Wrapped in gold foil, in the search
and shouting of Easter Sunday,
it was the ball of the princess,
it was Pharoah’ s body
sleeping in its golden case.
At the foot of the picket fence,
in grass lank with the morning rain,
it was a Sunday school prize,
silver for second place, gold
for the triumphant little dome
of Ararat, and my sister
took me by the hand and led me
out onto the wide, wet lawn
and showed me to bend into the thick nests
of grass, into the darkest green.
Grateful for their tour
of the pharmacy,
the first-grade class
has drawn these pictures,
each self-portrait taped
to the window-glass,
faces wide to the street,
round and available,
with parallel lines for hair.
I like this one best: Brian,
whose attenuated name
fills a quarter of the frame,
stretched beside impossible
legs descending from the ball
of his torso, two long arms
springing from that same
central sphere. He breathes here,
Fetch? Balls and sticks capture my attention
seconds at a time. Catch? I don’ t think so.
Bunny, tumbling leaf, a squirrel who’ s — oh
joy — actually scared. Sniff the wind, then
I’ m off again: muck, pond, ditch, residue
of any thrillingly dead thing. And you?
Either you’ re sunk in the past, half our walk,
thinking of what you never can bring back,
Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam — up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,
all night — downtown anywhere
and between the column of feathering steam
unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’ s
shimmered azaleas of gasoline,
between the steam and the ruin
of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising
its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed,
ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape
and black plastic, captive in this zone
