There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’ t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’ s the one who cries out who doesn’ t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’ t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’ t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
It is an afternoon toward the end of August:
Autumnal weather, cool following on,
And riding in, after the heat of summer,
Into the empty afternoon shade and light,
The shade full of light without any thickness at all;
You can see right through and right down into the depth
Of the light and shade of the afternoon; there isn’ t
Any weight of the summer pressing down.
She always writes poems. This summer
she’ s starting a novel. It’ s in trouble already.
The characters are easy — a girl
and her friend who is a girl
and the boy down the block with his first car,
an older boy, sixteen, who sometimes
these warm evenings leaves his house to go dancing
in dressy clothes though it’ s still light out.
The girl has a brother who has lots of friends,
The skin of sleep
is thin. It will not hold.
Its contents stumble out.
A nub of bone
lodged in earth
at the bottom of a pit.
A stranger staring
down from the rim.
The skin of sleep is thin.
It cannot hold.
Lost names spill out.
Children engraved
in ash. A sea of blood.
Only you, tenderness,
stillborn, beneath
the skin of sleep.
Despite that you
wrote your name
and number
on its fuselage
in magic marker
neither your quiet
hours at the kitchen
table assembling
it with glue
nor your choice of
paint and lacquer
nor your seemingly
equally perfect
choice of a seemingly
breezeless day
for the launch of
your ambition
nor the thrill
of its swift ignition
nor the heights
it streaks
nor the dancing
way you chase
beneath its
dot
Into her mother’ s bedroom to wash the ballooning body.
“My mother is jelly-hearted and she has a brain of jelly:
Sweet, quiver-soft, irrelevant. Not essential.
Only a habit would cry if she should die.
A pleasant sort of fool without the least iron....
Are you better, mother, do you think it will come today?”
The stretched yellow rag that was Jessie Mitchell’ s mother
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!
get them out of the house so they won’ t know what you’ re up to
it’ s true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about the soul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery images
and when you grow old as grow old you must
I SPOT the hills
With yellow balls in autumn.
I light the prairie cornfields
Orange and tawny gold clusters
And I am called pumpkins.
On the last of October
When dusk is fallen
Children join hands
And circle round me
Singing ghost songs
And love to the harvest moon;
I am a jack-o'-lantern
With terrible teeth
And the children know
I am fooling.
When that I was and a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.
But when I came to man’ s estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
’ Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.
