And into the heavens, as on a bright day after rain,
there came the shapes of four creatures,
and they each had the likeness of a man,
and each man had four wings outstretched
and each wing had four eyes emblazoned, wide open,
given to weeping at the worlds they contained:
Missionary girl reports that Chinese addicts say
your heart begs you to stay away
even while your legs are carrying you back.
After the merry little jitter of the filter
and the smack dancing in the spoon, after
the absorbed, childlike, assassin-like procedure —
citric, water, flame — I’ m back in the basement,
heartsick, digging for a vein in February
as in a February gone and a February
still to come, spitting prayers through the tourniquet
Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough
droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional
map intrigues me: say clotheslines’
fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage
lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there
in the sea floes
of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos.
The strings, as if they knew
the lovers are about to meet, begin
to soar, and when he marches in the door
they soar some more — half ecstasy, half pain,
the musical equivalent of rain —
while children who have grown up with one stare
steal further looks across a crowded room,
as goners tend to do.
Tell the truth of experience
they say they also
say you must let
go learn to let go
let your children
go
and they go
and you stay
letting them go
because you are obedient and
respect everyone’ s freedom
to go and you stay
and you want to tell the truth
because you are yours truly
its obedient servant
but you can’ t because
you’ re feeling what you’ re not
supposed to feel you have
let them go and go and
“Feed Fred and sit with him
and mind he doesn’ t walk about.
He falls. Tell him his ute is safe
back home. Thinks someone’ s pinched it,
peers around the carpark all the time.
His family brought him in it and
he thinks it’ s gone.
He was a farmer once...”
I take the tray. The ice-cream’ s almost
melted round the crumbled orange jelly
and the soup’ s too hot. I know
I’ ll have to blow on it.
She wears the run-down slippers of a local
and in her arms, five rare protea
wrapped in newsprint, big as digger pine cones.
Our hands can’ t help it and she lets us touch.
Her brother grows them for her, upcountry.
She’ s spending the day on Oahu
with her flowers and her dogs. Protea
With a boil the size of an egg
protruding from her right hip,
she knows what I must do,
and to stall me has locked herself
inside the bathroom, bargaining
for a way out.
But it’ s too late: I’ ve seen
the oozing wounds stopped up with bits
of toilet paper and tape, the scarified
pockets that crater the surface
of her arms, buttocks, thighs.
A mean fix torched her last vein
years ago, and she’ s been banging the dope
ever since, puncturing her body
like a juju doll. She wants to kick,
but not now.
1. a night in the barn
The deer carcass hangs from a rafter.
Wrapped in blankets, a boy keeps watch
from a pile of loose hay. Then he sleeps
and dreams about a death that is coming:
Inside him, there are small bones
scattered in a field among burdocks and dead grass.
He will spend his life walking there,
gathering the bones together.
Pigeons rustle in the eaves.
At his feet, the German shepherd
snaps its jaws in its sleep.
We have been cruising, half a block
at a time, my wife, my two children,
all morning, and I have been pointing out
unhurriedly and with some feeling
places of consequence, sacred places,
backyards, lush fields, garages, alleyways.
“There,” I say, “by this big cottonwood,
That’ s where I dropped the fly ball, 1959.”
