I had let myself in;
I'd sat down in your chair.
I could just see you reading late
in the soft lamplight—
looking at a page,
listening to its voice:
yellow light shed in circles, in stillness,
all about your hair.
Ill Lit
Leaves stir overhead;
I write what I'm given to write.
The extension cord to the black house.
Word from Home
Then I went out among the dead
a pint of whiskey in my head
and lay on a mound
covered with snow,
and closing my eyes to the blowing snow
looked into his face.
Smiling and wincing,
reading his shoes,
holding out a ruined hand;
wishing for a way to disappear—
all the poor formalities of the mad.
As if I had met him years later,
an accident—something is wrong with his face.
Thinner, perhaps, the eyes cruel
with pain, my own
reflection in a knife.
The look of love gives the face beauty.
We look at him
as if he were a stain.
We look at him.
Entry in an Unknown Hand
And still nothing happens. I am not arrested.
By some inexplicable oversight
nobody jeers when I walk down the street.
I have been allowed to go on living in this room. I am not asked to explain my presence anywhere.
What posthypnotic suggestions were made; and are any left unexecuted?
Why am I so distressed at the thought of taking certain jobs?
They are absolutely shameless at the bank— you'd think my name meant nothing to them. Nonchalantly they hand me the sum I've requested,
but I know them. It's like this everywhere—
they think they are going to surprise me: I, who do nothing but wait.
Once I answered the phone, and the caller hung up— very clever.
They think that they can scare me.
I am always scared.
And how much courage it requires to get up in the morning and dress yourself. Nobody congratulates you!
At no point in the day may I fall to my knees and refuse to go on, it's not done.
I go on
dodging cars that jump the curb to crush my hip,
accompanied by abrupt bursts of black-and-white laughter and applause,
past a million unlighted windows, peered out at by the retired and their aged attack dogs—
toward my place,
the one at the end of the counter,
the scalpel on the napkin.
Duration
On the sill
the blown-out candle
burning
in the past.
Frozen clouds
passing over
the border
north. Listen
to the end,
listen with me.
III
No Longer or Not Yet
From a phrase by Hermann Broch
In the gray temples of business
In the famine of the ant-bewitched seed
Wolves attacking people in the half-deserted suburbs
And kings dead with their hands crossed on their genitals a thousand years from now
In sunlight shining on your vacant place at the table
In the sneer and the kick in the face world without end
In my crouched shadow loping beside me
In the imbecilic prose of my thoughts
In the voice of the one fingerprinted blindfolded and shot
World of dead parents unconsciously aped without end
In the hand above the rainbow horses of the Peche-Merle cave walls
We interrupt this program to bring you the announcement that enemy ICBMs will begin to arrive in ten minutes
In the strangeness which corridors and stairwells have for children
Death of the weekday
In their parties alone in a sip from an empty cup
In the little grass toad beating in your palm
The spider spinning in the dust the barren worm
The death of tears
In the gashed vivid colors of gas station restrooms at three in the morning
(And we thank Thee for destroying the destroyers of the world)
In the unaccompanied boy on the Greyhound the old woman with a balloon
World no longer or not yet
In the moon which goes dragging the ocean and turning its chalky steppes away
Unsummonable world
In the white stars in the black sky shining in the past
The black words in the white page uttered long ago
Death of tears
In the storm of wordless voices the hand abruptly shocked into dictation
(Envelop me clothe me in blackness book closed)
While you quietly turn between dreams like a page
The morning light standing in the room like someone who has returned after long absence younger
World no longer or not yet
IV
Look into Its Eyes
The leaved wind,
the leaved wind in the mirror
and windows, perceived by the one-week-old.
Forever, we weren't here-
Biography
The light was getting bad;
he wished the rain would stop.
He'd try again tomorrow—
anyway, he had to walk.
Brain-sick. Wet pavement. Green neon.
The light was getting awful—
had to walk the ghost.
He'd try again, he wished.
He'd try again.
