of Grace, you open,
you part your curtains
and smile like a hostess
when we call your name,
you tender what any traveler needs,
a call to ease, a balm,
a kindness, whatever storm.
You take us in. City of Grace
and Benevolence, you say
you know what solace means,
burned so often they called you
Chimneyville, and now
you can't forget,
you've written it in bronze
outside the City Hall
the War made a hospital
for the Yankee
and for your Rebel sons,
1
Who will honor the city without a name
If so many are dead and others pan gold
Or sell arms in faraway countries?
What shepherd's horn swathed in the bark of birch
Will sound in the Ponary Hills the memory of the absent —
Vagabonds, Pathfinders, brethren of a dissolved lodge?
This spring, in a desert, beyond a campsite flagpole,
— In silence that stretched to the solid rock of yellow and red mountains —
I heard in a gray bush the buzzing of wild bees.
I have a word for it —
the way the surface waited all day
to be a silvery pause between sky and city —
which is elver.
And another one for how
the bay shelved cirrus clouds
piled up at the edge of the Irish Sea,
which is elver too.
The old Blackrock baths
have been neglected now for fifty years,
fine cracks in the tiles
visible as they never were when
I can I can I can
shouted Harry Vernon as
he dived from the highest board
curving down into salt and urine
I had written him a letter which I had, for want of better
Knowledge, sent to where I met him down the Lachlan, years ago,
He was shearing when I knew him, so I sent the letter to him,
Just “on spec”, addressed as follows: “Clancy, of The Overflow”.
