The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly

  like an old indian, for just a little

  rain over this desert.

  Telling the Hour

  if you want to know

  the time you must look

  at a clock, or stare continuously

  into the moon,

  until it grows round like a clock.

  under the moon growing round

  a hunter strolls; he must be saying,

  “i have killed an animal.” however,

  as the evening draws

  close in for a better look, it is

  nine p.m. and the hunter’s arms

  are loaded with air, his belly

  swells with the solitude. he is saying,

  “i think i have killed an animal,

  a barely visible bird,

  at eight p.m., or the dim

  figure of a woman bent over

  her sewing, in a distant house,

  who glanced occasionally

  at the big moon. and i shot

  a telephone pole as it strained

  into the sky, wanting desperately the moon.”

  as he continues among the trees,

  the ticking of the city becomes

  larger, moving the birds and insects

  from the air, rattling

  the moon so that it opens

  and tolls down upon the hunter.

  his hands try to caress the sudden,

  awkward hush, and he wonders more often,

  “have i killed an animal?”

  Retirement

  i would like to be just an old man with my gin,

  retiring even from these leaves into

  my big, gradual silence beyond the wood

  and it will be good,

  wife, because i have pointed to you,

  and you have become real. within

  this darker stillness my eyes grow too wide.

  it must be that seeing you in the trees

  becoming softer than i ever dreamed

  has made it all seem

  a multitude of nonsense, all the seas,

  the planets, all i wrote. i lied,

  i swear to you i lied, becoming old and so

  very drunk, when i did not lie to you.

  The Year’s First Snow

  emptying into

  the freezing, quiet alleys

  there is the voice of a single

  ferreting drunk. if he is singing

  it is lovely, and if he talks on

  strangely, he, at least,

  understands. by the river, noiselessly,

  some lovers have frozen

  in the winter, and they will be taken

  away, with the floods of spring.

  in an upper window

  of the county jail, the sleepless man

  who was framed knows

  that all along, all along,

  this snow that rests

  more heavily over the reach of branches

  has been descending.

  On a Busy Street a Man Walks Behind a Woman

  there is the chance that you will step

  ahead of me into the traffic

  alive, and that there will be

  an accident. always i am walking,

  i am seeing your heels and thinking

  of something else, but always i am

  asking you to remember: if you step carefully

  into the screeching

  of tires and become bloody, i must not

  be the one extending himself awkwardly

  into the confusion to say, my dear

  mrs. hutchins, do

  forgive the way we have arranged

  your body, dead like that

  on the pavement, but surely you

  understand? it must

  not be me who is the one

  fisherman to fish you up drowned among

  all that seaweed. it cannot

  be me looking in all

  directions for help, knowing all

  along that it is just you

  and me, finally, and that i am

  alone to hear the sound of the breakfast

  bell opening as it did

  into the corners of the barnyard, and your

  mother’s voice calling back

  and forth among the animals. am i

  positioned here alone to welcome

  you from such a very distant

  place, and must i now tell you what every

  second in your life, what all the

  breathing and the continual inching

  forward of the body through each and every

  day, when i am so absolutely

  young, when i am so

  unprepared, must i

  tell you what it has all

  at last come to? you are

  dead, mrs. hutchins, amid this

  mob craning to see your own blood,

  which has somehow

  gotten away from you in all

  the excitement—i am so truly sorry,

  of course it isn’t fair, you weren’t

  prepared, but don’t you see it works

  this way for all of us, for instance that

  i am here just isn’t fair, either, because

  of my unpreparedness, because of my lack

  of anything to say except you’re dead,

  you’re dead, i didn’t

  do it, i didn’t do it.

  Checking the Traps

  morning,

  the door opening, changing

  into a doorway. half

  the night i stayed awake and smoked

  and watched the mousetraps.

  the mice were there, nudging

  into cups and plates, one fell

  into the toaster, but escaped.

  they waited until i gave up and slept to die.

  for these mice

  the night will be long, i heard

  the iron snapping

  in my sleep and dreamed my wife was

  closing the door.

  two mice are dead, for my wife.

  mice make her legs

  go watery, as they do sometimes after her climax.

  one mouse’s head is barely

  in the trap, one eye probing

  toward the ceiling where i could tell him

  there is nothing.

  the other mouse is flung willingly under the iron

  bar. i wonder, were they

  married? was she pregnant? they are

  going out together,

  in the garbage this morning. it was

  morning when we were married.

  it has been morning

  for a long time. that mouse, with his

  eye. did he hear the iron snapping,

  and dream it was his

  wife with her stretching, laden tits

  closing the door?

  The Man Among the Seals

  for Ed Schroeder

  at night here in the park it is different:

  the man by the seal pool stalks

  through an acute emptiness, encircled

  by the city. is he

  taking off his clothes?

  by day i have seen

  the seals, enclosed, blundering

  among the spattered rocks. they climb

  like prisoners of a ferris wheel, above

  their pool and above

  the peanuts floating through

  air, high over the sudden, too large

  teeth of the spectators. but at night

  without their land-locked captors moving

  gracefully by, the seals

  seem less inept, even

  on the hostile rocks.

  before dawn they rise

  and dive, becoming masters

  in the water. the figure in

  underwear on the left is not

  a seal. before me and

  an audience of trees he has

  joined the seals. drunk, perhaps,

  and, a staggerer on land,

&n
bsp; perhaps he hopes to move cleanly,

  like a seal, through water. or,

  sober, perhaps he dives to assume

  the clumsiness now shed by the seals: then

  he will tumble drunk onto

  the ground, and the seals, plunging

  landward, will find

  no awkwardness among the rocks, will

  no longer wonder deep

  within themselves at a dry hardness

  which is not ice. each day

  he will return, wetness

  forever staining through his pants,

  to watch his seals as they rise

  above the rocks to pluck the floating

  bits of food, as they slide through

  the air over the trees, the

  ferris wheel grown

  stationary with shame, the tiny

  unfamiliar bodies jerking

  under balloons through the lighted park.