The Day
My mother picks me up at school. Strange. I leave the others playing, walk to where she's parked— and why are we driving so slowly?
You have to turn right here, she whispers. When we get there the whole house is silent. Why's that? Does this mean I can watch The Three Stooges}
Evidently. She's driving away now, and he's not in his basement typing: he isn't there at all, I've checked. This must be my lucky day.
Night Writing
The sound of someone crying in the next apartment.
In an unfamiliar city, where I find myself once more,
unprepared for this specific situation
or any situation whatsoever, now—
frozen in the chair,
my body one big ear.
A big ear crawling up a wall.
In the room where I quietly rave and gesticulate— and no one must hear me!— alone until sleep:
my life a bombed site turning green again.
The sound of someone crying
There
{for Thomas Frank}
Let it start to rain, the streets are empty now. Over the roof hear the leaves coldly conversing in whispers; a page turns in the book left open on the table. The streets are empty, now it can begin.
Like you
I wasn't present
at the burial. This morning
I have walked out for the first time and wander here among the blind flock of names standing still in the grass—
(the one on your stone
will remain
listed in telephone books
for a long time, I guess, light
from a disappeared star …)
—just to locate the place,
to come closer, without knowing where you are
or if you know I am there.
Poem
[for Frank Bidart}
Per each dweller
one grass blade, one leaf
one apartment
one shadow
one rat
By itself, d
efending a lost position,
the poem
writing the poet—
Anvil of solitude
So diminish the city's population
by one, and go
add your tear to the sea
Heart that wonderfully lasted until I harned how to write what it so hnged to say
Nothing of the kind.
A Day Comes
A day comes
when it has always been winter,
will always be winter.
Witnesses said the crowd fled
through the park, chased by policemen on horseback
past the Tomb of the Unknown
Celebrity as the guard
was being changed,
but they are gone.
The witnesses are gone.
A day comes
when the planet stops turning.
It is February here,
late afternoon.
It will always be late afternoon,
neither dark nor light out.
But we cannot be bothered,
because we are asleep;
the door is locked.
Now and then somebody comes and knocks
and goes away again
back down the hall,
back down the stairs.
But we cannot be bothered,
because we are asleep
and listening,
listening.
Do you hear the wind?
We have always been asleep,
will always be asleep—
turning over
like pages on fire.
Where were we?
We were listening. No, I don't hear it either.
The wind, the marching
boots, the burning
names.
Three Discarded Fragments
From the notebooks of Rilke
Who can say, when I go to a window, that someone near death doesn't turn his eyes in my direction and stare and, dying, feed on me. That in this very building the forsaken face isn't lifted, that needs me now
*
That smile, for a long time I couldn't describe it— the velvet depression left by a jewel…
*
A child's soul like a leaf light still shines through
The Street
On it lives one bird
who commences singing, for some reason best
known to itself, at precisely 4 a.m.
Each day I listen for it in the night.
I too have a song to say alone,
but can't begin. On it, surrounded by blocks of black warehouses,
is located this room. I say this room, but no one knows
how many rooms I have. So many rooms how will I light
This isn't working out, is it
Here's what really occurred, in my own words
I murdered my father—and if he comes back, I'll kill him again—but first I persuaded him to abandon my mother. Now you know. It was me all along. Then I got bored, held a knife to her throat, and forced her to marry the sadist who tortured my brother for ten years.
I feel bad about it, but what can I do.
I mean we're talking about a genetic predisposition here.
I am taking my medication. And things have gotten a lot better.
And if I ever finish writing this, I'm going to tear that bird's head off and eat it.
My Work
The way I work is strange.
For one thing, you would never call it work.
Although I'm good at that.
Work is not the term.
It destroys me, I adore it—
I'll look at it someday and noticing its utility still fails to surpass that of a lyre locked up in a glass case tuned an octave above human hearing,
I'll take an ax to it.
I'll stop speaking to it.
I'll sit alone in some shithole and inject it until the jewels roll out of my eyes.
