I’ m wondering where you are now
Married, or mad, or free:
Wherever you are you’ re likely glad,
But memory troubles me.
We could’ ve had us children,
We could’ ve had a home —
But you thought not, and I thought not,
And these nine years we roam.
Today I worked in the deep dark tanks,
And climbed out to watch the sea:
Gulls and salty waves pass by,
And mountains of Araby.
There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’ t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’ s the one who cries out who doesn’ t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’ t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’ t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
It is an afternoon toward the end of August:
Autumnal weather, cool following on,
And riding in, after the heat of summer,
Into the empty afternoon shade and light,
The shade full of light without any thickness at all;
You can see right through and right down into the depth
Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’ t
Any weight of the summer pressing down.
Alone in the library room, even when others
Are there in the room, alone, except for themselves:
There is the illusion of peace; the air in the room
Is stilled; there are reading lights on the tables,
Looking as if they're reading, looking as if
They're studying the text, and understanding,
Shedding light on what the words are saying;
But under their steady imbecile gaze the page
Is blank, patiently waiting not to be blank.
By the last few times we saw her it was clear
That things were different. When you tried to help her
Get out of the car or get from the car to the door
Or across the apartment house hall to the elevator
There was a new sense of heaviness
Or of inertia in the body. It wasn’ t
That she was less willing to be helped to walk
But that the walking itself had become less willing.
The unclean spirits cry out in the body
Or mind of the guest Ellen in a loud voice
Torment me not, and in the fury of her unclean
Hands beating the air in some kind of unending torment —
Nobody witnessing could possibly know the event
That cast upon her the spell of this enchantment.
She always writes poems. This summer
she’ s starting a novel. It’ s in trouble already.
The characters are easy — a girl
and her friend who is a girl
and the boy down the block with his first car,
an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes
these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing
in dressy clothes though it’ s still light out.
The girl has a brother who has lots of friends,
“While we’ re alive,” we kept
repeating. Tongues, throats,
roofs of our mouths bone dry,
skeletons we’ d someday
be...
Panicky masks we wore for
effect more than effect,
more real than we’ d admit...
The Magic of Numbers — 1
How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs!
I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two.
The Magic of Numbers — 2
You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on.
I was nineteen, and you were seven.
The Magic of Numbers — 3
Yes, but does X really like us?
We were both twenty-seven.
To think I used to be so good at going to pieces
gobbling my way through the cops
and spooking what’ s left of the girls. How’ d I
get so far, sloughing off one knuckle at a time,
jerking my mossy pelt along
ruined streets? Those insistent, dreadful thuds
when we stacked our futile selves
against locked doors. Our mumbles and groans!
Such hungry nights! Staggering through the grit
of looted malls, plastered with tattered
flags of useless currency, I’ d slobbered all over
