We crowd in, crouching

  in our summer denims and shades;

  we settle, buckle, inhale. Oh

  no, we are aloft! like that,

  with just a buzz, and Shelter Island

  flattens beneath us, between

  the forks of Long Island—the twisty

  legs of a dancing man, foreshortened,

  his head lost in a tan mist.

  The plane is too little!

  It rides the waves of air

  like a rowboat, of aluminum,

  sluing, dropping into the troughs;

  it gives out a shuddering Frug motion

  of its shoulders—one, two!

  I sit facing

  the women I am flying to Boston with,

  only one of them my wife

  but all of them grimacing,

  shutting their eyes with a sigh, resting

  forehead on fingertips as in sick prayer.

  Eyeballs roll, breasts bounce,

  nostril-wings turn pale, and hair

  comes sweatily undone;

  my wife signals

  with mirthless terrified lips that only

  I can read, “I hate this.”

  We tip! tip as a body,

  skid above some transmitting antennae,

  in Rhode Island it must be,

  stuck in the Earth like knitting needles

  into a ball of yarn: webbed

  by wire stays, their eerie points rise.

  We are high, but not so high

  as not to feel high;

  the Earth is too clear beneath us,

  under glass that must not be touched,

  each highway and house and the sites

  of our graves but not yet,

  not yet, no! Bright wind

  toys with us,

  tosses us,

  our eyes all meet together

  in one gel gaze of fear;

  we are closer than in coitus;

  the girl beside me,

  young and Jewish, murmurs

  she was only trying to get to Maine.

  And now Boston

  is its own blue street-map beneath us;

  we can feel in the lurching the pilot

  trying to pull in the city

  like a great fish

  by the throat of the runway.

  What invisible castles

  of turbulence rise

  from the rooted, safe towers!

  What ripples of ecstasy

  leap

  from the wind-whitened water!

  The sea-wall, the side-streaming asphalt:

  we are down, shouting out

  defiance to our own momentum,

  and trundle unbroken

  back through the static gates

  of life, and halt.

  Had that been us, aloft?

  Unbuckling, we trade

  simpers and caresses of wry glance

  in farewell, our terror

  still moist on our clothes.

  One by one

  we crouch toward the open and drop,

  dishevelled seatbelts left behind

  us like an afterbirth.

  Small-City People

  They look shabby and crazy but not

  in the campy big-city way of those

  who really would kill you or really do

  have a million dollars in the safe at home—

  dudes of the absolute, swells of the dark.

  Small-city people hardly expect to get

  looked at, in their parkas

  and their hunting caps and babushkas

  and Dacron suits and outmoded

  bouffants. No tourists come

  to town to stare, no Japanese

  or roving photographers.

  The great empty mills, the wide main drag

  with its boarded-up display windows,

  the clouded skies that never quite rain

  form a rock there is no out from under.

  The girls look tough, the men look tired,

  the old people dress up for a circus called off

  because of soot, and snarl

  with halfhearted fury, their hats

  on backwards. The genetic pool

  confluxes to cast up a rare beauty,

  or a boy full of brains:

  these can languish as in a desert

  or eventually flourish, for not being

  exploited too soon.

  Small cities are kind, for

  failure is everywhere, ungrudging;

  not to mention free parking

  and bowls of little pretzels in the ethnic bars.

  Small-city people know what they know,

  and what they know is what you learn

  only living in a place

  no one would choose but that chose you,

  flatteringly.

  L.A.

  Lo, at its center one can find oneself

  atop a paved and windy hill, with weeds

  taller than men on one side and on the other

  a freeway thundering a canyon’s depth below.

  New buildings in all mirror-styles of blankness

  are being assembled by darkish people while

  the old-time business blocks that Harold Lloyd

  teetered upon crouch low, in shade, turned slum.

  The lone pedestrian stares, scooped at by space.

  The palms are isolate, like psychopaths.

  Conquistadorial fevers reminisce

  in the adobe band of smog across the sky,

  its bell of blue a promise that lured too many

  to this waste of angels, of ever-widening gaps.

  Plow Cemetery

  The Plow: one of the three-mile inns that nicked

  the roads that led to Reading and eased the way.

  From this, Plow Hill, Plowville—a little herd

  of sandstone, barn and house like cow and calf,

  brown-sided—and, atop the hill, Plow Church,

  a lumpy Lutheran pride whose bellied stones

  Grandfather Hoyer as a young buck wheeled

  in a clumsy barrow up the bending planks

  that scaffolded around the rising spire.

