I wondered if the others felt
as heroic
and as safe: my unmangled family
slept while I slid uncertain feet ahead
behind my flashlight’ s beam.
Stones, thick roots as twisted as
a ruined body,
what did I fear?
I hoped my batteries
had eight more lives
than the lost child.
I feared I’ d find something.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Afternoon burns everything off Franklin Street.
Even the birds, even the flies.
Or iced-tea sugar and chicken grease weigh everyone
into a doze, all indoors, in a cool
they said would never come eighty years ago
when this was still the center of business
and the civilized left these high hours to the dogs,
ice in a highball, and let each house
One spring day I saw
the shadow of a strawberry tree
lying on the moor
like a shy lamb asleep.
Its heart was far away,
suspended in the sky,
brown in a brown veil,
in the sun’ s eye.
The shadow played in the wind,
moving there alone
to make the tree content.
Here and there it shone.
It knew no pain, no haste,
wanting only to feel morning,
then noon, then the slow-paced
journey of evening.
For years I tried to conceal from the villagers that I wrote poetry
I didn’ t want them to know that I was an oddball
I didn’ t want the young men with beards wearing baseball caps who come to the liquor store in their pickups to buy sixpacks to know that I was some kind of sissy
I decided it was prudent to buy the Daily News instead of the Times at the drugstore
I burned my poem drafts at home before I took the trash to the dump, kids scavenge around there and the old man who does the recycling is nosy
I took every precaution
You, my friends, and you strangers, all of you,
Stand with me a little by the walls
Or where the walls once were.
The bridge was here, the city further:
Now there is neither bridge nor town —
A doorway where the roof is down
Opens on a foot-worn stair
That climbs by three steps into empty air.
(What foot went there?)
Nothing in this town that had a thousand steeples
Each morning I made my way
among gangways, elevators,
and nurses’ pods to Jane’ s room
to interrogate the grave helpers
who tended her through the night
while the ship’ s massive engines
kept its propellers turning.
Week after week, I sat by her bed
with black coffee and the Globe.
Down in the shipyard, day and night,
The Galahads of the dock,
Hard as the sinews of basin rock,
Build an ocean cosmopolite.
The rivets stab and the hammers bite
Into the beams and plates of steel
Of the Diesel heart and the belly keel.
We,
The workers of the world strike catholic notes
On woods and irons, wring from brassy throats
Epics of industry.
So the tide forgets, as morning
Grows too far delivered, as the bowls
Of rock and wood run dry.
What is left seems pearled and lit,
As those cases
Of the museum stood lit
With milk jade, rows of opaque vases
Streaked with orange and yellow smoke.
You found a lavender boat, a single
Figure poling upstream, baskets
Skipping out from the major international cocktail party
with my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist,
I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i. e., men.
Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves.
Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talk
as the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh,
so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimps
from doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs,
dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared,
