There are diagrams on stilts all wired together
Over the hill and the wind and out of sight.
There is a scar in the trees where they walk away
Beyond me. There are signs of something
Nearly God (or at least most curious)
About them. I think those diagrams are not
At rest.
I think they are a way of ciphering God:
There is no widening distance at the shore —
The sea revolving slowly from the piers —
But the one border of our take-off roar
And we are mounted on the hemispheres.
Above the waning moon whose almanac
We wait to finish continents away,
The Northern stars already call us back,
And silence folds like maps on all we say.
The catalpa’ s white week is ending there
in its corner of my yard. It has its arms full
of its own flowering now, but the least air
spills off a petal and a breeze lets fall
whole coronations. There is not much more
of what this is. Is every gladness quick?
That tree’ s a nuisance, really. Long before
The morning that the world began
The Lion growled a growl at Man.
And I suspect the Lion might
(If he’ d been closer) have tried a bite.
I think that’ s as it ought to be
And not as it was taught to me.
I think the Lion has a right
To growl a growl and bite a bite.
And if the Lion bothered Adam,
He should have growled right back at ’ im.
The way to treat a Lion right
Is growl for growl and bite for bite.
True, the Lion is better fit
For biting than for being bit.
Pat Dugan…….. my grandfather…….. throat cancer……..1947.
Ed Berrigan…….. my dad…….. heart attack……..1958.
Dickie Budlong…….. my best friend Brucie’ s big brother, when we were
five to eight…….. killed in Korea, 1953.
Now like the Lady of Shalott,
I dwell within an empty room,
And through the day and through the night
I sit before an ancient loom.
And like the Lady of Shalott
I look into a mirror wide,
Where shadows come, and shadows go,
And ply my shuttle as they glide.
Not as she wove the yellow wool,
Ulysses’ wife, Penelope;
By day a queen among her maids,
But in the night a woman, she,
I should be happy with my lot:
A wife and mother – is it not
Enough for me to be content?
What other blessing could be sent?
A quiet house, and homely ways,
That make each day like other days;
I only see Time’ s shadow now
Darken the hair on baby’ s brow!
No world’ s work ever comes to me,
No beggar brings his misery;
I have no power, no healing art
With bruised soul or broken heart.
We shall meet again, in Srinagar,
by the gates of the Villa of Peace,
our hands blossoming into fists
till the soldiers return the keys
and disappear. Again we’ ll enter
our last world, the first that vanished
I’ ll do what I must if I’ m bold in real time.
A refugee, I’ ll be paroled in real time.
Cool evidence clawed off like shirts of hell-fire?
A former existence untold in real time...
The one you would choose: Were you led then by him?
What longing, O Yaar, is controlled in real time?
Each syllable sucked under waves of our earth —
The funeral love comes to hold in real time!
“Each ray of sunshine is seven minutes old,”
Serge told me in New York one December night.
“So when I look at the sky, I see the past?”
“Yes, Yes,"he said. “especially on a clear day.”
On January 19, 1987,
as I very early in the morning
drove my sister to Tucson International,
suddenly on Alvernon and 22nd Street
the sliding doors of the fog were opened,