  He never did forget how those planks bent

  beneath his weight conjoined with that of rock,

  on high; he would tell of it in the tone

  with which he recounted, to childish me,

  dental pain he had endured. The drill,

  the dentist warned him, would approach the nerve.

  “And indeed it did approach it, very close!”

  he said, with satisfaction, savoring

  the epic taste his past had in his mouth.

  What a view he must have commanded then,

  the hickory handles tugging in his palms!—

  the blue-brown hills, Reading a red-brick smudge

  eleven winding miles away. The northward view

  is spacious even from the cemetery,

  Plow Cemetery, downhill from the church.

  Here rest my maternal forebears underneath

  erect or slightly tipping slender stones,

  the earliest inscribed Hier ruhe, then

  with arcs of sentimental English set

  afloat above the still-Germanic names

  in round relief the regional soft rock

  releases to the air slow grain by grain

  until the dates that framed a brisk existence

  spent stamping amid animals and weather

  are weathered into timelessness. Still sharp,

  however, V-cut in imported granite,

  stand shadowed forth John Hoyer’s name, his wife’s,

  his daughter’s, and his son-in-law’s. All four

  mar one slab as in life they filled one house,

  my mother’s final year left blank. Alert

  and busy aboveground, she’s bought a plot

  for me—for me—in Plow Cemetery.

  Our earth here is red
, like blood mixed with flour,

  and slices easy; my cousin could dig

  a grave in a morning with pick and shovel.

  Now his son, also my cousin, mounts

  a backhoe, and the shuddering machine

  quick-piles what undertakers, for the service,

  cloak in artificial turf as tinny

  as Christmas. New mounds weep pink in the rain.

  Live moles hump up the porous, grassy ground.

  Traffic along Route 10 is quieter now

  the Interstate exists in parallel,

  forming a four-lane S in the middle view

  that wasn’t there before, this side the smudge

  red Reading makes between its blue-brown hills.

  Except for this and ever-fresher graves,

  all changes are organic here. At first,

  I did resent my mother’s heavy gift,

  her plot to bring me home; but slowly I

  have come to think, Why not? Where else? I will

  have been away for fifty years, perhaps,

  but have forever to make my absence up.

  My life in time will seal shut like a scar.

  Spring Song

  The fiddlehead ferns down by our pond

  stand like the stems of violins

  the worms are playing beneath the moss.

  Last autumn’s leaves are pierced by shoots

  that turn from sickly-pale to green.

  All growth’s a slave, and rot is boss.

  Accumulation

  Busbound out of New York

  through New Jersey,

  one sees a mountain of trash,

  a hill of inhuman dimension, with trucks

  filing up its slopes like ants

  and filing down empty, back to the city

  for more.

  Green plastic flutters from the mountain’s sides,

  and flattened tin glints through the fill

  that bulldozer treads have tamped

  in swatches like enormous cloth.

  One wonders, does it have a name,

  this hill,

  and has any top been set

  to its garbagy growing?

  Miles pass.

  A cut by the side of the eight-

  lane concrete highway

  (where spun rubber and dripped oil

  accumulate)

  has exposed a great gesture of shale—

  sediment hardened, coarse page by page,

  then broken and swirled like running water,

  then tipped and infolded by time,

  and now cut open like a pattern of wood

  when grain is splayed to make a butterfly.

  Gray aeons stand exposed in this gesture,

  this half-unfurling

  on the way to a fuller unfurling

  wherein our lives will have been of less moment

  than grains of sand tumbled back and forth

  by the solidifying tides.

  Our past

  lies at the end of this journey.

  The days bringing each their detritus,

  the years minute by minute have lifted

  us free of our home,

  that muck whose every particle—

  the sidewalk cracks, the gravel alleys—

  we hugged to our minds as matrix,

  a cozy ooze.

  What mountains we are,

  all impalpable, and

  perishable as tissue

  crumpled into a ball and tossed upon the flames!

  Lives, piled upon lives.

  The faces outside the stopped bus window

  have the doughy, stoic look of those

  who grew up where I did,

  ages ago.

  Styles of Bloom

  One sudden week (the roads still salty,

  and only garlic green) forsythia

  shouts out in butter-yellow monotone

  from hedge to hedge and yard to yard,

  a shout the ochre that precedes

  maple leaves echoes overhead.

