The Mind

It was the summer of 1976 when I saw the moon fall down.

It broke like a hen’ s egg on the sidewalk.

The garden roiled with weeds, hummed with gnats who settled clouds on my

oblivious siblings.

A great hunger insatiate to find / A dulcet ill, an evil sweetness blind.

A gush of yolk and then darker.

Somewhere a streetlamp disclosed the insides of a Chevy Impala — vinyl seats, the rear- view,

headrests and you, your hand through your hair.

An indistinguishable burning, failing bliss.

Somebody who would never refuse money told me this —
about the syncretic effect when each person plugs
their attention into a field to read ad copy, let’ s just say
they become opened up and other beings can see into
their minds. This was considered a science fiction idea
to many people, but not to me.
In my negative space construction is always occurring.

There are rooftops
made of cloud remnants

gathered by a trader
dabbling in car parts and burlap

At night, I dive onto the breeze
fermenting above the dirt

and dream that I am a crocodile
a tin of shoe polish, an audience of two

In the morning, before the smallest yawn
becomes a noodle, I am offered

a ribbon of yellow smoke
I opt for fuzzy rocks and clawed water

and, of course, the perishable window
I am one of the last computer

chain errors to be illuminated
I tell you there are rooftops

The challenge: to start
not with theory but with tangible performance

You and others, approaching

We shall be asked for a way out

to be fed

to keep warm and dry

Starting with experience, magic
genuine science

More than once we have been lost
in a trackless wilderness

dwarfed and shadowed by mighty buildings
subway trains wild as elephants

One goes blindly back to one’ s desk

These moments come, their dark
shadow

We wonder at our shifting capacities, keep
adding and striking skills
from the bottoms of our résumés
under constant revision
like the inscriptions on tombs
shared for generations
unnervingly up
to date

Made nervous by our shift in capabilities, we write:

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost
and never came out was the beginning
and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin
with a gesture for explanation.
In the afternoon there are pauses between the words
through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane.
A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound
and nothing can be learned by more analysis.
The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through
the glorious pages of appreciation and that’ s not all.

We are descending again in parallel —
I cannot say together — as in another dream

you rushed through the first door
without me. It was late. Your name

was an elevator door resisting its rail,
its screech my only attempt to reach you.

Was it the hurt that filled the elevator
I entered with gurneys and gowned girls,

incubated hearts pumping for a home?
Floors flicker as they fall.

The girls’ chatter flaps shrill at light,
tangles in my hair and away

One and one make two,
the literalist said.
So far they've made five billion,
said the lateralist, or ten
times that, if you count the dead.

Like the small hole by the path-side something lives in,
in me are lives I do not know the names of,

nor the fates of,
nor the hungers of or what they eat.

They eat of me.
Of small and blemished apples in low fields of me
whose rocky streams and droughts I do not drink.

And in my streets — the narrow ones,
unlabeled on the self-map —
they follow stairs down music ears can’ t follow,

A thing too perfect to be remembered:
stone beautiful only when wet.

* * *

Blinded by light or black cloth —
so many ways
not to see others suffer.

* * *

Too much longing:

it separates us
like scent from bread,
rust from iron.

* * *

From very far or very close —
the most resolute folds of the mountain are gentle.