it flows, the deep river of your hair.
But all of this will come together
the minute I see you again at the station,
my notebook and pens packed away,
your face smiling as I cup it in my hands,
or frowning later when we are home
and you are berating me in the kitchen
waving the pages in my face
demanding to know the name of this latest little whore.
Riverside, California
I would have to say that the crown
resting on the head of my first acid trip
was the moment I went down on one knee
backstage at the Top Hat Lounge
and proposed marriage to all three of the Ikettes.
We had no idea, Tom and I,
that the Ike and Tina Turner Revue would be playing there
when we stepped out for some lights and drinks,
but sometimes the tortoise gets lucky, they say,
and comes across an opening in the chain-link fence.
With many people sending many drinks
to our maniacally happy table,
how could I not feel that I had slipped
out of the enclosure of the past
where I used to inch in circles through the grass
when I wasn’t sunning myself on a favorite rock?
So the night flew on with its mighty colors
until there emerged a posture
of valor and chivalric intensity
as the music, especially “Nutbush City Limits,”
became more beautiful and fair, like a bower in a poem.
And even better was the sound
I heard when it became clear to those girls
why I had appeared backstage during a break.
Yes, the best was the laughter
of those three backup singers
in their shiny wigs and short red sequin dresses—
their sweet mocking laughter
at my courteous sincerity, my ardor,
after I had breached their dressing room
and descended to one knee before them all.
FOUR
Cemetery Ride
My new copper-colored bicycle
is looking pretty fine under a blue sky
as I pedal along one of the sandy paths
in the Palm Cemetery here in Florida,
wheeling past the headstones of the Lyons,
the Campbells, the Dunlaps, and the Davenports,
Arthur and Ethel who outlived him by 11 years
I slow down even more to notice,
but not so much as to fall sideways on the ground.
And here’s a guy named Happy Grant
next to his wife Jean in their endless bed.
Annie Sue Simms is right there and sounds
a lot more fun than Theodosia S. Hawley.
And good afternoon, Emily Polasek
and to you too, George and Jane Cooper,
facing each other in profile, two sides of a coin.
I wish I could take you all for a ride
in my wire basket on this glorious April day,
not a thing as simple as your name, Bill Smith,
even trickier than Clarence Augustus Coddington.
Then how about just you, Enid Parker?
Would you like to gather up your voluminous skirts
and ride sidesaddle on the crossbar
and tell me what happened between 1863 and 1931?
I’ll even let you ring the silver bell.
But if you’re not ready, I can always ask
Mary Brennan to rise from her long sleep
beneath the swaying gray beards of Spanish moss
and ride with me along these halls of the dead
so I can listen to her strange laughter
as some crows flap in the blue overhead
and the spokes of my wheels catch the dazzling sun.
Thank-You Notes
Under the vigilant eye of my mother
I had to demonstrate my best penmanship
by thanking Uncle Gerry for the toy soldiers—
little red members of the Coldstream Guards—
and thanking Aunt Helen for the pistol and holster,
but now I am writing other notes
alone at a small cherry desk
with a breeze coming in an open window,
thanking everyone I happened to see
on my long walk to the post office today
and anyone who ever gave me directions
or placed a hand on my shoulder,
or cut my hair or fixed my car.
And while I am at it,
thanks to everyone who happened to die
on the same day that I was born.
Thank you for stepping aside to make room for me,
for giving up your seat,
getting out of the way, to be blunt.
I waited until almost midnight
on that day in March before I appeared,
all slimy and squinting, in order to leave time
for enough of the living
to drive off a bridge or collapse in a hallway
so that I could enter without causing a stir.
So I am writing now to thank everyone
who drifted off that day
like smoke from a row of blown-out candles—
for giving up your only flame.
One day, I will follow your example
and step politely out of the path
of an oncoming infant, but not right now
with the subtropical sun warming this page
and the wind stirring the fronds of the palmettos,
and me about to begin another note
on my very best stationery
to the ones who are making room today
for the daily host of babies,
descending like bees with their wings and stingers,
ready to get busy with all their earthly joys and tasks.
Lakeside
As optical illusions go
it was one of the more spectacular,
a cluster of bright stars
appearing to move along the night sky
as if on a secret mission
while, of course, it was the low clouds
that were doing the moving,
scattered over my head by a wind from the east.
And as hard as I looked
I could not get the stars to budge again.
It was like the curious figure
of the duck/rabbit—
why, even paradoxical Wittgenstein
could not find his way back to the rabbit
once he had beheld the bill of the duck.
But which was which?
Were the stars the rabbit
and the blown clouds the duck?
or the other way around?
You’re being ridiculous,
I said to myself,
on the walk back to the house,
but then the correct answer struck me
not like a bolt of lightning,
but more like a heavy bolt of cloth.
Revision
When I finally pulled onto the shoulder
of a long country road
after driving a few hundred miles
without stopping or even blinking,
I sat there long enough to count
twenty-four cows in a wide, sloping pasture.
Nothing about the scene asked to be changed,
things being just what they were,
and there was even a green hill
looming solidly in the background.
Still, I felt the urge
to find a pencil and edit one of them out,
that swaybacked one standing
in the shade in a far corner of the field.
I was too young then to see
that she was staring into the great mystery
just
as intently as her sisters,
her gorgeous, brown and white, philosophic sisters.
