Southern

Walking back to the office after lunch,
I saw Hans. “Mister Isham, Mister Isham,”
He called out in his hurry, “Herr Wegner needs you.
A woman waiting for a border pass
Took poison, she is dead, and the police
Are there to take the body.” In the hall,
The secretaries stood outside their doors
Silently waiting with Wegner. “Sir,” he said,
“It was her answer on the questionnaire,
A clerk for the Gestapo. So it was.”
Within the outer office, by the row
Of wooden chairs, one lying on its side,

I summon up Panofskv from his bed
Among the famous dead
To build a tomb which, since I am not read,
Suffers the stone’ s mortality instead;

Which, by the common iconographies
Of simple visual ease,
Usurps the place of the complexities
Of sound survivors once preferred to noise:

All winter long you listened for the boom
Of distant cannon wheeled into their place.
Sometimes outside beneath a bombers’ moon
You stood alone to watch the searchlights trace

Their careful webs against the boding sky,
While miles away on Munich’ s vacant square
The bombs lunged down with an unruly cry
Whose blast you saw yet could but faintly hear.

From the far star points of his pinned extremities,
cold inched in — black ice and squid ink —
till the hung flesh was empty.
Lonely in that void even for pain,
he missed his splintered feet,
the human stare buried in his face.
He ached for two hands made of meat
he could reach to the end of.
In the corpse’ s core, the stone fist
of his heart began to bang
on the stiff chest’ s door, and breath spilled
back into that battered shape. Now

The King saith, and his arm swept the landscape’ s foliage into bloom
where he hath inscribed the secret mysteries of his love
before at last taking himself away. His head away. His
recording hand. So his worshipful subjects must imagine
themselves in his loving fulfillment, who were no more
than instruments of his creation. Pawns.
Apparati. Away, he took himself and left us
studying the smudged sky. Soft pencil lead.

I came awake in kindergarten,
under the letter K chalked neat
on a field-green placard leaned

on the blackboard's top edge. They'd cagedme
in a metal desk — the dull word writ
to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill

i.

I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’ s shaking hand.
In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats
through the dull, black night. I’ m heir to an orange heart
in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly
and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole
in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull,
but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body.
In my dad’ s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night
where I sit beneath the canvas looking up.
My dad looks down and laughs.

Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center

of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,

an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut

at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the

curtains ormolu:
I miss you

is what I want to say
like a rocket

stocked from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,

wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some

Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
­ rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows

When you take the lost road
You come to the snow
And when you find the snow
You get down on your hands and knees
Like a sick dog
That’ s been eating the grasses of graveyards
For twenty centuries.

When you take the lost road
You find woman
Who has no fear of light
Who can kill two cocks at once
Light which has no fear of cocks
And cocks who can’ t call in the snow.