I accompany this life’ s events like a personal journalist:
“Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon...”;
or “Despite inauspicious beginnings,
this was to be their happiest year.”
Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.
And how could we foresee an answer to
that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith
as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.
My name mocks me
for I was born at the cost
of my mother’ s life,
earning my father’ s hatred
with my first breath.
All my life
I have scoured a house soiled
with the thick soot of his resentment.
It has left its mark on the walls,
in his eyes, and on me.
All of it I have tried to wipe away.
In my hands I hold a broom,
in my heart —
ashes, ashes.
I just had the old Dodge in the shop
with that same damned front-end problem,
and I was out, so to speak, for a test run,
loafing along, maybe 35 m. p. h.,
down the old Corvallis road,
holding her out of the ruts and potholes.
That’ s out in Montana, the Bitterroot Valley.
Long ways from home is how they say it.
Long ways from home, boys, long long ways from home.
1. WALDORF-ASTORIA EUPHORIA,
THE JOY OF BIG CITIES
Joy, when intense, leads to various purposeless
movements — to dancing about, clapping the
hands, stamping, etc. — IBID.
Suddenly out of its stale and drowsy lair, the lair of slaves,
Like lightning it le'pt forth, half startled at itself,
Its feet upon the ashes and the rags—its hands tight
to the throats of kings.
O hope and faith!
O aching close of exiled patriots' lives!
O many a sickened heart!
Turn back unto this day, and make yourselves afresh.
I
So you have swept me back,
I who could have walked with the live souls
above the earth,
I who could have slept among the live flowers
at last;
so for your arrogance
and your ruthlessness
I am swept back
where dead lichens drip
dead cinders upon moss of ash;
so for your arrogance
I am broken at last,
I who had lived unconscious,
who was almost forgot;
Evans? Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle’ s
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.
Then there's the Yemeni legend
of Eve in the Garden knitting
a pattern on the serpent's back,
the snake unfinished like the rest
of creation, the first woman
thinking to add design, a sheath
of interlocking diamonds and stripes
along that sensuous S,
The three men now stood satisfied, arms crossed,
joking among themselves, but only moments before
they hadn’ t been laughing. It had taken all three
to bind the struggling man. First, to limit his movement,
they had duct-taped his wrists together behind his back:
for that, one man had held his legs and another had pinned him,
one hand on each shoulderblade and one knee on his head,
at his left temple, grinding his right cheek and eye into
the dust and straw and dried shit that formed the floor of the barn.
The light passes
from ridge to ridge,
from flower to flower —
the hepaticas, wide-spread
under the light
grow faint —
the petals reach inward,
the blue tips bend
toward the bluer heart
and the flowers are lost.
The cornel-buds are still white,
but shadows dart
from the cornel-roots —
black creeps from root to root,
each leaf
cuts another leaf on the grass,
shadow seeks shadow,
then both leaf
and leaf-shadow are lost.
