Mid-Atlantic

When I was
nearly six my

father
opened his magic

doctor bag:
two

tongue depressors fastened by
a rubber

band;
one flick

of his hairy wrist
and lo!

we invented
flight.

Even the flags seemed frozen
to their poles, and the men
stamping their well-shod feet
resembled an army of overcoats.

But we were young and fueled
by hope, our ardor burned away
the cold. We were the president’ s,
and briefly the president would be ours.

The old poet stumbled
over his own indelible words,
his breath a wreath around his face:
a kind of prophecy.

are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather —
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

It is more onerous
than the rites of beauty
or housework, harder than love.
But you expect it of me casually,
the way you expect the sun
to come up, not in spite of rain
or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity
to sadness were a hidden vice —
that downward tug on my mouth,
my old suspicion that health
and love are brief irrelevancies,
no more than laughter in the warm dark
strangled at dawn.

Spring: the first morning when that one true block of sweet, laminar,
complex scent arrives
from somewhere west and I keep coming to lean on the sill, glorying in
the end of the wretched winter.
The scabby-barked sycamores ringing the empty lot across the way are
budded — I hadn't noticed —
and the thick spikes of the unlikely urban crocuses have already broken
the gritty soil.

Another drought morning after a too brief dawn downpour,
unaccountable silvery glitterings on the leaves of the withering maples —

I think of a troop of the blissful blessed approaching Dante,
“a hundred spheres shining,” he rhapsodizes, “the purest pearls…”

then of the frightening brilliants myriad gleam in my lamp
of the eyes of the vast swarm of bats I found once in a cave,

a chamber whose walls seethed with a spaceless carpet of creatures,
their cacophonous, keen, insistent, incessant squeakings and squealings

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines — how not be annihilated by it? — the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,

1.

If that someone who’ s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn’ t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?

If he who rakes me with such not trivial shame for minor sins now were there then,
shouldn’ t he have warned me he’ d even now devastate me for my unpardonable affront?

Into my backyard’ s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,

Snarls, bread trucks, yeast
breathing inside huddled bags,
and sleepers completing lives
behind their gray windows.

A whistle on the phonewires,
feathers, twitches, whistling
down to the hot loaves.

Reeds everywhere, pulse,
flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs.
An answer. Radio news