When her recorded voice on the phone
said who she was again and again to the piles
of newspapers and magazines and the clothes
in the chairs and the bags of unopened mail
and garbage and piles of unwashed dishes.
When she could no longer walk
through the stench of it, in her don’ t-need-nobody-
to-help-me way of walking, with her head
bent down to her knees as if she were searching
for a dime that had rolled into a crack
This is Tarsus, one place like anyplace else.
And this is my circuit, the rodeo, fair.
The farmboys blow through here in pickups, wild
as horses in their oat sacks.
The women wear spurs.
In the trailers the cattle are pounding for air.
Zeh was a pharmacist,
or claimed to be,
times were tranquil, people didn’ t ask too many questions,
but when a new broom came along, it was duly “established that” etc.
and it all contributed to his downfall.
Zeh was an incomparable magician
shelves full of powders and tinctures
not that he had to sell them to you
you were persuaded of their efficacy
in advance.
One rusty horseshoe hangs on a nail
above the door, still losing its luck,
and a work-collar swings, an empty
old noose. The silence waits, wild to be
broken by hoofbeat and heavy
harness slap, will founder but remain;
while, outside, above the stable,
eight, nine, now ten buzzards swing low
in lazy loops, a loose black warp
of patience, bearing the blank sky
like a pall of wind on mourning
wings. But the bones of this place are
long picked clean. Only the hayrake's
ribs still rise from the rampant grasses.
Mauve mist-shadow cloaks the sky’ s
River-blurred, inchoate border.
Dawn’ s old story; and light tries —
Not the last time — to devise
Lasting order;
From first principles assigns
Laws to frame day’ s jurisdiction;
Drawing contours, shapes, and lines
From the nebula, it shines,
Strange as fiction.
They pay us time and a half
and don’ t dare catch us
drinking: we don’ t insist,
don’ t pass a bottle, but each sips
a private pint, all sitting
in the narrow room with our backs
to the center, each facing
his work — router, stain tray,
buffing wheel, drill press —
and with that sweet taste echoing
in our bones, we watch our hands
We brought that newborn home from Maimonides
and showed her nine blue glittering streets.
Would she like the semis with hoods of snow?
The precinct? Bohack’ s? A lit diner?
Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted
like milk in a pan, toward shadow.
Would she like the tenement, three dim flights,
her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge?
We slept beside her in our long coats,
rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed.
Her breath woke us with its slight catch.
Would she approve of gray winter dawn?
The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man
It hangs on its
stem like a plum
at the edge of a
darkening thicket.
It’ s swelling and
blushing and ripe
and I reach out a
hand to pick it
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,
