Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty
tree. Take a phrase, then
fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades
ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest
and tail feathers.
A musical idea.
Macaws
scarlet and violet,
tangerine as a song
At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings
turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.
We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak
in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.
They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,
from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters
will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets
burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.
There is so much sweetness in children’ s voices,
And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.
I don’ t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.
A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.
Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery
with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew
whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how
she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were
my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac
If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain,
of waiting under the eaves of an old house
at that moment
when it takes a form like fog.
It makes the mountain vanish.
Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up,
only condensed and refined.
Almost fifty years since thunder rolled
and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.
Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
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There, in that lost
corner of the ordnance survey.
Drive through the vanity —
two pubs and a garage — of Satley,
then right, cross the A68
past down-at-heel farms and a quarry,
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides
I’ m not interested in sadness,
just a yard as elder earth,
a library of sunflowers
battered by the night’ s rain.
When sliced wide, halved at dawn,
I can see how you exist,
O satellite town, your bright possibility
born again in drywall
and the diary with the trick lock.
Hardly held, for years I slept
with my window wide open,
wanting screen-cut threads of rain.
Blind suburb, dear untruth,
you who already know what I mean
when I praise every spared copse,
you were my battery, my sad clue,
Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,
mocking magnets, graphs, and maps —
in a split second the dream
piles before us mountains as stony
as real life.
And since mountains, then valleys, plains
with perfect infrastructures.
Without engineers, contractors, workers,
bulldozers, diggers, or supplies —
raging highways, instant bridges,
thickly populated pop-up cities.
Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen —
crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us
and when to vanish.