  Crossing Over the Ice

  i should have brought

  an axe to this white place and seen

  for sure if, far beneath,

  a city is falling irretrievably away.

  as it is i can only guess

  that this spot, warmer

  than the rest, is where the tallest

  steeple was cut loose to unmoor the town.

  i wonder: could i nudge my vision

  over onto the spaces below?

  it has thus far been

  easy to locate myself, somewhere between hands

  warming in pockets and the hands that waken,

  empty, out of the shadows

  of buildings. i know

  what’s going on; the stars

  evade the oceans, thank goodness,

  and just here there are

  the trees fumbling with roots under the earth.

  to chip through to a town

  that will not come back might

  put me anywhere, i might become

  that someone on the farther bank, who is standing

  still within the movement of trees, as if

  one step would lose him gradually

  into the stars. he may be

  the one who has leaned

  his head into the air underneath and seen

  another dawn glowing like a deep fish,

  seen, as here above,

  the citizens in the morning

  growing tinier, weightless

  and lost from their families,

  preparing for beautiful

  supermarkets, for an endlessness

  of downward flight under an expanse of snow.

  Upon Waking

  at the far edge of earth, night

  is going away. another

  poem begins. slumped over

  the typewriter i must get this

  exactly, i want to make it

  clear this morning that your

  face, as it opens

  from its shadow, is more

  perfect than yesterday; and

  that the light, as it

  hesitates over the approach

  of your smile, has given this

  aching bed more than warmth,

  more than poems; someway

  a generous rose, or a very

  delicate arrangement of sounds,

  has come to peace in this new room.

  A Child Is Born in the Midwest

  as i look on your struggle i remember

  i have seen arriving from movie theaters

  the forms of people

  disgraced, slanting heavily out of the cold,

  their coats, the muscles under the skin

  fraying, given up to the air.

  and later, near morning,

  i have seen their figures compelled

  from the panic and emptiness of the town asleep

  into all-night diners, which flounder, exhausted.

  outside the towns the wide plains

  are delirious

  with frozen animals,

  and the sky is rising with moons and moons.

  these faces lifted over the street

  are not moons. even so, they are

  lost somewhere between worlds and home,

  in a town that can’t quite hold onto the earth.

  i listen to your tiny,

  unbelieving anguish,

  and i wonder if i have known

  these faces in another time;

  and i think that you have come here, drifting

  through universes of cold

  because no longer, no longer

  could the womb contain your loneliness.

  To Enter Again

  for the astronauts on the occasion

  of their re-entry

  for the first few instants in

  this jungled machine we were all

  at once human. then

  we became confused monsters,

  and then we were, as before,

  sardines waiting to land hung

  over like sardines.

  for the first few instants

  we had been dragged

  outside of everything. but

  the cracks began to show, each

  of us was too much the

  other, and we were once

  again inside our terribly good

  balloon, revolving and knowing

  far too much.

  the first day we slept

  little, we examined and counted

  the stars. we thought we should. and now

  we sleep most of the time, dreaming

  ourselves away from this haze

  of tubes and gauges. we have learned: we

  have been brought here to

  wait, and to learn

  to live packed

  in forever, waiting to be pried

  out. to live here truly

  washed by the sea, turning end

  over end, waiting to halt,

  and breathe, but never

  halting. waiting to slide at

  last toward the freshly lighted

  earth, there to wait and dive again far

  down into tubes and fantasies.

  the moon lies

  there beyond us, cringing toward the neat

  package of stars, not

  waiting. below, in dreams, the earth scatters

  in all directions way from

  itself, and yearns

  toward us, toward our distant perfection.

  Drunk in the Depot

  for Bob Zimmerman

  drunk here in the railway depot

  i can recall your train budging

  forward in that other depot, that first

  squash of steam making

  your window real and solid. that is

  why i am jumping down onto

  the tracks, or because i am a gazelle.

  i left later, by bus, and now

  the city is gray and vacant, so i

  am bounding out of the depot along

  the tracks though i think

  i am here to see someone

  off. the train moved and you were

  windowed in and everything was

  final. or i might have left

  by plane from the airport. no,

  it was bus. i am supposed to

  wave goodbye to a girl. that

  was the last time i

  saw you, so i will keep

  moving down the tracks because

  i am some kind of zebra, because

  these railway tracks are mashing

  like ridiculous snowshoes into

  the distance. she thinks i am

  cute, in a grubby, nonsexual

  way. it was summer then; now

  it is winter, with all

  the roads stationed outside

  the houses and the snow coming

  to get them. it should have been

  night, and it is.

  The Cabinet Member

  …wake up in the morning:

  a critical edi
torial, or a Herb Block cartoon.

  RICHARD NIXON

  wake up

  in the morning: a critical

  editorial, or a herb block

  cartoon. sometimes, if my wife

  would just leave me alone things

  would be all right. you should see

  this cartoon,

  or the poor sogginess

  of this bacon, you don’t believe this

  country’s going down

  and not up. the sewers

  demand attention. the potomac

  is swallowing up all the love,

  and society is

  killing itself, for love. if i

  had a dog there would be

  more love in it for me. if

  i had something in my hands.

  In a Rented Room

  this is a good dream, even if the falling is

  no less real, and even if my feet will crumble

  on the lurking ground. my throat itches, and i am

  awake in this room which is no less vacant for

  all my presence and there are no aspirin. here

  is the sun with its tired surprise, the morning. there