Living

For we have thought the longer thoughts
And gone the shorter way.
And we have danced to devils’ tunes,
Shivering home to pray;
To serve one master in the night,
Another in the day.

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,

We are descending again in parallel —
I cannot say together — as in another dream

you rushed through the first door
without me. It was late. Your name

was an elevator door resisting its rail,
its screech my only attempt to reach you.

Was it the hurt that filled the elevator
I entered with gurneys and gowned girls,

incubated hearts pumping for a home?
Floors flicker as they fall.

The girls’ chatter flaps shrill at light,
tangles in my hair and away

One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they've made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.

And yet we should consider how we go forward.
To feel is not enough, nor to think, nor to move
nor to put your body in danger in front of an old loophole
when scalding oil and molten lead furrow the walls.

The flowering sea and the mountains in the moon’ s waning
the great stone close to the Barbary figs and the asphodels
the jar that refused to go dry at the end of day
and the closed bed by the cypress trees and your hair
golden; the stars of the Swan and that other star, Aldebaran.

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.

Again with spring
she wore light colours
and with gentle steps
again with spring
again in summer
she was smiling.

Among fresh blossoms
breast naked to the veins
beyond the dry night
beyond the white old men
debating quietly
whether it would be better
to give up the keys
or to pull the rope
and hang from the noose
to leave empty bodies
there where souls couldn’ t endure
there where the mind couldn’ t catch up
and knees buckled.

for Mack Charles Parker, lynched near Poplarville, Mississippi, April 24, 1959,
recovered from the Pearl River, May 4, 1959

When they come
filling the yard with their overheard,

broke-glass catastrophes of voice,
overcrowded party line,

he lets the screen door clap
to see them plume

the settle back to the fence,
aftershocks of crowd and wail.

When they come
he says again he was home at breakfast

radio preacher doing love thy neighbor
and then the bomb,

just ask the wife.
The silence

in the TV's cathode glow
slowly fills with questions

as starlings shutter light
then weigh the lines, voices