We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep
adding and striking skills
from the bottoms of our résumés
under constant revision
like the inscriptions on tombs
shared for generations
unnervingly up
to date
Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:
1. gone to lunch back in five minutes
night closed in on my letter of resignation
out in the square one of my threads had broken loose
the language i used was no and no
while the yellow still came through, the hammer and the drills
occasionally the metabolism alters
and lines no longer come express
waiting for you what muscles work me
which hold me down below my head?
it is a long coat and a van on the horizon
a bird that vanishes the arabic
i learn from observation is how to break the line
Sometimes you watch them going out to sea
On such a day as this, in the worst of weathers,
Their boat holding ten or a dozen of them,
In black rubber suits crouched around the engine housing,
Tanks of air, straps and hoses, and for their feet
Enormous flippers.
the breaththe treesthe bridge
the roadthe rain the sheen
the breaththe linethe skin
the vineyardthe fences the leg
the water the breath the shift
the hairthe wheels the shoulder
Your mother’ s in the kitchen and out
and in again. It’ s all about them.
They’ ve taken over like the dark cloud
hanging low over the back yard,
a fat aunt coming in for a hug.
Enough’ s enough. The door opens:
new guests flow in as the old
back you up like mangroves.
Why get dressed up to stay in?
Pretend to befriend other children
because they have been dumped next to you?
Resistance, then fire, then to your room
without toys. Later, it’ ll be the boys
to whom your friends will cater,
They gave the city a stroke. Its memories
are cordoned off. They could collapse on you.
Water leaks into bricks of the Workers’ century
and every meaning is blurred. No word in Roget
now squares with another. If the word is Manchester
it may be Australia, where that means sheets and towels.
To give the city a stroke, they mixed a lorryload
of henbane and meadowsweet oil and countrified her.
The skyscrapers of New York will never know the coolness that comes down on Kifisia
but when I see the two cypress trees above your familiar church
with the paintings of the damned being tortured in fire and brimstone
then I recall the two chimneys behind the cedars I used to like so much when I was abroad.
They have left behind the established cave
with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them
in hundreds, but generally one by one,
to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own.
Proto-Semitic linguistic theory,
Hittite stratigraphic anomalies,
microclimatic economics. "What do you see?"
invisible followers ask in their ears,
and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry
a grain of rock at a time, or examine
a fleck of ore, or measure
the acidity of a trickle of water.
See! Behold! Look! Lo!
