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

  are the cars and streets moving in the usual

  fashion. the room wants to be rid of me. it must

  fall open and communicate with other dim,

  stifled rooms when i have slaughtered my body in

  the sheets and fumbled streetward to sooth the itch. what

  do you learn, room? what have you told, why are the stains

  and the accusing glasses pointing so when i

  return? there was the girl some time ago. she would

  want to know where the guilt comes from, that hums over

  the bed and descends, like an uncaring thumb, to

  blot me out. she would help me, when the universe

  has fooled me again, and the joke has gone too far,

  when the itch, climbing, deep, remains after bottle

  after bottle, and i inch toward death and i

  must poke my body into a thousand vacant

  darknesses before i strike the correct sleep, and dream.

  Driving Toward Winter

  miraculously,

  there is the sun, coming back.

  beneath it the cows wander, more

  exhausted, baffled by the sparseness

  of the winter grass. were i

  a cow staggering over vanishing grass,

  i would feel like the man

  in the story, the one where

  he leaps into his sports car to find

  that everything has become an ocean, saying

  certainly i did not expect

  the sea. yesterday the numerous

  actual cars spilled over

  solid hills. kissing

  my wife i never wished for the sea. in

  an agony of exactness, bent

  into the tiny measuring dials i did not

  yearn for these impossible waves,

  or for the stopped movement

  of trees. the wrecked,

  liquid countryside unfolds

  beyond me, and i am the last bubble of air,

  searching for air.

  licking bare dirt, the nearest cow

  raises his head to me, not understanding.

  i would tell him about the sun, how it

  rolls nearer, hauling the spring.

  but he peers at me as if through mist, as i

  would peer through the fogged, cracking windows

  of my fast car at the half-

  distinguished movements of an unusual fish.

  A Poem about Baseballs

  for years the scenes bustled

  through him as he dreamed he was

  alive. then he felt real, and slammed

  awake in the wet sheets screaming

  too fast, everything moves

  too fast, and the edges of things

  are gone. four blocks away

  a baseball was a dot against

  the sky, and he thought, my

  glove is too big, i will

  drop the ball and it will be

  a home run. the snow falls

  too fast from the clouds,

  and night is dropped and

  snatched back like a huge

  joke. is that the ball, or is

  it just a bird, and the ball is

  somewhere else, and i will

  miss it? and the edges are gone, my

  hands melt into the walls, my

  hands do not end where the wall

  begins. should i move

  forward, or back, or will the ball

  come right to me? i know i will

  miss, because i always miss when it

  takes so long, the wall has no

  surface, no edge, the wall

  fades into the air and the air is

  my hand, and i am the wall. my

  arm is the syringe and thus i

  become the nurse, i am you,

  nurse. if he gets

  around the bases before the

  ball comes down, is it a home

  run, even if i catch it? if we could

  slow down, and stop, we

  would be one fused mass careening

  at too great a speed through

  the emptiness. if i catch

  the ball, our side will

  be up, and i will have to bat,

  and i might strike out.

  The Woman at the Slot Machine

  if the children were not locked

  into georgia, and texas, if

  the husband were not packed away

  cold, never to be fished

  from air, the plunging down

  of the handle might be less desperate

  but alone now before

  this last enemy, she juggles

  for any victory. the jerked

  handle offers a possible coming home. each

  symbol come to rest clicks into

  her eyes, because

  it is there to be had, it

  was there once, the old miracle come back

  alive, when the bell

  sang like a beautiful daughter and it was

  harry, upstairs with his broken

  leg, ringing for her, yelling, martha come hear

  the radio, it’s jack benny and he’s playing

  the violin.

