Autumn on West Lorain Street
Go to the window: the dead
leaves stream, soundlessly,
into W. Lorain Street,
frightening with no humans.
It is that time of your day
before Dr. Pierces young wife
appears below,
tapping her cane
and leading her young
daughter by the hand. Two swans
glide across the lake's black
glass. The marble clouds glide
overhead, their huge reflections
glide across the water, and their shadow
darkens your address.
View from an Institution
Thirty miles or so south of L.A.
stand two hangars, two gigantic tombs
on the plain between
the freeway and the mountains,
remote black swarms of army helicopters every hour
departing and arriving: I still
feel too sick even to think
we lived in their presence
for nearly a year. Oh yes, I remember
it. And when I can't sleep
I think of huge observatories parting soundlessly
or those two domelike structures
we passed once on the coast highway,
the nuclear reactor eerily lit and crane-manipulated all
night long.
And when I'm by myself,
this is my demented song:
Welcome to the university—
it seems you're the only one registered this fall.
You'll notice our nocturnal sprinkling system.
You'll notice the library's books are all blank on the inside.
To Her
It was still dark out still snowing
You were still here still asleep
When the leaves came out
Their shadows came out too
I can't remember the summer
I can't remember your voice
But it is still dark out still snowing
You are still here
In Memory: 1980
The Journey
9 o'clock. The bells come floating in
from town a mile or so off,
the sky is growing dim now:
not far from my fingers
your photograph is developing
a new expression somehow, more hidden, august.
Why is it disturbing to look at the blind
eyes in a picture;
and how did it happen
that I came to live in a room
with somebody who's not there?
Once, I had to get to
the part of the city
where I knew you were living then,
600 miles away—
and now I will have to relive this,
and hear my footsteps in empty side streets again
and again, the distant, electrical
rustling of late afternoon
foreshadowing rain
as I make my way down your block,
as I ring the door of your apartment.
I find out you live by the East River: I walk there
and sit down on a bench. It's getting cold. I wait
and know nothing, feel nothing, see nothing
but this black river flowing to the sea,
the pale hand on my leg.
A small ship appears with all its lights out.
Now I can remember something
like it from my childhood: a large house
gliding slowly through town on a platform
a foot off the ground
in the summer dusk, the stillness before trains. Sleep
casts its clear and healing shadow over me,
because I have never been this by myself yet
and still have a long way to go.
1973
Home
By twilight, by bat light
I enter the hill where
it blocks the still luminous sky,
a wake of crickets'
stillness opening
before my feet.
I take the grass road
which winds upward through oaks
the sun never penetrates;
the creek bed
where nothing is flowing now
but a light breeze.
In back of my shoulders
Orion will rise
by the time I reach the top—
by the time I come to the barbed wire,
where the horses stand quietly breathing in the cold air.
I am that cold, I am not there.
Walnut Creek, California
I Did Not Notice
I did not notice
it had grown dark as I sat there.
Needless to say,
speech no longer came
to your lips even soundlessly now.
when, in one slow unwilled motion,
your arm began to rise from the bed,
fingers spread, in a gesture resembling
the one you used to interrupt me,
that we might not miss
a particular passage of music.
Lower East Side Dawn
So flow on my unfathomed river
Shrouded in black music
—IVAN GOLL
I have already considered
the three philosophical problems
worthy of prolonged reflection: Why
are we here?
Is there anything to eat?
Where are our dead friends?
Now it is time
to get dressed.
Behind the wall
I lie facing, the old woman
suffering from gradual disintegration of the spine
and half asphyxiated with
the stench of her own urine
begins another day.
I can hear her now
asking in the little
laughing children from upstairs,
who like to torment her by banging the door,
so she can slit their throats.
And not far from here—not that
far—the long grave
of the river
flows on.
So flow on
my unfathomed horror
black and cold
as space.
As it gets dark tonight
and the two or three stars start to appear
between the bridges and
it can grow no colder,
when the lights come on in the tombs of the skyline,
when the drugged patient hovers a foot above his body,
only tied to this world at the wrist
by the IV needle, futile
hourglass of tears—
I will never again hold your
poor emaciated hand.
I will never again see your
listening face.
The first white crocuses
suddenly appeared
back in Ohio,
one day before
I heard you were gone.
Are you
still here? And if not,
and if not
flow on my black music, flow on
my wind in the hospital hallway—
flow on, flow on
my beginning,
my last address.
March 1980
After
Where I am going now
I don't yet know:
I have, it appears, no destination, no plan.
In fact no particular longing to go
on anymore, at the moment, the cold
weightless fingers encircling my neck
to make me recite, one more time,
the great reasons for being alive.
Permanent address: unknown.
In the first place, we are not convinced
I exist at all. And if I have
a job
it is to be that hour
when the birds who sing all night long wake
and cease one by one,
and the last stars blaze and go out.
It is to be the beam of morning in the room,
the traveler at your front door;
or, if you wake in the night,
the one who is not
at the door.
The one who can see, from far off,
what you hiddenly go through.
The hammer's shadow in the shadow of a hand.
No one,
and the father of no one.
Entry in an
Unknown Hand
{1989}
I
Untitled
Will I always be eleven,
lonely in this house,
reading books
that are too hard for me,
in the long fatherless hours.
The terrible hours of the window,
the rain-light
on the page,
awaiting the letter,
the phone call,
still your strange elderly child.
Winter: Twilight & Dawn
Buson said the winter rain
shows what is before our eyes
as though it were long ago.
