Uncategorized

We brought that newborn home from Maimonides
and showed her nine blue glittering streets.
Would she like the semis with hoods of snow?
The precinct? Bohack’ s? A lit diner?
Her eyes were huge and her gaze tilted
like milk in a pan, toward shadow.
Would she like the tenement, three dim flights,
her crib that smelled of Lemon Pledge?
We slept beside her in our long coats,
rigid with fatigue in the unmade bed.
Her breath woke us with its slight catch.
Would she approve of gray winter dawn?

The animal of winter is dying,
its white body everywhere
in collapse and stabbed at
by straws of   light, a leaving
to believe in as the air
slowly fills with darkness
and water drains from the tub
where my daughter, watching it
lower around her, feeling it
go, says about the only thing
she can as if it were a long-
kept breath going with her
blessing of dribble and fleck.
Down it swirls a living drill
vanishing toward a land
where tomorrow already
fixes its bright eye on a man

It hangs on its
stem like a plum
at the edge of a
darkening thicket.

It’ s swelling and
blushing and ripe
and I reach out a
hand to pick it

Skipping out from the major international cocktail party
with my becleavaged blight, a jeroboam in her tight fist,
I broke open my copy of Sarcasm for Beginners, i. e., men.

Never had I seen so many pairs of to-the-elbow gloves.
Never did I see a puttoed ceiling groan so with thin talk
as the great, the grim and the gone pressed terrible flesh,

so many penguins offering tastesome wisps and skimps
from doilied salvers: cherry-shaded caviar, cheese puffs,
dark sugared berries, dainty octopods, gently vinegared,

Dormant are pinnacles and streams of the mountains,
Chasms and bluffs and crawlers fed by the dark earth;
Dormant are wild animals and that tribe of bees
And monsters out of the sea’ s dark syntax;
Dormant are clans of birds with wings that envelop.

A sycamore grove, and in its limbs
the orchestra played Má vlast, so I saw
boughs bouncing and tuxedo legs
swinging sap-spotted above the splayed
blades of the ground feathered black
in moss, in the sweat of the set sun,
and the players’ faces where moths roosted,
where leaf-points drew water-stripes
on brows and eyelids, their hands
that stirred in pollen like a fog, were masked
by birds’ nests and bows and flaking vines.

Up — or out? — here:
a problem of preposition,

my uneasy relation
with the world. Whether I’ m

above it or apart. On the other side
of the latched glass door, a man

loves me. Worries. Calls my name.

•

Where — for art — thou-
sands of windows go dark

in slow succession. On Essex
and Ludlow and Orchard.

A thousand times goodnight.

•

A boy throwing stones at a window.
Right window, wrong boy.

•

America is inconceivable without drugs
and always has been. One of the first acts
was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished
the mansions of Virginia was tobacco,
a drug now in much disrepute.
Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for
and they dealt it by the bale altho it
was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire —
people were so simple in those days.
The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine
making amputation a pleasure and making
the block of wood between the teeth,

The show did not start off
auspiciously, the contestants
were nervous and kept fiddling
with the wires attached
to their privates, the men
being especially anxious
over the question of balls.
The women were more querulous.

I

I hear you are whispering there O stars of heaven,
O suns — O grass of graves...
If you do not say anything how can I say anything?

Let us tunnel

the air
(as a mole’ s green galleries)
toward the ultimate

cornfield
— the square of gold, & green, & of tassle

that rustles back at us —

let us burrow in
to a susurration, the dense starlings,

of the real —
the huge
sunflowers waving back at us,

as we move

— the great grassy world

that surrounds us,
singing.