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    Night of the Republic

    Page 4
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      spilling the goods out

      in profuse disorder at her feet.

      Like what if not like here

      at night where the improbable

      is law, and logic

      a penumbral state in which "tar heels"

      from Ohio could be "first in flight"

      above a beach named after a bird

      named after a cat.

      The Public

      The no one of it

      is everywhere.

      It is a high-rise that

      is itself a wall

      of windows all

      but one of which

      halfway up is dark,

      rising above the locked

      gate against which

      a stray page of the day's

      disasters has been

      blown flat, trembling

      against the iron

      bars as if trying

      to pass through or

      over them, like a

      fugitive the dogs

      are closing in on,

      wanting in, wanting

      for God's sake someone

      to take him in, as if

      that sole blue light

      above were safety,

      except it isn't

      safety, is it,

      it's the news

      on television, the same

      news of the same

      day—it is news

      calling out to news

      as pixel to print

      to pixel over circuits

      and atonal airways

      that someone earlier

      left on before leaving

      to make it seem

      as if someone were home.

      IV. AT THE CORNER OF COOLIDGE AND CLARENCE

      For Tom Sleigh

      Beloved

      The block is empty. I'm the boy there in the street,

      Looking downhill for you to turn the corner,

      Out of the avenue where horn blare, veils

      Of exhaust, and strangers in a hurrying sleepwalk

      Through each other tell me you'll be here soon.

      And soon is home, and home is when at last

      Your any moment now sensation brings

      Out of the day's dull glint and inching flow

      The look and bearing of a just for me

      Unearned, unjustified, imagined face

      That's all I need, so long as it's arriving,

      That's mine till your real face eff aces it.

      But not today, not now, not ever again.

      No one but me is left here outside the house

      Where you by being dead are more alive

      To me than ever, you who have no other

      Purpose now, no other way of being,

      Than to appear by never quite appearing,

      Whenever I need you, any time I want

      Clearer and still clearer in the aftermath

      Of your not yet but soon about to happen.

      Flowerpot

      I lay back on the carpeted bott om step

      Of the stairwell that like a well extended

      Darkly up to the window near the ceiling,

      Up where the china man under the wide-brimmed hat

      That hid his face pulled the flowerpot that held

      No flower across the sill no one could reach.

      There was a television on somewhere

      Above me, and the doomsday clock was ticking,

      Someone was saying. Someone was saying something

      About a blockade and a quarantine,

      Who would blink first, lose face, or push the butt on.

      A fat man banged a shoe against a desk.

      The china man however didn't care.

      Pulling his flowerpot of absent flowers,

      He was content to be a clot of darkness

      Brightening the moment late sun caught the glass—

      The hat tip first, and then the hat, the arms,

      The rickshaw of the flowerpot he pulled.

      And everywhere within the light's slow fall

      Infinities of particles were falling

      Into the flowerpot they'd never fill.

      The Family

      Three million years ago, three barefoot people—

      A father and mother and a litt le child—

      Were walking close together in moist ash.

      I saw their footprints in a photograph—

      The child walked beside his mother, the father

      A step or two ahead, and it was raining,

      Fat raindrops pocked the ash around their feet,

      The ash that later hardened under ash

      Preserved in ash the way the mother paused,

      Turned left a moment, not sure where she should go,

      Looking behind her at the home she fled?

      At the volcano exploding in the distance?

      Anonymous as Lot's wife, turning around—

      In sorrow or relief? As if a blank

      Impenetrable cloud, extending back

      In time forever opened only there

      Just then, and briefly, for only ninety feet,

      Before it closed again for good behind them,

      Whoever they were, wherever they were going,

      On a rainy day three million years ago,

      Walking together barefoot in the ash.

      Light Switch

      The bad news was the sun was mortal too.

      One day it would just burn out. The good news was

      We'd all be long gone by the time it happened.

