As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
Nature, that washed her hands in milk,
And had forgot to dry them,
Instead of earth took snow and silk,
At love’ s request to try them,
If she a mistress could compose
To please love’ s fancy out of those.
Her eyes he would should be of light,
A violet breath, and lips of jelly;
Her hair not black, nor overbright,
And of the softest down her belly;
As for her inside he’ d have it
Only of wantonness and wit.
Limped out of the hot sky a hurt plane,
Held off, held off, whirring pretty pigeon,
Hit then and scuttled to a crooked stop.
The stranger pilot who emergedthis was the seashore,
War came suddenly heretalked to the still mechanics
Who nodded gravely. Flak had done it, he said,
From an enemy ship attacked.
They wheeled it with love
Into the dark hangar’ s mouth and tended it.
Coffee and cake for the pilot then who sat alone
In the restaurant, reading the numbered sheets
By such an all-embalming summer day
As sweetens now among the mountain pines
Down to the cornland yonder and the vines,
To where the sky and sea are mixed in gray,
How do all things together take their way
Harmonious to the harvest, bringing wines
And bread and light and whatsoe’ er combines
In the large wreath to make it round and gay.
To me my troubled life doth now appear
Like scarce distinguishable summits hung
Around the blue horizon: places where
Not even a traveller purposeth to steer, —
There was a fire in the night.
Across the street I slept among the others
as the ashes snowed upon small pines.
I slept owning nothing, a child ignorant
of fortune’ s blistering story, the playful
flash in the dark, the unseen smolder
that would leave us revealed, unchanged.
I said my prayers for luck
but the man trying to live in two houses
answers me now, losing
neither the old one whose windows burst
with weariness, nor the one half-built
whose roofless, green timbers
1981,
& for three days in Nebraska
penny loafers are the talk, the thirties sensation
all over again in one-light towns.
Three days in Nebraska,
& a hundred calves come out bloody & new
as Wahoo & Alma & Dunning hum
La luna
Sang the miles por los palos
de Nebraska
You bunch of lights
And houses How did you walk
to this place
Buffalo Bill
Better know him some Spanish
Para Horses ride
rubber horseshoes
moderno.
El café
Boiled water/no milk in sight.
Homes that will travel interstate
8 o tomorrow in the morning
for the next edge of town.
In through our bedroom window, the full dawn-scape concusses.
Difficult to sustain sleep's equilibrium of wordlessness.
Naming anything, like stepping barefoot in wet sand up to my ankles.
Name after name, sinking me farther beneath waking's buoyancy.
House, this morning, is pale with the rush of what night siphoned off.
Objects, still emptied of resemblance, hum their chord-less cantos.
Bloodless, my knuckles knock on walls without echo, testing singularities.
Needles and pins,
Needles and pins,
When a Man marries,
His Trouble begins.
1
One night in April or May,
his daughter saw someone's hand
make the curtain which was drawn tightly across her window bulge
and ran to the adjoining room in her night clothes
where he and his son were sitting.
He ran around the house one way
and his son ran the other way
and they found a Negro
under a workbench
within six or eight feet of the window
holding a piece of plank before his face —
begging them not to shoot.
2