I have been thinking about it for days,
and now I see.
And as I write the hills are turning green.
It does that here. The hills turn slowly
green in the interminable rain of late November,
as though time had begun
running backward
into a cold and unheard-of summer.
We are so far from you.
We are as far from you as stars, as those white
herons standing on the shore,
growing more distinct
as night comes—
What a black road this is.
Orion nailed there
upside down, and banking right
into a cloud and descending
behind Mount Konocti.
(The week that marks the beginning
of my life marks
the beginning
of his death
the hour
Rooms
Rooms I (I will not say
worked in) once heard in. Words
my mouth heard
then—be
with me. Rooms,
you open onto one
another: still house
this life, be in me
when I leave
The Crawdad
[for Dzvinia}
The crawdad absorbed in minute excavations;
trees leaning over the water, the breathing
everywhere. And watching alone
a door I have walked through
into a higher
and more affectionate world—,
my face looking back at me, under the water
moss glowing faintly on stone.
We will not sleep, we will be changed.
Joseph Come Back as the Dusk
(1950—1982)
The house is cold. It's raining,
getting dark. That's Joseph
for you: it's that time
of the day again.
We had been drinking, oddly enough.
He left.
I thought, A walk—
It's lovely to walk.
His book and glasses on the kitchen table.
Quandary
[for Keith Hollaman}
All day I slept
and woke and slept
again, the square
of winter sky lighting
the room,
which had grown
octaves
grayer.
What to do, if the words disappear as you write—
what to do
if they remain,
and you disappear.
To the Hawk
In the unshaded hill
where you kill
every day I have climbed
for a glimpse of you; below me
all the earth turned
golden
in the searing wind, the
very wind golden, its abrupt blast
at a bend in the road
as I approach the summit, shining
wind, where you live
waiting to visit
its own Christless invisible blue and quite terminal instant
on some ex-jackrabbit, plummeting
upward, or floating
suspended
past sight-nimbus: close eyes
beholding themselves in the sun.
Audience
The street deserted. Nobody,
only you and one last
dirt-colored robin,
clenching its branch
against the wind. It seems
you have arrived
late, the city unfamiliar,
the address lost.
And you made such a serious effort—
pondered the obstacles deeply,
tried to be your own critic.
Yet no one came to listen.
Maybe they came, and then left.
After you traveled so far,
just to be there.
It was a failure, that is what they will say.
Alcohol
You do look a little ill.
But we can do something about that, now.
Can't we.
The fact is you're a shocking wreck.
Do you hear me.
You aren't all alone.
And you could use some help today, packing in the
dark, boarding buses north, putting the seat back and
grinning with terror flowing over your legs through
your fingers and hair …
I was always waiting, always here.
Know anyone else who can say that?
My advice to you is think of her for what she is: one
more name cut in the scar of your tongue.
What was it you said, “To rather be harmed than
harm is not abject.”
Please.
Can we be leaving now.
We like bus trips, remember. Together
we could watch these winter fields slip past, and
never care again,
think of it.
I don't have to be anywhere.
At the End of the Untraveled Road
Under Konocti
the long eucalyptus-lined
road in the moon,
wind of November,
the now hawkless
hills
turning green—
it was always here, not yet remembered.
Whatever it is
I was seeking, with my tactless despair:
it has already happened.
And I'm on my way now,
the pages too heavy to turn,
the first morning lights coming on
over the lake. How happy I am!
There's no hope for me.
II
Vermont Cemetery
Drowsy with the rain
and late October sun, remember,
we stopped to read the names.
A mile across the valley
a little cloud of sheep
disappeared over a hill,
a little crowd of sleep—
time to take a pill
and wake up,
and drive through the night.
Once I spoke your name,
but you slept on and on.
Morning Arrives
Morning arrives
unannounced
by limousine: the tall
emaciated chairman
of sleeplessness in person
steps out on the sidewalk
and donning black glasses, ascends
the stairs to your building
guided by a German shepherd.
After a c
ouple faint knocks
at the door, he slowly opens
the book of blank pages
pointing out
with a pale manicured finger
particular clauses,
proof of your guilt.
North Country Entries
Do you still know these early leaves, translucent, shining, spreading on their branches like green flames?
And the hair-raising stars flowing over the ridge late at night.
No one home in the house by itself on the pine-hidden road,
or the 4-story barn up the road, leaning on its hill.
The two horses who've opened the gate to their field, old, wandering around on the lawn.
The sky becoming ominous.
Which is more awful, a sentient or endlessly presenceless sky?
Birthday
I make my way down the back stairs
in the dark. I know
it sounds crude to admit it,
but I like to piss in the backyard.
You can be alone for a minute
and look up at the stars,
and when you return
everyone is there.
You get drunker, and listen to records.
Everyone agrees.
The dead singers have the best voices.
At four o'clock in the morning
the dead singers have the best voices.
And I can hear them now,
as I climb the stairs
in the dark I know.
The Note
{for CD.}
Summer is summer remembered;
a light on upstairs at the condemned orphanage,
an afternoon storm coming on.
She heard a gun go off and one hair turned gray.
Somehow I will still know you.
The Talk
Aged a lot during our talk
(you were gone).
Left and wandered the streets for some hours—
melodramatic, I know—
poor, crucified by my teeth.
And yet, how we talked
for a while.
All those things we had wanted to say for so long,
yes—I sat happily nodding
my head in agreement,
but you were gone.
In the end it gets discouraging.