Night and Day
Funny how that works,
the breathing all day then it continuing
into the night
when I am absent from the company of the wakeful
oblivious even to the bedroom windows
and the ghost dance of the curtains
but still breathing
and turning in bed
pulling the covers tight around me
maybe caught in the irons of a dream,
like that one about the birds, but
more like an evil society of birds
a kind of neighborhood watch group
throwing a block party
with the usual balloons and folding chairs
and tables covered with covered dishes
and many children running
in circles or jagged lines
only everyone with bird heads, bigger than life,
even the children with bird heads
and yes, you guessed it
the birds up in the trees
have little human faces
and they are all talking amongst themselves
about the cloudy weather
and the bushes laden with berries
as if none of it were the least bit funny.
My Hero
Just as the hare is zipping across the finish line,
the tortoise has stopped once again
by the roadside,
this time to stick out his neck
and nibble a bit of sweet grass,
unlike the previous time
when he was distracted
by a bee humming in the heart of a wildflower.
The Meatball Department
There is no such thing as a meatball department
as far as anyone knows.
No helpful clerk has ever answered the question
where do you keep your meatballs?
by pointing to the back of the store
and saying you’ll find them over there in the meatball
department.
We don’t have to narrow it down
to Swedish and Italian meatballs to know
that meatballs are already too specific
to have an entire department named after them
unlike Produce, Appliances, or Ladies’ Shoes.
It’s like when you get angry at me
for reading in bed with the light on
when you are trying to fall asleep,
I cannot find a department for that.
Like meatballs, it’s too small a thing to have its own
department
unlike Rudeness and Selfishness which are located
down various aisles of the store known as Marriage.
I should just turn off the light
but instead I have stopped in that vast store
and I will now climb into my cart,
clasp my knees against my chest and wait
for the manager or some other person of authority
to push me down to the police station
or just out to the parking lot,
otherwise known as the department of lost husbands,
or sometimes, as now, the department of dark and pouring rain.
Silhouette
There is a kind of sweet pointlessness
that can visit at any time,
say this afternoon when I find myself
rustling around in the woods behind the house
and making with my right hand
the head of a duck,
the kind that would cast a silhouetted
profile on a white screen
in a darkened room with a single source of light
if one were in the mood to entertain.
But I am outdoors today and this duck
has a wrist for a neck
and fingers for a beak that never stops flapping,
jabbering about some duck topic,
unless I rotate my arm and let him face me.
Then he stops his quacking
and listens to what I have to say,
even cocking his head like a dog
that listens all day to his master speaking
in English or Turkish or Albanian.
There was talk of war this morning
on the radio, and I imagined the treads of tanks
churning over the young trees again
and planes hacking the air to pieces,
but there is nothing I can do about that
except to continue my walk in the woods
conversing with my hand—
so benign an activity that if everyone
did this perhaps there would be no wars,
I might say in a speech
of America.
And now it is getting to be evening,
a shift from blue to violet
behind the bare staves of trees.
It is also my birthday,
but there is nothing I can do about that either—
cannot control the hands of time
like this hand in the shape of this duck
who peers out of my sleeve
with its beak of fingers, its eye of air.
No—I am doing no harm,
nor am I doing much good.
Would any bridge span a river?
would a college of nurses have ever been founded?
would one stone ever be placed on top of another
if people were concerned with nothing
but the shadows cast by nonexistent ducks?
So the sky darkens as always,
and now I am tripping over the fallen branches
as I head back downhill
toward the one burning light in the house
while the duck continues its agitated talk,
in my pocket now,
excited about his fugitive existence,
awed by his sudden and strange life
as each of us should be, one and all.
But never mind that, I think,
as I grab the young trees with my other hand,
braking my way down,
one boot in front of the other,
ready for my birthday dinner,
my birthday sleep, and my crazy birthday dreams.
Bread and Butter
You could hear the ocean from my room
in the guesthouse where I often stayed,
that constant, distant, washy rumbling under the world.
I would sometimes slide back the glass door
and stand on the deck in a thin robe
just to be under the stars again or under the clouds
and to hear more clearly the dogs
on the property barking—the brave mother and her pups,
all white, bearded, and low to the ground.
And now something tells me I should make
more out of all that, moving down
and inward where a poem is meant to go.
But this time I want to leave it be,
the sea, the stars, the dogs, and the clouds—
just written down, folded in fours, and handed to my host.
Roses
In those weeks of midsummer
when the roses in gardens begin to give up,
the big red, white, and pink ones—
the inner, enfolded petals growing cankerous,
the ones at the edges turning brown
or fallen already, down on their girlish backs
in the rough beds of turned-over soil,
then how terrible the expressions on their faces,
a kind of was it all really worth it? look,
to die here slowly in front of everyone
in the garden of a bed-and-breakfast
in a provincial English market town,
to expire by degrees of corruption
in plain sight of all the neighbors passing by,
the thin mail carrier, the stocky butcher
(thank God the children pay no attention),
the swiveling faces in the windows of the buses,
and now this stranger staring over the wall,
his hair disheveled, a scarf loose around his neck,
writing in a notebook, writing about us no doubt,
about how terrible we look under the punishing sun.
After I Heard You Were Gone
I sat for a while on a bench in the park.
It was raining lightly but this was not a movie
even though a couple hurried by,
the girl holding his jacket over her head,
and the chess players were gathering up their pieces
and fanning out into the streets.
No, this was something different.
I could have sworn the large oak trees
had just appeared there overnight.
And that pigeon looked as if
it had once been a playing card
that a magician had transformed with the flick of a scarf.