Earlier Poems (7 page)

For a long time I was attracted to small things. Spiders particularly: the spiders who lived in my house

were simply not to be found although I had no wish to harm them. It's true I might have frightened some

in my sleep, I might have stepped on one without seeing it, friendly. I did see one once

but it ran off
very quickly, like someone
who notices a large
crowd coming forward to stone him.

Something about the thin shadow of a nail in the wall; the trees' shadows moving on the bed

while a being casts
its two inches of vision
from a remote corner of the ceiling
into the room.

Once, at dawn, when I was sick I went through the house with my drug-lit eyes, I stopped by the window

and sat down at the piano in order to type something about your childhood: a sip from an empty cup,

a doll cemetery.
A spider appeared, creeping
toward my fingers
like a little furry hand.

I lie down,
I press the place behind my ear
where the vein is.
Today

I observe the absence of my brother sentience: the spider who lived in my room

with its minute blood.

As the bourbon's level descended in the bottle his voice would grow lower and more indistinct, like a candle flame under a glass

Sunlight in the basement room

So he reads to me disappearing When he is gone

I go over
and secretly taste his drink

Mushroom cloud of sunset

Like a kneeling communicant offering his candle

the white scorpion has lifted its lance and touched the right spot.

Ambush has instructed it in invisible agility.

Swollen currents will ravage this naive scene.

Narcissus, gold buttons undoing themselves in the field's heart.

The king of the alders is dying.

Voicing
in itself
was the allowing to appear
of that which the voicing one saw
because it once looked into him …

Green desuetude of railroad
tracks, wild
apples, aging limestone
angel's face and
changing
cloud

Green lightning past the last trees, they are pure gaze

I am wandering through the corridors of a deserted
elementary school

I am flying
over a dark sea

Jolted awake
I meet my own eyes
in the window staring back
from badly executed features

(Like a scar the face speaks for itself)

But irises, iris—a meteor, chrysalis, a woman's

name, a flower's unconscious light

Green eyes the altering light alters

Unlit
until the sun

Damned to language, we come from the sun

From stars and weather flowing in opposite directions Stars slowly silently flowing and setting, beginningless

I woke up at four in the afternoon. Rain woke me. Dark. Mail—a voice said, You'll have mail,

scaring and gladdening my heart. Enough anyway to get it to leave the bed, attempt to make coffee, dress and begin limping downstairs. All

the boxes were empty. Of course. A voice said, He just hasn't come yet. But I knew: it is four in the afternoon—the others have already taken

the mail indoors. Hours ago. If this my box is empty now then it was always empty.

Rain. Darker

now. By the time I had walked, more or less, back up the stairs, the treacherous voice had nothing more to say.

Hope. They call it hope—

that obscene cruelty, it never lets up for a minute.

But not anymore—never again. If the telephone rings just don't answer it, said the voice. Very adaptable, the obsequious voice. If the mail does come put it in the garbage with its fellow trash;

or set it on fire in that big metal can in the alley, you know, your publisher. Dark. Odd. It was light when I finally slept, I hear myself saying so out loud. I suppose I am insane again,

on top of everything else. He talks to himself now, they'll say. Who. By the time you get back to your room you won't even exist. A bit mean now. And you will sit down in the chair with your back to the window, it observes.

After a little I know for a fact you will open your notebook and write all this down,

why I don't know. No doubt you will even show it to somebody, at some point: they'll talk to you, offer advice,

admit admiration for this phrase,

dislike for that. But they don't understand. You don't

care now—how can you. No, I don't care what they say,

what they do to me now. I used to. Terribly. And then you didn't.

And then I didn't.

Think of them setting out from their leather beached eggs to follow the moon to the sea and into the sea.

The ones who make it. Think of them

hatching, so strange—like some misshapen

birds who haven't yet grown wings.

But no, they are far in advance of that, returning

to the sea that vast tear we came crawling out of. Led there by what we call the moon: Eve, or cesarean child.

The moon which left the great scar called the sea when it tore itself from the earth's side and flung itself out into space,

lover or child, to escape—but not far enough.

I was mad when I got home
and smelled the alcohol.
I thought he was sleeping, though
the color of the skin, the
breathing and the drool were strange.

Impossible to touch him or get near.
He started, as I guess
I sort of barked at him through tears.
All I asked for was an ambulance
I'm sure, though don't remember phoning. Cops

searched for drugs in my empty film canisters.
Nobody really saw
me.
The “Final Wish,” as he put it
in the almost illegible note that was pinned
to the wall like a crucifix over the head

of the bed of some lonely serious child:
something having to do with cremation
and scattering ashes on the Ohio. And do you know
I laughed. I actually laughed—what does he think this is—
left by myself in the house. It was a scream.

There is a heaven.

These sunflowers—those dark, wind-threshed oaks— …

Heaven's all around you,

though getting there is hard:

it is death, heaven.

But they are only words.

Unemployed, you take a walk.
At an empty intersection
you stop to look both ways as you were taught.
An old delusion coming over you.
The wind blows through the leaves.

The light is winter light.
You've already felt it
before you can open your eyes,
and now it's too late
to prepare yourself
for this gray originless
sorrow that's filling the room. It's not winter. The light
is. The light is
winter light,
and you're alone.
At last you get up:
and suddenly notice you're holding
your body without the heart
to curse its lonely life, it's suffering
from cold and from the winter
light that fills the room
like fear. And all at once you hug it tight,
the way you might hug
somebody you hate,
if he came to you in tears.

