His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low
voice;
all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine.
When he went to high school Webber was in his class.
Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in
lawns with trees beside the gutters.
The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and
hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall.
Passing the shop after school, he would look up at the sign
and go on, glad that his own life had to do with books.
Now at night when he saw the grey in his parents’ hair and
heard their talk of that day’ s worries and the next:
lack of orders, if orders, lack of workers, if workers, lack of
goods, if there were workers and goods, lack of orders
again,
The bread has become moldy
and the dates blown down by the wind;
the iron has slipped from the helve.
The wool was to by dyed red
but the dyer dyed it black.
The dead woman has forgotten her comb
and tube of eye-paint;
the dead cobbler has forgotten his knife,
the dead butcher his chopper,
and the dead carpenter his adze.
A goat can be driven off with a shout.
But where is the man to shout?
The bricks pile up, the laths are trimmed,
and the beams are ready. Where is the builder?
I am the blossom pressed in a book,
found again after two hundred years....
I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper....
When the young girl who starves
sits down to a table
she will sit beside me....
I am food on the prisoner's plate....
I am water rushing to the wellhead,
filling the pitcher until it spills....
I am the patient gardener
of the dry and weedy garden....
I am the stone step,
the latch, and the working hinge....
Her sickness brought me to Connecticut.
Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life
is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated
or put siding on, who's burned the lawn
with lime — that's the news on Ardmore Street.
The leaves of the neighbor's respectable
rhododendrons curl under in the cold.
He has backed the car
through the white nimbus of its exhaust
and disappeared for the day.
In the hiatus between mayors
the city has left leaves in the gutters,
and passing cars lift them in maelstroms.
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
The young bull dropped his head and stared.
Only a wispy wire — electrified — kept us
apart. That, and two long rows of asparagus.
An ancient apple tree
blossomed prodigally pink and white.
The muddy path sucked at my shoe,
but I reached the granite step, and knocked
at the rickety porch door.
Deep in the house a dog began to bark.
I had prepared my Heart Fund speech,
and the first word — When — was on my tongue.
It is always the dispossessed —
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’ s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.
Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he’ s out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.
Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”
Back from a brain-scan, she dozed
to the sound of the Soaps: adultery,
amnesia, shady business deals,
and long, white hospital halls....
No separation between life and art.
The dog and I push through the ring
of dripping junipers
to enter the open space high on the hill
where I let him off the leash.
He vaults, snuffling, between tufts of moss;
twigs snap beneath his weight; he rolls
and rubs his jowls on the aromatic earth;
his pink tongue lolls.
I look for sticks of proper heft
to throw for him, while he sits, prim
and earnest in his love, if it is love.
