Always the evening noises, the footsteps on the stairs, the day that rises in the throat.
A turn of the key will expel the world.
Against the extinct forest of furniture, the channeled bloodstream translates the dream into this small life.
In the end we shrink until finally we can no longer inhabit the gestures of our childhood.
A nail in a board: the remains of a fence; blurred memory of the mountain that raised the tree, that brooded over its ore.
You're dreaming
of Cratoids, Armpullers, the Blownose Dragon.
Who knows what Anna Brichtova dreamed about, the girl
who comes looking for us tonight with her mosaic
of colored paper: her house
with its red roof, some trees on a green lawn,
the sky — outside, the concentration camp.
This is the real gift
I brought back from Prague without telling you.
It was with me on the train the morning
I thought I was living in hell: Stuttgart,
or south of there, amid a drone
of people working — they don't know at what
This is a year of poppies: our land
was brimming with them as May burned
into June and I returned —
a sweet dark wine that made me drunk.
From clouds of mulberry to grains to grasses
ripeness was all, in the fitting
heat, in the slow drowsiness spreading
through the universe of green.
My life half over I saw grown sons
setting off alone and vanishing from sight
beyond the prison the flight
of the swallow makes in the spent
And it grows, the vain
summer,
even for us with our
bright green sins:
behold the dry guest,
the wind,
as it stirs up quarrels
among magnolia boughs
and plays its serene
tune on
the prows of all the leaves —
and then is gone,
leaving the leaves
still there,
the tree still green, but breaking
the heart of the air.
One spring day I saw
the shadow of a strawberry tree
lying on the moor
like a shy lamb asleep.
Its heart was far away,
suspended in the sky,
brown in a brown veil,
in the sun’ s eye.
The shadow played in the wind,
moving there alone
to make the tree content.
Here and there it shone.
It knew no pain, no haste,
wanting only to feel morning,
then noon, then the slow-paced
journey of evening.
Psychoanalysis
always looks for the egg
in a basket
that has been lost.
* * *
I sample sin as if it were
the beginning of well-being.
* * *
I don't like Paradise
as they probably don't have obsessions there.
* * *
If God absolves me
he always does so
for insufficient
evidence.
From now on they always are, for years now
they always have been, but from now on you know
they are, they always will be,
from now on when they cry and you say
wryly to their mother, better you than me,
you’ d better mean it, you’ d better
hand over what you can’ t have, and gracefully.
The fact of the harp swells into the air,
Alien and familiar and entirely too large,
An elephant lost in the suburbs,
And opens with its cry a strange passage
Between the harp itself, the fragile harp,
And the almost guilty knowledge
Of the stroke of luck that brought it here
And the care with which it must depart.
The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even heard of,
as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.
Long ago you kissed the names of the nine muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
In a rush this weekday morning,
I tap the horn as I speed past the cemetery
where my parents are buried
side by side beneath a slab of smoothgranite.
Then, all day, I think of him rising up
to give me that look
of knowing disapproval
while my mother calmly tells him to lie back down.