I don't know what all I'll do,
snow of
unlit afternoon …
mute and agreed-to descent
Coordinates
Waking up at an improbable hour
in the small gray-lit Boston apartment
where I can never bring myself
to believe I actually live;
going off in the winter morning to teach
certain there's been a mistake,
knowing as I enter the classroom
the students will look in my face
with unanimous amusement
and lack of recognition,
that before I can utter a word
someone in a suit will appear
and ask me to come with him.
*
This won't hurt at all.
It does?
Well we haven't been taking good care of them
have we. Difficulty explaining to some
the concept of financial terror—
specifically, that if you're afraid to buy food
if you can help it you are not going to spend
$1,500 on a tooth;
difficulty of explaining anything
with your mouth clamped open.
Under anesthesia
I walk along a sunflower field I know of
*
It was still day
when I boarded the train.
The tunnel
then the Charles,
and soft blue lights of traffic in the rain.
*
Everyone in his right mind is asleep. A black car glides past, in its wake (the
speed blossoming coldly
through fingers and spine) a prolonged Coltrane scream
and a shiver of beauty open the night
Waiting Up
I can remember you
mentioning once
how you'd wait until your mother was preoccupied
or gone, to dress
the doll all in white
for its little funeral—
how all the while it stared into your eyes
with its cold unbeckonable eyes,
and seemed to smile.
Why this
I couldn't say. And then again,
why not? It's easy
to remember anything.
I'll walk now, maybe.
The clouds' stature slumberously building
and blooming on the horizon,
identityless, huge
gesticulations from the trees,
a bird's voice
hidden back in the leaves,
the remote barely audible wake
from the roar of an airliner's engines
fill the dim morning.
Maybe your presence
will startle me now;
maybe I'll rise from
this chair.
Maybe the room will be empty.
The room will be empty, and you will not come.
Guests
Smell of winter pine trees in the air;
around me night, the wind, Marie, the stars.
Last night I dreamed I stood here,
this very spot—why I've come—
lights on in a house across the valley
where there is no house.
Stood here as I lay beside you
and looked so fondly at those lights
they might have been our home, and why not?
Everyone you see
lives somewhere.
How is this done?
Winter Entries
Love no one, work, and don't let the pack know you're wounded.
Stupid, disappointed strategies.
Hazel wind of dusk, I have lived so much.
Friendless eeriness of the new street—
The poem does not come, but its place is kept set.
Going North in Winter
The sound of pines in the wind.
And to think you're the only person on earth
isn't hard, at the end
&
nbsp; of the long journey nowhere.
Yet in the end I have come to
love this room and be the one
looking out on snowfields, blank
scores of wire fence in the deepening
snow, the wind through them a passage
of remembered music, bare
unbeckoning branches
with never a ghost
of a deciduous rustling,
the stilled river
with the sheet over its face—
going north in winter.
And it's all right
to glance out the window:
the fear will grow less
or more intense, but
it will always be there. Unseen
it's a palpable force,
isn't it. Like electricity
which can be employed,
as has been pointed out,
to kill you in a chair
or light your room.
But I'm through with that now.
I reach over and switch on the dark.
It's all right to pronounce a few words
when you're by yourself, and feel a little joy.
The Night World &
the Word Night
{1993}
Illegibility
Hawk in golden space
Thick-leaved, darkly
beckoning trees
bigger than the house
Sunlit apparitional
peaks of a thunderhead
fading
to the east
Page
from conception to death mask
The stranger who approaches on the street and says, You don't remember me
Occurrence
I've gotten everyone who hurt me.
In a blackout a man loads his shotgun again.
Outside the genuine star-spangled twilight
of North Dakota
unfurls, twinkling and barking.
Then he becomes a ghost.
Big windblown rags of bitching crows
resettle
in the trees out back.
Pawtucket Postcards
Neon sign missing a letter
Firearm with an obliterated serial number
There's always death
But getting there—
you can't just say the word