Perhaps the universe is an extinguished building
with blue banners strung along
and the forest, more like a commodity
bordering bushes and asphalt,
something else to string our blue banners on.
Never was restoration swifter:
the leafless trees, the asphalt
less splintered and more splendid.
Never was restoration swifter
with its mightier solutions,
less splintered and more splendid
snipers, dynamiters, colorful bombs.
The sun that puts its spokes in every
Wheel of manhandle and tree
Derives its path of seashines
(Sheer centrifugality) from my
Regards. I send it
My regards. Some yards
Of lumen from the fabrika
Have come unbolted from the look
Of it (or likes of me), a long
Unweaving or recarding I
Cannot recall begun, and there
Before my eyes a palm
Puts lashes round the sun.
Things are not
unmoving (or else what
is ing there for?)
The things once-living
fall on the never-living
all the more movingly for the eye
that passes over them.
The wind wells up
to spill a trail
of onces off the nevers,
take opaque from eye
to mind, or near it —
every rocking takes some leaving
to a stonish spirit.
O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen,
o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks
accuse of spoiling souls,
whose destiny is downward,
whose reflecting's up — I think
I must have come from you.
Just one more cup.
1
As so-called quarks, so atoms before and through
And after molecules, which too
Constitute us awhile, pluming
Through our slowly changing shapes
Like beachscapes
Through a duneless sandglass, say
(I said, once) — all these
So utterly forgetful, wiped clean
As numbers with each new use, lint-free.
How not so words, which pass our minds
And mouths and ears from hind-
Most elsewhere, on their way to elsewhere — why
Now, when he and I meet, after all these years,
I say to the bitch inside me, don’ t start growling.
He isn’ t a trespasser anymore,
Just an old acquaintance tipping his hat.
My voice says, “Nice to see you,”
As the bitch starts to bark hysterically.
He isn’ t an enemy now,
Where are your manners, I say, as I say,
“How are the children? They must be growing up.”
At a kind word from him, a look like the old days,
We who must act as handmaidens
To our own goddess, turn too fast,
Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse
Gliding below her lake or sea,
Are left, long-staring after her,
Narcissists by necessity;
1
The perfect mother lets the cat
sleep on her head. The
children laugh.
Where is she?
She is not carefully ironing the starched
ruffles of a Sunday dress.
What does she say?
She does not speak.
Her head is under the cat and
like the cat, she sleeps.
2
In Chicago, it is snowing softly
and a man has just done his wash for the week.
He steps into the twilight of early evening,
carrying a wrinkled shopping bag
full of neatly folded clothes,
and, for a moment, enjoys
the feel of warm laundry and crinkled paper,
flannellike against his gloveless hands.
There’ s a Rembrandt glow on his face,
a triangle of orange in the hollow of his cheek
At six I lived for spells:
how a few Hawaiian words could call
up the rain, could hymn like the sea
in the long swirl of chambers
curling in the nautilus of a shell,
how Amida’ s ballads of the Buddhaland
in the drone of the priest’ s liturgy
could conjure money from the poor
and give them nothing but mantras,
the strange syllables that healed desire.
I lived for stories about the war
my grandfather told over hana cards,
slapping them down on the mats
with a sharp Japanese kiai.
