The heavy, wet, guttural
small-plane engine
fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness
about where the airport should be.
I take a lot for granted,
not pleased to be living under the phlegm-
soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated
heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets
and live elsewhere in Clean Zones,
but figuring the air is full of sorrows.
The fake Parthenon in Nashville, Stonehenge reduced by a quarter
near Maryhill on the Columbia, the little Statue of Liberty
taken from the lawn of the high school and not recovered
for months,
Simon Rodia’ s Watts Towers in the tile maker’ s shape of a ship
to sail home in, the house in the shape of a ship near Milwaukee
Ethics without faith, excuse me,
is the butter and not the bread.
You can’ t nourish them all, the dead
pile up at the hospital doors.
And even they are not so numerous
as the mothers come in maternity.
1. About the Beginnings of the Dead Man
When the dead man throws up, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Seeing his vomit, he thinks he sees his inner life.
Now he can pick himself apart, weigh the ingredients, research
The Israeli Navy,
sailing to the end of the world,
stocked with grain
and books black with God’ s verse,
turned back,
rather than sail on the Sabbath.
Six days, was the consensus,
was enough for anyone.
1
That you, Father, are “in my mind,”
some will argue, who cherish the present
but flee the past. They haven’ t my need
to ask, What was I? Asking instead,
What am I?, they see themselves bejeweled
and wingèd. Because they would fly and have value,
their answers are pretty but false:
Day and night, the lake dreams of sky.
A privacy as old as the mountains
And her up there, stuck among peaks. The whole eye
Fastened on hawk, gatherings of cloud or stars,
So little trespass. An airplane once
Crossed her brow; she searched but could not find
A face. Having lived with such strict beauty
She comes to know how the sun is nothing
But itself and the path it throws; the moon
They are not angels
though they have the hollow look
of beings bred on ether. There’ s an air
of cool removal from your life, the hawk’ s
indifference to the hare’ s terror.
You see it in their palms, raised casually
against the fresco’ s surface, as to glass
of submarine or spacecraft, and you see
it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass
alone to unknown agony. The song
Sheets entangle him
Naked on his bed
Like a toppled mast
Slack sails bedeck
At sea, no ballast
For that even keel
He cannot keep —
No steering wheel
As he falls asleep
