There is so much sweetness in children’ s voices,
And so much discontent at the end of day,
And so much satisfaction when a train goes by.
I don’ t know why the rooster keeps crying,
Nor why elephants keep raising their trunks,
Nor why Hawthorne kept hearing trains at night.
A handsome child is a gift from God,
And a friend is a vein in the back of the hand,
And a wound is an inheritance from the wind.
Warsaw, October: rose-madder by four,
the soldierly grey boulevards slippery
with tickets to winter. After forty years rebuilding,
the Old Town is like this beautiful girl I knew
whose face was wheel-broken in a crash,
and remade so well it was hard to say how
she looked wrong. I’ d brought two questions here —
holding them as if they might slip: who were
my mother’ s people? Where did they die?
In an attic-archive — deep card indexes, ink turned lilac
When the first mechanical picker had stripped the field,
It left such a copious white dross of disorderly wispiness
That my mother could not console herself to the waste
And insisted on having it picked over with human hands,
Though anyone could see there was not enough for ten sheets
And the hands had long since gone into the factories.
No matter how often my father pointed this out,
She worried it the way I’ ve worried the extra words
If I ever get over the bodies of women, I am going to think of the rain,
of waiting under the eaves of an old house
at that moment
when it takes a form like fog.
It makes the mountain vanish.
Then the smell of rain, which is the smell of the earth a plow turns up,
only condensed and refined.
Almost fifty years since thunder rolled
and the nerves woke like secret agents under the skin.
Brazil is where I wanted to live.
The border is not far from here.
Lonely and grateful would be my way to end,
On the porch, unbreeched shotgun dangling
Across one arm, just after the killing,
The murderer, Billy Winkles, made polite
Small talk with my father while we waited
For the sheriff to come. The reek of cordite
Still loomed above the sheeted corpse, his uncle
Ben, whose various dark and viscous organs
Jeweled the lawn. “Want some coffee, Von?”
Macy’ s Hickory FarmsCircuit City GNCPayless ShoeSource The Body ShopSears Eddie BauerKay Jewelers Payless ShoeSourceGNC Circuit City LensCrafters Kay JewelersCoach GymboreeH& MRadioShackGymboree
August, 1849 EN ROUTE FROM NEW YORK TO NEW ORLEANS
ABOARD THE 'GENERAL WAYNE'
Whenever my father was left with nothing to do —
waiting for someone to 'get ready',
or facing the gap between graduate seminars
and dull after-suppers in his study
grading papers or writing a review —
he played the piano.
I laid myself down as a woman
And woke as a child.
Sleep buried me up to my chin,
But my brain cut wild.
Sudden summer lay sticky as tar
Under bare white feet.
Stale, soot-spotted heapings of winter
Shrank in the street.
Black headlines, infolded like napkins,
Crashed like grenades
As war beat its way porch by porch
Up New Haven's façades.
Europe: a brown hive of noises,
Hitler inside.
On the sunny shelf by the stairs
My tadpoles died.
There, in that lost
corner of the ordnance survey.
Drive through the vanity —
two pubs and a garage — of Satley,
then right, cross the A68
past down-at-heel farms and a quarry,
