The Mind

The cost of flight is landing.
On this warm winter day in the southwest,
down here on the edge of the border I want
to go to France where we all came from
where the Occident was born near the ancient
caves near Lascaux. At home I’ m only
sitting on the lip of this black hole, a well
that descends to the center of the earth.
With a big telescope aimed straight down
I see a red dot of fire and hear the beast howling.
My back is suppurating with disease,
the heart lurches left and right,
the brain sings its ditties.

If I could hold a fire against
a hemisphere of shadows, hold it
close, not so that damage
finds my hands, but so fire scatters
galvanizing strands, my pupils
responsive to the flames’ unbridled
tutelage as they tell me
nothing but these little jumps
out of your definitions, small
or large or leaping, sinking, slumped...
If I could hold a fire against
that latticework of shadows, standing
close to flames pivoting without
being singed or riveted or convinced
it is the only spirit, like a god,

Shrugging shallowly down, burrowing
in beneath the heaps of plumped cork- and sallow-
brown leaf, beneath the oak and the brittle bean-

dripping locust and the still so innocent fruit
trees — bare-boughed and newly blossoming — skinnily
shadowing the frost-seared grasses, I and my

“now” [in this pictured perfect] four-
year-old daughter, huddled, hidden, lie
low. I remember hiding in the fort

As a teenager
she was like any other,
boys, the craic,
smoking down the backs.

Later there was talk
she broke things,
furniture and glass,
her mother’ s heart.

‘Mad at the world,’
the old women nod,
round each other’ s faces.

But it was more
than that
and for less
she was punished.

That weekend
she didn’ t leave a cup alone
every chair hit the wall,
Philomena’ s revenge.

Soon after
she was shifted
and given the shocks.

Like nearly all women under sixty she would have deftly
avoided meeting the eyes of an unknown man —
but occasionally an exception happens by chance
and her unconscious skill at avoidance gets instantly
replaced by a human generosity which is either
inherently feminine or gender-trained, as you please;
she glanced at me exactly when I glanced at her
in the store at the mall and so she gave me
that momentary slight smile which implies
Though many men are dangerous, and I do not intend

For example, I wrote my first poem in 1976 about being in the Vermont house
after my mother’ s death; she died the year before;
she loved that house. My father said he kept having moments
of thinking she must have just stepped outside for a minute
to weed the garden or to walk just a little way
along Prospect Street, for a few minutes only and now
almost now she’ d be coming back, we’ d hear the screen door,
Bev would be back and saying something casual about —

Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing.
In Leland’ s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor.
The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story?
Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping
softly away while Sam’ s sneakers made the wood stairs creak.
The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store.
The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went.
Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet.
Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen

On a backwards-running clock in Lisbon,
By the marble statue of Pessoa;
On an antique astrolabe in London
Tracing out the sky above Samoa,

Thousands of miles away — in time, in place,
Each night conspires to create a myth
That stands for nothing real, yet leaves you with
The vague impression of a human face.

“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming,
linoleum flecked with flame,
a thick coat of wax that flashed
down a corridor and led to a room,
a place where I curled up a few
innocuous inches off the floor.
Straps — word out of strophe,
the restraints of line and stanza —
straps hung in loops on closet hooks.
On the nightstand a basket with
peanut butter crackers, a vivid
and unnatural orange, a crinkly
wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked
with icy juices, foil boxes, straws
glued on. A female voice next door

Past the fountain out of repair
And the boarded diner

A small studio
You’ d never told anyone about

Where old clothes have remained
Right where you’ ve dumped them

Side by side
With random notes and sketches

When someone close to you
Has a different idea of what you represent

He insisted
You’ ll write a check for the loan

There were other misjudgments
As well. Exits were being blocked

Down every hall I walked

Until a sort of muscle memory —
Well, I knew it all along, of course,