      The good news was there wasn't any place

      Inside the house I couldn't find extinctions

      To study and by studying prepare

      Myself for what I wouldn't live to see:

      The way the angry litt le ball of fire

      From a struck match would vanish when I shook it

      Into a loosening skeleton of smoke;

      Or how the world that watched me from the TV screen

      Swallowed itself the moment I turned it off.

      The good news was the light switch in my room,

      The way I'd flick it on and off so quickly

      That when the room went black an after-room

      Lit by a spectral light would drift on the blackness,

      The bed, the desk, the streetlamp in the window,

      Drifting before me till the black seeped through.

      I watched it till it wasn't anymore

      To feel as if I understood. That was

      The good news. The bad news was it did no good.

      Sickbed

      There were two voices in the fever dream:

      Hers speaking from another room, and theirs,

      The teenyboppers', singing from the screen.

      Hers spoke a litany of grievous thanks,

      And thankful worries, who did what to whom,

      And why, and thank God it wasn't worse, poor bastard,

      Poor thing, while theirs kept singing who wears short

      Shorts, we wear short shorts, over and over

      Till I was singing too. Someone, thank God, at last,

      Was out of it, and someone else, thank God,

      Had only lost a breast, and Shirley what

      A good kid, what a beauty, what a doll,

      She let herself go when the bum walked out.

      Thank God they never had a child. Thank God

      They smelled the smoke; they found the keys, the dog.

      Thank God they all wore short shorts as they sang

      To me on litt le stages on the stage

      Where boys and girls were dancing all around them,

      Singing and dancing where it wasn't worse,

      Thank God, and, thank God, no one paused to wonder

      Who to thank for just how bad it was.

      Coffee Cup

      Consider the cup of coff ee, black as night,

      At night, all night, beside her on the table,

      Under the kitchen light where she would sit

      Staring at nothing, still as a photograph.

      Consider th
    e way at first the steam would rise,

      Like phantoms twisting up against each other

      Struggling to pull away from the black lake

      That burned them every which way into nothing.

      Consider the cup of coff ee as it cooled,

      The glassy black of it on which the light

      Above floated a tiny version of itself.

      How like an eye it might have looked to her,

      The bright pupil there, the negative of hers,

      If she had seen it, although she never did,

      Never so much as lifted up the cup,

      Never so much as touched it, staring off

      At nothing as it went from hot to cold,

      To colder while you watched her from the hallway,

      Back in the dark beyond the doorway's frame,

      Unseen, unseeable, and completely safe

      As the cold eye in the mirror of the cup.

      Cigarette Smoke

      The cigarett e leaning in the ashtray's groove,

      On the side table beside the easy chair,

      Before the never-turned-off television,

      Released a single strand of smoke straight up

      In a slender column that looked like it would go

      On stretching in a straight line to the ceiling,

      Though always at the same point—maybe a foot

      Or so above the ashtray—it would waver,

      And bend and branch, the branches branching too,

      Thinning to veins, the veins to capillaries

      Entangling and knott ing up each other

      Into a bluish opalescent cloud.

      There had to be a reason why it split

      And whorled and tangled in that slow turbulence,

      And why the cloud it turned into would rise

      Just so high and then hang there like a halo

      Under the lamplight just above her head,

      While on the screen a movie star who'd died

      Was somehow standing on a subway vent

      And laughing as she tried to hold her white

      Dress down against the wind that lifted it.

      Piano Bench

      Back in an alcove off the upstairs room,

      Against the wall, the tall piano slept

      Beside the record player that had no needle,

      Beside a crate of albums. The tall piano slept,

      And nobody would wake it. Under the lid

      Too heavy for me to lift, the keys would dream

      All day of songs in the piano bench,

      Locked up on sheets of paper, behind bars,

      The way the records locked up their songs as well

      Inside the tight cell of concentric grooves

      I'd hold a fingernail to just to see

      If I could spring them while the record spun.

      The piano slept, and nobody could wake it.