I happened to be in a strange city
drinking.
One of those dives where you enter
and just pull the covers over your head;
where the gentleman sitting five inches away
has lately returned from his mission in space
in the one coeducational toilet stall
existing on the premises,
and will continue to sit there forever, nodding
and peering down into his shot glass
like a man struggling to keep awake over a bombsight;
and the aged transsexual
whore who never got around
to the final operation in his youth
seems to be pursing her lips
in your direction, demurely, down bar.
One of those places with windows
the color of your glasses—
a fact which in no way compels you
to remove them. Nobody cares
about your eyes: they'll go on serving you
as long as you can talk,
as long as you can still pronounce
your drink by name and are tactful
enough not to fall off your stool
or call anyone's attention
to the fetus in the vodka bottle
to the left of the vast Bartender's
telepathic, “Another?”
It was then you walked past,
outside the window, unhindered
by the event's complete impossibility.
This kind of thing's happened to everyone.
No? Never mind, then:
I will describe it.
At whichever ground zero
you've found yourself waiting, waiting,
there is one and only one person
whose sudden dumbfounding appearance
could, if not exactly save you,
afford you some respite
from the slightly green outpatient
you're supposed to be keeping an eye on there
behind the beverages in the mirror, the one
whose job is watching you …
Then she walks by.
Though the instant this transpires
you know it's already too late,
she's vanished right back again
into one of those infinite places
where you are not. And it's pointless
to run to the door, tear it open and scream
her name into the freezing wind:
it doesn't stand a chance
of being heard above
the amused roar of the sky's numberless sports fans.
No—you need a strategy.
Needless to say, this calls for a drink or ten.
Now this individual, her special haunts:
there is still a very slight chance
they are all in your mind, that grim city
that's changed somewhat since you've been here
attending your dark little party.
And God only knows what's happened to the one
outside the door, a place
you have never really been to
and one where you never intended
to do a lot of sightseeing.
You are a peaceful man.
But what can you do—time's passing faster,
and your loneliness is ruined anyway.
You down your shot of fear and hit the street.

Undressing, after working all night, the last thing I see is the room

in the house next door.

At four in the morning, a dark room

filled with that flickering blue

so familiar, almost maternal if you were born

in my generation: this light

so intimate, reassuring you that the world is still there

filled with friendly and beautiful people, people who would like to give you helpful products—

adoring families— funny Nazis …

Undressing, the last thing I will see.

And now it's gone
I'll wait
for time to come
and tuck me in

a little white blank
envelope,

and mail me
on this pretty wind-lights

midnight:
I am safe

here in the darkness,
the gloating

vampire
of myself,

waiting for the sudden light
to open, its enormous hand

to sort me from the others
and raise me up

and finding me spotless, devoid of destination or origin,

transport me
to the painless fire
of permanent, oblivious
invisibility.

To tell you the truth I'd have thought it had gone out of use long ago, there is something so nineteenth century about it,

with its absurd reverse Puritanism.

Can withdrawal from reality or interpersonal commitment be gauged by uneasiness at being summoned to a small closed room to discuss ambiguously sexual material with a total stranger?

Alone in the presence of the grave examiner, it soon becomes clear that, short of strangling yourself, you are going to have to find a way of suppressing the snickers of a ten-year-old sex fiend, and feign curiosity about the whole process to mask your indignation at being placed in this situation.

Sure, you see lots of pretty butterflies with the faces of ancient Egyptian queens, and so forth—you see other things, too.

Flying stingray vaginas all over the place, along with a few of their male counterparts transparently camouflaged as who knows what pillars and swords out of the old brains unconscious.

You keep finding yourself thinking, God damn it, don't tell me that isn't a pussy!

But after long silence come out with, “Oh, this must be Christ trying to prevent a large crowd from stoning a woman to death.”

The thing to do is keep a straight face, which is hard. After all, you're
supposed to
be crazy

(and are probably proving it).

Maybe a nudge and a chuckle or two wouldn't hurt your case. Yes,

it's some little card game you've gotten yourself into this time, when your only chance is to lose. Fold, and they have got you by the balls—

just like the ones you neglected to identify.

Movement of the hour hand, dilating
of the rose …
Once I could write those.
What am I? A skull

biting its fingernails, a no one
with nowhere to be
consulting his watch,
a country music station left on quietly

all night, the motel door left open
to Wheeling's rainy main street, the river
and wind
and every whiskey-breathed

ghost in the family—
left open,
old man,
for you.

It is the little girl guiding the minotaur with her free hand— that devourer

and all the terror he's accustomed to effortlessly emanating, his ability to paralyze merely by becoming present,

entranced somehow, and transformed into a bewildered and who knows, grateful gentleness …

and with the other hand lifting her lamp.

A big velvet-brown moth
with an eye on each wing, asleep
right in the middle of
the sunflower, its antennae stirring
lightly now and then. We are alone
on this dim barely window-lit street—
stirring, maybe because of the light
breeze or a semiattentiveness
to my presence in its trance,
an inability to decide
if something's really there,
combined with a total indifference
since it has found at last its golden
temple of the myriad gold chambers
and its god. The flower
has virtually tripled in size
since bursting into bloom a week ago, in fact
it's grown so huge it is in danger
of breaking its own neck.
(It reminds me of someone we know.)
I spend about an hour
rummaging around the back porch
for twine and poles and so forth—it's beginning
to get blue out now—and finally
manage to prop up the head
so it will be comfortable.
At this point I am beginning
to appreciate the cool, still night
and it is almost gone. Now the moth
all this time has not budged