Old Woman Nature
naturally has a bag of bones
tucked away somewhere.
a whole room full of bones!
A scattering of hair and cartilage
bits in the woods.
A fox scat with hair and a tooth in it.
a shellmound
a bone flake in a streambank.
A purring cat, crunching
the mouse head first,
eating on down toward the tail--
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.
Washing Kai in the sauna,
The kerosene lantern set on a box
outside the ground-level window,
Lights up the edge of the iron stove and the
washtub down on the slab
Steaming air and crackle of waterdrops
brushed by on the pile of rocks on top
He stands in warm water
Soap all over the smooth of his thigh and stomach
“Gary don’ t soap my hair!”
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.
i
Gilgamesh spoke and said to the old man then:
"When I looked at you I thought that you were not
a man, one made like me; I had resolved
to challenge you as one might challenge a demon,
a stranger-adversary. But now I see
that you are Utnapishtim, made like me,
a man, the one I sought, the one from whom
I might find out how death can be avoided.
Tell me then, father, how it came about
that you were admitted to the company
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.
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
MORNING
For Russians the stars are always incontinent, ejaculatory
smears across the squalor of a boundlessly
unhygienic sky. You’ d scoff, Marina, at how I go at them
with a tiny plastic shovel and my litter box
technique, scooping up the sidereal splooge while trying
to wipe down the universe. You’ d say
I tug at God’ s Old Testament beard, praying the prayers
of a coward. You’ d confide to your diary my eyelashes
don’ t bat sootily enough. Such a lummox