  The dogwood’s blossoms float sideways

  like stars in the dark that teatime brings

  to the side of the tall brick house,

  but almost vanish, melting flakes,

  in morning’s bald spring sun.

  Lilac: an explosion of ego

  odorous creamily, each raceme

  dewy till noon, then overnight

  turned papery and faded—a souvenir.

  In arches weighed by fragile suds,

  the bridal wreath looks drenched.

  White as virtue is white, plain

  as truth is plain, the bushes can’t wait

  to shed their fat bundles of sequins;

  burdensome summer has come.

  Natural Question

  What rich joke does

  the comically spherical peony bud—

  like the big button on a gong striker—

  hold, that black ants

  crawl all over its tie-dyed tightness,

  as if to tickle it forth?

  Two Hoppers

  Displayed in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection

  The smaller, older Girl at a Sewing Machine

      shows her, pale profile obscured by her hair,

  at work beneath an orange wall while sky

  in pure blue pillars stands in a window bay.

      She is alone and silent. The heroine

  of Hotel Room, down to her slip, gazes

  at a letter unfolded upon her naked knees.

      Her eyes and face are in shadow. The day

  rumbles with invisible traffic outside

  this room where a wall is yellow, where

      a bureau blocks our way with brown and luggage

  stands in wait of its unpacking near

  a green armchair: sun-wearied, Thirties plush.

      We have been here before. The slanting light,

  the woman alone and held amid the planes

  of paint by some mysterious witness we’re

      invited to breathe beside. The sewing girl,

  the letter. Hopper is saying, I am Vermeer.

  Two Sonnets Whose Titles Came to Me Simultaneously

  The Dying Phobiac Takes His Fears with Him

  Visions of flame fanned out from cigarette

  or insecure connection to engulf

  all carpets, floors, and sleepers in their beds

  torment no longer the shadow in his tent

  of sterile plastic, his oblivious lungs

  laboring to burn last oxygen,

  his fear of heights dissolving as he hangs

  high above hissing nothingness.

  The dread of narrow places fails to visit

  his claustral tent, and hydrophobia,

  amid the confluence of apparatus,

  runs swirling down a drain. His nerves and veins

  release their fibrous demons; earth and air

  annul their old contract and set him free.

  No More Access to Her Underpants

  Her red dress stretched across the remembered small

  of her dear bare back, bare for me no more,

  that once so nicely bent itself in bed

  to take my thrusts and then my stunned caress,

  disclosing to my sated gaze a film

  of down, of sheen, upon the dulcet skin—

  her red dress stretched, I say, as carapace

  upon her tasty flesh, she shows a face

  of stone and turns to others at the party.

  Her ass, its solemn cleft; her breasts, their tips

  as tender in color as the milk-white bit

  above the pubic curls; her eyes like pits

  of warmth in the tousled light: all forfeit,

  and locked in antarctic ice by this bitch.

  Long Shadow

  Crossing from a chore as the day

  was packing it in, I saw my long shadow
r />
  walking before me, bearing in the tilt

  of its thin head autumnal news,

  news broadcast red from the woods to the west,

  the goldleaf woods of shedding branch and days

  drawing in like a purse being cinched,

  the wintry houses sealed and welcoming.

  Why do we love them, these last days of something

  like summer, of freedom to move in few clothes,

  though frost has flattened the morning grass?

  They tell us we shall live forever. Stretched

  like a rainbow across day’s end, my shadow

  makes a path from my feet; I am my path.

  Aerie

  By following many a color-coded corridor

  and taking an elevator up through the heart of the hospital

  amid patients with the indignant stare of parrots

  from within their cages of drugs,

  one can arrive at the barbershop

  which the great institution keeps as a sop to the less-than-mortal needs

  of its captive populace, its serried ranks of pain.

  Here, a marvel: a tiny room, high above Boston,

  lined with Polaroid photographs of happy, shorn customers,

  and the barber himself asleep in two chairs,

  snoring with the tranquillity of a mustached machine.

  Nor is that all: opposite me,

  not ten feet away from where I stood wondering what happened next,

  a seagull on the ledge outside the windows with so dazzling a view

  worried at the same problem. With his beak

  he rapped at the glass. Once. Twice. Hard.

  We two framed the problem, two sentient bookends

  with slumber’s fat volume between us.

  The gull was accustomed to being fed stale breadcrusts, and the back

  of my neck tickled unendurably, and the tops of my ears.

  One man with an oblivious mustache between us held the answer