you lie in bed listening,
waiting, fearing the moment
your father returns home. you
listen to voices talking in the
next room and wonder why you are
still afraid of the dark. his voice
in the other room you would love to
kiss. you cannot see your face in the
dark but the blackness is there, like
his back. if only he would
open the door and look at you. maybe
the light would be in his eyes,
his voice.
sometimes the deaf
hear better than the blind
some men
when they first
heard her sing
were only attracted
to the flower in her hair
death surrounds itself with the living
i watch them take the body from the house
i’ m a young kid maybe five years old
the whole thing makes no sense to me
i hear my father say
lord jesus what she go and do this for
i watch him walk out the backdoor of the house
i watch him walk around the garden
kick the dirt
stare at the flowers
& shake his head shake his head
he shakes his head all night long
inside the car
françois and i
could see the light
coming from the
cigarette michele
duvalier was smoking
her husband
declared president
for life looked like
a fat chauffeur
sitting beind the
wheel
françois
and i smiled
the small
procession of cars
slipping past us
in the dark
I’ m not interested in sadness,
just a yard as elder earth,
a library of sunflowers
battered by the night’ s rain.
When sliced wide, halved at dawn,
I can see how you exist,
O satellite town, your bright possibility
born again in drywall
and the diary with the trick lock.
Hardly held, for years I slept
with my window wide open,
wanting screen-cut threads of rain.
Blind suburb, dear untruth,
you who already know what I mean
when I praise every spared copse,
you were my battery, my sad clue,
Sent in after new ground was taken,
my father ducked from ditch to shell-hole,
unwinding the telephone cable behind him,
a pfc. cast as Mercury, connecting
the gods with the lesser gods.
Funny to think of him trailing
the complex filament of speech,
that man, neither shy nor sullen,
who answered only “Yes,” “No,” “Maybe,”
and never volunteered a private thought.
We sat in the park, but there was a war between us,
A dead moon over us and all around us
The shy and secret whisperings as of the tiny
Woods animals which in the high forest gather
Wind-fallen goods before the frost comes.
1.
Betrayed by his five mechanic agents, falling
Captive to consciousness, he summons light
To all its duties, and assumes the world
Like a common penance. Rust on the green tongue burns
Like history’ s corrosive on his living tree.
But all the monsters of his sleep’ s dark sea
Are tame familiars in the morning sun.
2.
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
Let us honor the topmost banner
fluttering over the kingdom of commodities —
the encoded soul of price
rose of the name and name of the rose,
bundle of stems, fasces
of tendons and veins —
wrist on which
to auscultate
the pulse of money.
