You haven’t heard
from your father
in six months
and you can’t
bring yourself
to call. In Bengal,
farmers wore
masks on the backs
of their heads
to ward off tigers,
who, one supposes,
wouldn’t attack
a man who was
watching. If I don’t
call, you thought,
nothing is wrong.
Each possibility is
a cavern eaten
out of limestone
by water. Naming
everything is a way
of naming nothing.
His family dropped
away like cicada
husks swept off
That twig of light, that branch, that
fork, that form.
Beyond that, a city. A horse drowning in
a river, and beyond that, a city. Wildfire, and beyond that,
a city. God, a slippery thing,
an eel, is twined
from our hands. That rainy hum is
the wharf, is the light that etches a bridge
between pronouns, the bottle
of amber formaldehyde, the infant
orangutan, the wing
of a gull stitched to its scapula. Here is a river
drowning in a horse’s dark eye. Devitalized, humming, rainy,
You that I loved all my life long,
you are not the one.
You that I followed, my line or path or way,
that I followed singing, and you
earth and air of the world the way went through,
and you who stood around it so it could be
the way, you forests and cities,
you deer and opossums struck by the lonely hunter
and left decaying, you paralyzed obese ones
who sat on a falling porch in a deep green holler
and observed me, your bald dog barking,
as I stumbled past in a hurry along my line,
you are not the one. But you
Prosaic miles of streets stretch all round,
Astir with restless, hurried life and spanned
By arches that with thund’rous trains resound,
And throbbing wires that galvanize the land;
Gin-palaces in tawdry splendor stand;
The newsboys shriek of mangled bodies found;
The last burlesque is playing in the Strand—
In modern prose all poetry seems drowned.
Yet in ten thousand homes this April night
An ancient People celebrates its birth
To Freedom, with a reverential mirth,
With customs quaint and many a hoary rite,
Eastham, Massachusetts
One of the spectators is disappointed
there isn’t a guide to explain
the beaching, the scientists busy
cutting into ninety-four pilot whales
stranded on the salt grass.
No one knows why and, try as the rescue team
might, not one whale will go back to water.
So they’re injected to speed up the dying,
Then it was the future, though what’s arrived
isn’t what we had in mind, all chrome and
cybernetics, when we set up exhibits
in the cafeteria for the judges
to review what we’d made of our hypotheses.
The class skeptic (he later refused to sign
anyone’s yearbook, calling it a sentimental
degradation of language) chloroformed mice,
weighing the bodies before and after
to catch the weight of the soul,
What’s geography? What difference what mountain
it is? In the intimacy of this altitude
its discolored snowfields overhang half the world.
On a knife rim edge-up into whirlpools of sky,
feet are no anchor. Gravity sucks at the mind
spinning the blood-weighted body head downward.
At supper time an ondine’s narrow feet
made dark tracks on the hearth.
Like the heart of a yellow fruit was the fire’s heat,
but they rubbed together quite blue with the cold.
The sandy hem of her skirt dripped on the floor.
She sat there with a silvered cedar knot
for a low stool; and I sat opposite,
my lips and eyelids hot
in the heat of the fire. Piling on dry bark,
seeing that no steam went up from her dark dress,
I felt uneasiness
as though firm sand had shifted under my feet
in the wash of a wave.
Glory be to God for breaded things—
Catfish, steak finger, pork chop, chicken thigh,
Sliced green tomatoes, pots full to the brim
With french fries, fritters, life-float onion rings,
Hushpuppies, okra golden to the eye,
That in all oils, corn or canola, swim
Toward mastication’s maw (O molared mouth! );
Whatever browns, is dumped to drain and dry
On paper towels’ sleek translucent scrim,
These greasy, battered bounties of the South:
Eat them.
"I gave birth to a princess," her mother
once told me, and I thought of my son pouring
his Grape-Nuts in the garage so as not to wake her,
of the moment her baby, seeing her
now a separate entity, seemed not to breathe,
refused to blink her sapphire eyes.
I remembered again last night as she
and I crossed a Florida street, the caution
light running gold streamers
over the dark sweep of her hair,
when a young man coming toward us halted
midway a moment, stunned, before moving on.