  The Mourning in the Hallway

  my neighbor’s voice occurs within the hall, sadly:

  come back inside the house awhile before

  you go away. his daughter does not hear

  his oldest voice swear

  that he will balance forward from that door

  forever toward the spaces she

  has left. and even i have felt this thing,

  this leaning into the ocean like wild,

  like aching beasts, my wife was not alone

  when, deep in her bone

  and tumbling eternally, our child

  continued drowning. now, hearing

  this man’s face change against the tide his girl has gone

  away with, i leap to hold my own son.

  Out There Where the Morning

  out there where the morning

  is, the automobiles and citizens

  are clattering along just

  like pieces of the universe. from

  my place by the window i can

  examine an airplane as it crawls

  from speck to speck on the glass.

  i know that it is with

  the same arrogant mechanical

  lust that the pipes of the kitchen sink

  are dissolving. i am

  ready to believe that everything else is,

  too. for instance this

  room i am sure is

  atom by atom taking leave. but here in

  the disappearing room i am not too

  heavily alone. printed on the

  label of this cookie can is

  the one assurance:

  each cookie contains a joke.

  and i know that this

  is somehow good. i can

  call my mother and say, mother

  it is not what is true, but what

  is good that now matters. mother,

  mother, even here in this tumbling

  jar of selves,

  each cookie contains a joke,

  each of us offers himself up whole

  to some nearly invisible,

  tasteless affirmation.

  such sensation as we derive is derived

  only from the joke. mother,

  i am this morning electric. i am spinning

  into the staccato punch line,

  the end and the crumbling. i will

  hear the laughter as it breaks up

  and dissolves farther out in space,

  as it grinds and echoes against the metal.

  In Praise of Distances

  as the winter slips up under

  the palms of my hands, it is getting

  harder to be a poet: i am woe

  itself. my car fades

  without pain from the parking lot. i
t

  crumples to one knee, like

  an elephant, startled

  into lifelessness by the hungry bullets of winter.

  the graveyard wavers

  distantly. the car will no longer stand

  between me and the debts nuzzling

  at my door. i will no longer go rattling

  among the miles as if

  distance were a safe thing, as if i slammed

  the ancient car door

  in the face of all the noises.

  my wife tells me, why don’t you get

  a job? but once i had a dog,

  whose vital organs became

  confused beneath his skin, until he died;

  i will not leave this animal kingdom

  until he comes back from the trees.

  i will keep my nostrils

  opened for the lonely jangle

  of his collar landing over the buildings

  or for some sign that he will be returning.

  my hands will not

  be filled with advertisements; so

  they will be filled with the difficulty

  that is winter. if he is lost,

  farmers hoping for spring will discover

  his voice among the corn stalks,

  seeking a safe place to lie

  quietly down. as i wait for him

  by the window,

  i have the suspicion that the meaning of things

  will never be sorted out.

  A Consequence of Gravity

  my wife’s voice yelling from

  the window holds the distant echoes

  of a thousand mothers-in-law, all the women,

  all the weight, increasing, of this planet.

  i will not listen. here in the yard i am watching

  an old story: a child has dived

  into the earth attempting to fly, and injured

  farther than the skin he gives

  his long syllable toward the moon.

  there is no one to tell him he will settle

  for years, in a gradual re-enactment

  of this flight, against the earth,

  as he cries over his miserable attachment

  to the ground and mourns

  that first unlucky generation

  of airplanes, the lost inventions still burrowing

  somewhere desperately away from the air,

  making caves, making

  no sense at all crushed into the sides of mountains.

  i grow, like an imprisoned pilot,

  heavier, near death, my face

  makes mistakes in the last oxygen of the cockpit.

  through the dusk the moon has rolled

  again out into her private ocean. i cannot

  help it, like a blank virgin she has retired

  beyond the air, and here, bereft, surrounded

  by grotesque, inedible women and the painful

  breaking of another spring i admit it,

  i will never touch her, hold her.

