Jobs & Working

The lump on his neck that no collar
could hide, and the charity of his presence
there in the neighborhood each fall,
door-to-door, standing in the swept porches,
waiting for the housewives to answer.

What could have been the big to-do
that caused him to push me aside
on that platform? Was a woman who knew
there must be some good even inside
an ass like him on board that train?
Charity? Frances? His last chance
in a ratty string of last chances? Jane?
Surely in all of us is some good.
Better love thy neighbor, buddy,
lest she shove back. Maybe I should.
It's probably just a cruddy
downtown interview leading to
some cheap-tie, careerist, dull
cul-de-sac he's speeding to.

So won a name in this place,
handing off lath strips to a hammer's
measure, seeing the passing girls' slits
in roils of timber grain.

Mountains, barley, scaffold,
dirt. I was sixteen. And hourly
from the hoods of faraway bells
monks emerging like hairless animals.

But to whatever animal we ascribe these remains, it is certain such a one has existed in America, and that it has been the largest of all terrestrial beings. It should have sufficed to have rescued the earth it inhabited, and the atmosphere it breathed, from the imputation of impotence....
— Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.
But when I thought...
I could feel
My wound open wide.
— Thom Gunn, “The Wound”

THE STATES

They pay us time and a half
and don’ t dare catch us
drinking: we don’ t insist,
don’ t pass a bottle, but each sips
a private pint, all sitting
in the narrow room with our backs
to the center, each facing
his work — router, stain tray,
buffing wheel, drill press —
and with that sweet taste echoing
in our bones, we watch our hands

I would drive the pre-dawn dark to stake
my spot to fish for dinner, to numb my hands in the ice
bucket, to pluck, from the neat stack, a herring,
to fit the skullcap and pierce the eye with a toothpick,
the body double-hooked, my fingertips glimmering
with the scales of the dead while the line whined free
from the reel, and the bait arced out over the tidal current
on a point in view of   the town where I lived,

I stand and listen, head bowed,
to my inner complaint.
Persons passing by think
I am searching for a lost coin.
You’ re fired, I yell inside
after an especially bad episode.
I’ m letting you go without notice
or terminal pay. You just lost
another chance to make good.
But then I watch myself standing at the exit,

I had a calling.
I took the call.
It was all I could do to follow the voice streaming into me
Like traffic on the runway where I lay
Down to gather.
I had a calling. I heard the geese bleat
In the firmament as they migrated
Into the jet’ s jets.
And could I have foreseen that falling
I could have fallen too
Rather than being sutured to the bottomless
Freeze-out lake.
For it is fine to lie within one’ s borrowed blankets
Looking up at the
Dropped ceiling coming down.

All day she stands before her loom;
The flying shuttles come and go:
By grassy fields, and trees in bloom,
She sees the winding river flow:
And fancy’ s shuttle flieth wide,
And faster than the waters glide.

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