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
You’ re stepping on your father, my mother said,
and indeed I was standing exactly in the center
of a bed of grass, mown so neatly it could have been
my father’ s grave, although there was no stone saying so.
You’ re stepping on your father, she repeated,
louder this time, which began to be strange to me,
since she was dead herself; even the doctor had admitted it.
I moved slightly to the side, to where
my father ended and my mother began.
Osseous, aqueous, cardiac, hepatic —
back from bone the echoes stroke, back
from the halved heart, the lungs
three years of weightlessness have cinched to gills.
From a leather chaise, the astronaut's withered legs
dangle, as back they come, sounds
a beaked percussion hammer startles into shape.
The physician cocks his head and taps — exactly
as a splitter halves his slate, the metamorphic rock
chisel-shocked, then shocked again, halved
More than a third of a century later,
meeting for the first time in almost all those years,
we face each other’ s still somewhat familiar faces
across a table in a California restaurant,
and wonder why we did it, why we suddenly said
that night in July in Greenwich Village
“Let’ s go to Connecticut,” and got on a train
and ended up at midnight in Old Greenwich, Connecticut,
holding hands on an empty road that wound past
serious grown-up sleeping houses....
Saturday morning in late March.
I was alone and took a long walk,
though I also carried a book
of the Alone, which companioned me.
How long and thin
she seems today
a field of mustard
smiling up at the sun
it draws her eyebrows
together in a little pain
I don’ t think I ever
saw calligraphy of geese
like this overseas
oaks and pines
pretending to be asleep
not quite dark yet
as it is at home
poor people, midnight
“Shalom,” called the pink-shirted man in the Oceanic
Terminal of Heathrow, and I snapped,
“I do not want to talk to you.” Manic
with fear, I extended one pointy-tipped shoe, tapped
the message home. My cases bulged with the wrong
clothes, every outfit trimmed with clipped
Glove box rummages itself & dumps: fuzzy cough
droppings & stuck (menthol) among them a misdirectional
map intrigues me: say clotheslines’
fripperies hopping the breeze off the alley & garbage
lids clanging downhill to the sea: say there
in the sea floes
of penguins bobbing up to Argentine flamingos.
Chile, 1834
Not knowing in what season this again
Not knowing when again the arms outyearning
Nor the flung smile in eyes not knowing when
Not sure beyond all doubt of full return
Not sure of time now nor the film’ s reversal
This all done opposite, the waif regathered
Like our lost parents in the blinded song
We bag in hand with wandering steps and slow
Through suburbs take our solitary way