  For the Death of the Old Woman

  one after another along

  the perspective of the street, the people

  remain upright. my hands

  are blacking out, from the cold,

  dry body of this old woman.

  she has died,

  while she was sitting, concerned

  somewhere in her house, growing

  more beautiful, something has left

  the big rocker, has moved

  through the leaves brushing her window,

  beyond the trees and first

  national bank to a point

  overlooking the collapse of cities.

  the rivers are backing up

  with whales

  and wreckage, with

  the crowds of foam becoming huge and

  hanging to the factories that lean

  over the wettening banks.

  the figures

  of graves diminish toward

  the horizon:

  on the street,

  these faces are not chipped with grief,

  as they leap after busses.

  in the window of a store front a man

  who did not know her adjusts

  the limbs of a mannequin, and

  the ascending voice

  of a child wants to know, do the rivers freeze

  by themselves, can you walk on them.

  The Man Who Was Killed

  whatever the wind says that divides

  the surface of the river

  into tiny, upward gestures of surprise

  is not known, not here

  by me on the bank. i have wondered

  this same thing about the wintry faces of pedestrians,

  i have wondered how much of this

  is crazy and how much is real. he must have been

  hearing the wind, to be so deeply

  startled when the bullet rushed

  from the assassin’s control. he remembers always

  how it was, to breathe. his eye

  drifts through the streets in the city,

  through the rain, dreaming after his life.

  April 20, 1969

  when i think that i am watching

  the evening lengthen toward the end of this country,

  i know there can be no sea

  at the end of the pier. even

  the sea has gone to hide deep

  in the spaces below the sea, and the few

  children who have stayed this long in the yard

  are disappearing toward their dinners.

  INNER WEATHER

  An Evening with the Evening

  The night is very tall

  coming down the street. The light

  of the streetlights coming on

  in sequence just in front of the dark,

  this light is a prison

  broken loose from itself.

  The city has an expression

  on its face like that of someone hoping

  he will not be noticed,

  it is like that of the man now watching

  the processional flaring of the lamps from the corner,

  beneath the bank sign.

  He notices the city, he notices

  the reflection of his own face in the city,

  he wonders what the city must have done

  to the night,

  that it should avert itself like a debtor

  while welcoming the night

  with such display, such grim pomp, so courteous

  a removal, before

  the arrival of darkness,

  of any competing darknesses that may have

  managed to precede it there.

  Suddenly it is the total blackness

  with the numerous small lights of the face

  of the city shining through it;

  then it is the end,

  which is only himself, going

  home to his wife and children,

  turning and trying to walk away from the darkness

  that precedes him, darkness of which he is the center.

  Winter

  On the streets, which have gutters,

  in the shadows of doorways, at

  busstops, at this moment

  and yesterday, before the bars, their breath

  excluded in great

  clouds, turning from the wind

  to spit

  and laugh horribly

  at the life standing up inside them

  with such pain as

  loneliness permits, and the weather,

  turning to each other

  with jokes and lies, with the baggage

  and garbage of their humanness as if one

  they held it toward would

  take it and thank them

  is us, all of us, all dragged by the legs upstream

  like poor stooges sunk to drowning

  for a living.

  On Clinton St. the bars explode

  with the salt smell
of us like the sea, and the tide

  of rock and roll music, live

  humans floating on it

  out over the crimes of the night. How

  unlike such outwardness the clenching back

  of a man into himself is,

  several of us are our own fists

  There! emphasizing on the tabletop.

  Prayer: That We May Be Given This Day the Usual Business

  Some days the automobiles are smiling,

  other days they

  are morose;

  and so it is with humans, always

  going around crying, until one

  day one of them is all smiles,

  introducing, buying drinks.

  Had you never met one,

  these nevertheless would be known

  to you readily by their descriptions,

  these humans, heads, legs

  and arms inexplicable, graduating

  immaculately like the small

  blossoms into this faith,

  that soon, soon the moon

  shall descend to touch

  us each deeply,

  here.

  But there is a shadow

  to touch each roof

  at six-thirty in

  this country, and it comes to them