Afternoon burns everything off Franklin Street.
Even the birds, even the flies.
Or iced-tea sugar and chicken grease weigh everyone
into a doze, all indoors, in a cool
they said would never come eighty years ago
when this was still the center of business
and the civilized left these high hours to the dogs,
ice in a highball, and let each house
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
After the second conference, I would be cast in the role of a young dancer with a prestigious New York City ballet company. I would be cast in the role of the mother, a former dancer now amateur artist, whose career ended at 28 when she became pregnant. I would be cast in the role of the exotic beauty who is more in touch with her sensuality. I would be cast in the role of the director, a cruel and demanding genius who would sleep with the ingenue. I would be cast in the role of someone selected to compete for the part alongside several other dancers.
They have left behind the established cave
with its well-worn floor. Scholarship impels them
in hundreds, but generally one by one,
to find an unknown passage or scrape out their own.
Proto-Semitic linguistic theory,
Hittite stratigraphic anomalies,
microclimatic economics. "What do you see?"
invisible followers ask in their ears,
and they whisper "Wonderful things" as they quarry
a grain of rock at a time, or examine
a fleck of ore, or measure
the acidity of a trickle of water.
See! Behold! Look! Lo!
I need everything else
Anything else
Desperately
But I have nothing
Shall have nothing
but this
Immediate, inescapable
and invaluable
No one can afford
THIS
Being made here and now
(Seattle, Washington
17 May, 1955)
MARIGOLDS
Having returned at last and being carefully seated
On the floor — somebody else's floor, as usual —
Far away across that ocean which looked
Through Newport windows years ago — somebody else's livingroom —
Another messed-up weedy garden
Tall floppy improbably red flowers
All the leaves turned over in the rain
Ridged furry scrotum veins
does
The old Roman sow
Bears a new litter now
To fatten for a while
On the same imperial swill.
The cannibal wolf will dig
And root out Spanish bones beside the pig.
Germany has reared
A rare ugly bird
To screech a sour song
In the German tongue:
Tell me if there be
A sparrowhawk for such birds as he?
The stairs lead to the room as bleak as glass
Where fancy turns the statues.
The empty chairs are dreaming of a protocol,
The tables, of a treaty;
And the world has become a museum.
(The girl is gone,
Fled from the broken altar by the beach,
From the unholy sacrifice when calms became a trade-wind.)
move