      Nobody could stop the keys under the lid

      From dreaming all the melodies they dreamed

      When no one else was home, in the empty house,

      When the radio and the TV downstairs

      Were sleeping too, the silence through the day

      Now like a round of voiceless voices all

      Around me singing songs I couldn't hear

      While the turntable turned under my finger.

      Dryer

      I sat before the porthole to watch the clothes

      Billowing and collapsing round and round

      For hours inside the perforated drum.

      As if I watched the world from outer space,

      In an accelerated sky, white clouds

      Of underwear and T-shirts massed and parted,

      Slid away to mass again, in never quite

      The same white vortices within vortices

      You couldn't see down to the bott om of.

      I watched geologies of color, deep time

      Of mountain ranges rising from a sea

      They just as quickly sank into again;

      Pangaea breaking into continents,

      Continents into islands, and the islands

      Into that reef of blue cuff , green peninsula

      Of pant leg, flashing up and driven down,

      Churning itself upon itself, in cycles

      Neither diff erent nor the same, over

      And over for five billion years until

      The bell rang as the drum stopped, and it all

      Fell past the porthole into what it was.

      Bathtub

      Aside from sleep, there were two ways to practice:

      One was to lie back in the bath and stay there

      Still as the stillest water my stillness made

      Until I couldn't feel it anymore,

      The heat of it, despite how hot it was.

      As if my body had become no body,

      Suspended in a nothing that could turn

      Back into burning only when I moved.

      The other way was picturing the pink

      Gum hard as marble someone I didn't know

      Had left on the bott om of my desk at school,

      The desk carved with initials no one knew,

      Forgotten, in that row of desks inside

      That classroom in a vast hall of classrooms

      On the third floor of the elementary school

      At three o'clock on Sunday in the thick

      Of summer when the bell rings for no reason,

      And the silence in the moment after

      Is suddenly everywhere an avalanche

      Of silence that in the moment after that

      Becomes again the silence that it is.

      Family Pictures

      At first it was the old dead on the wall

      Above the fireplace nobody lit,

      Who kept watch on the empty living room;

      Solemn or smiling, who never looked away

      From the fluff ed cushions of the reading chair,

      The glass-topped coff ee table where a stack

      Of Mona Lisa coasters lay beside

      A giant picture book nobody opened.

      All day and night, they watched the plastic-covered

      Couches that I was not to sit on ever,

      The crystal goblets I was not to touch

      Behind a locked door in the cabinet

      Where silver hid inside a felt-lined box.

      And then each year, it seemed, more dead would join them,

      Some old, some younger, some my parents' age,

      And even one or two my own, in clothes

      I could imagine wearing, seeing myself

      Up there among them keeping a close eye too

      On everybody coming after me

      Who needed to be reminded constantly

      That nothing in the living room was theirs.

      Color

      How did God move? And anyway why would he?

      Where would he go, where could he ever need

      To go if he was everywhere already?

      How could I think of it, or picture it—

      God moving "over the blank face of the void"—

      Except as color, instantaneous as color?

      And what was color really but a vital

      Absence living where it was and wasn't,

      Insolid soul of visibility,

      The unseen of seeing all at once and too

      Continuously for the eye to see

      The trackless path it traces to the eye:

      The finch's yellow now-there-not-there flashing

      Among the leaves, and the leaves too, their green

      Degrees, gradations, shifting moods, a green

      Or yellow fire unfixed and alive

      And flaring out indiff erent to the sight

      It woos and enters, indiff erent to the bird,

      The leaf, the very air it all at once

      Continuously dwells in and deserts,

      Awake and wakeless, light-borne, born of light?

      Faucet

      The faucet dripped one slow drip from its lip,

      A slight convexity at first of metal


      Distilled from metal to a silvery blur,

      Opaque as mercury, that thickened to

      A see-through curvature, a mound that swelled

      As streams I couldn't see poured in and filled it,

      Stretched by its own weight to a rounder shape

     


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