Listen, children:
Your father is dead.
From his old coats
I'll make you little jackets;
I'll make you little trousers
From his old pants.
There'll be in his pockets
Things he used to put there,
Keys and pennies
Covered with tobacco;
Dan shall have the pennies
To save in his bank;
Anne shall have the keys
To make a pretty noise with.
Life must go on,
And the dead be forgotten;
Life must go on,
Though good men die;
Anne, eat your breakfast;
Dan, take your medicine;
Your dying was a difficult enterprise.
First, petty things took up your energies,
The small but clustering duties of the sick,
Irritant as the cough’ s dry rhetoric.
Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray
Or test (while you read novels two a day)
Already with a kind of clumsy stealth
Distanced you from the habits of your health.
In hope still, courteous still, but tired and thin,
That night he came home, he came unto me
at the cold hour of the night
Smelling of corn wine in the dawn dew.
He stretched his hand and covered my forehead.
There was a moon beam sparking rays in particles.
The drummer boys had got themselves a goat.
The din was high in the wail of the harvest moon.
The flood was up gurgling through the fields
Birth waters swimming in floods of new blood.
He whispered my name in far echo
Sky-wailing into a million sounds
across my shores. His voice still bore
Kwangju, 1980
Sarajevo, 1992
1
A Personage is seen
Leaning upon a cushion
Printed with cornflowers.
A Child appears
Holding up a pencil.
“This is a picture
(Says the Child to the Personage)
Of the vortex.”
“Draw it your own way,”
Says the Personage.
(Music is heard
Pure in the island windows,
Sea-music on the Child’ s
Interminable shore, his coral home.)
Because Yosemite’ s high altitude lake’ s
tadpoles wash up in
glow-in-the-dark condoms
and every fish lip has a hook in it. Because
there’ s bird shit
in the clouds. Things catch, get caught.
Things are consumed.
The hummingbird hovers over bougainvillea, darting in and out
of blossoms as the bride throws
her corset among laughter and waving hands. Seeing you, glass in hand, sunlight
piercing the punch bowl’ s crystal, I remember
the horse, an Appaloosa, the white and gray markings
like clouds, cumulus, one
Frosty, green through gray rising steeply,
top of the bank a big top, red with a sign,
misty, fantastical on the walk to school.
“My sister can’ t express herself properly.
Imagine if those performers
were stuck in their caravans
forever. If round the back of the big top
the doors were locked. That’ s her.
She’ s a trapeze artist, lion tamer,
cramped clean-faced clown
drinking tea, practicing tricks,
movement through frosted windows.
Language is her caravan on bricks,
with tiny little windows in.”
"With sacrifice before the rising morn
Vows have I made by fruitless hope inspired;
And from the infernal Gods, 'mid shades forlorn
Of night, my slaughtered Lord have I required:
Celestial pity I again implore; —
Restore him to my sight — great Jove, restore!"
I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.
