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

  and what these moments are

  when all that was impending

  begins, when the whole

  downtown, arrested like a lung

  between intake and expulsion, erupts

  into genuineness—as if many

  bells have been struck and what

  the world is, is that I can touch

  their ringing. It is unbreakable.

  It is the examiner before whom the emptiness

  inside me perjures itself.

  It is the examiner who is a fist.

  For Jane

  At left, with a net, in a light

  like whiskey, you skim flotsam

  from the water.

  I can’t tell you how vivid

  this undertaking is—

  you are as unsettling

  and as naked as that yellow

  flower admiring you as it rests

  along the surface of the pool.

  I am just going to listen

  to the sound of liquid,

  the sound of oleanders.

  If ever

  I was about to speak I

  forget. I can see

  that the single flower goes

  aloft on the water of

  the pool because it is something

  that everything has addressed

  to my darling, while I stand

  here like some ashes

  that used to be a clown,

  looking out quietly

  from my face to watch the failure

  of these words to be those things.

  Sway

  Since I find you will no longer love,

  from bar to bar in terror I shall move

  past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth

  and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,

  their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,

  suffer the light from the wrestling arena

  to fall all over them. And what they say

  blends in the tarantellasmic sway

  of all of us between the two of these:

  harmony and divergence,

  their sad story of harmony and divergence,

  the story that begins

  I did not know who she was

  and ends I did not know who she was.

  The Circle

  for Jane, after a dream

  I passed a helicopter

  crashed in the street today,

  where stunned and suddenly grief-torn

  passers-by tried to explain

  over and over, a hundred ways, what

  had happened. Some cried over the pilot,

  others stole money from his wallet—

  I heard the one responsible for his death

  claiming the pilot didn’t need it any more,

  and whether he spoke of the pilot’s

  money or his life wasn’t clear.

  The scene had a subaqueous timbre

  that I recognize now as a light

  that shines in the dreams I have when I sleep

  on my back and wake up half-drowned.

  However I tried to circumnavigate

  this circus of fire and mourning—

  the machine burst ajar like a bug,

  the corpse a lunch pail

  left open and silly music coming out—

  I couldn’t seem to find a way

  that didn’t lead straight to the heart of the trouble

  and involve me forever in their grief.

  The Woman in the Moon

  for Glenna K, 1922–1979

  Who wouldn’t have been afraid

  of your face?—watching me

  from another world through your cheap

  frame on the dresser, while your daughter

  wept and I made hysterical

  love to her, trying

  to banish your ghost that wandered

  with its smashed head through this life

  I never invited you to.

  Who wouldn’t have wanted to drive you out of her,

  seeing how your memory, grown

  sharp as flint in grief, carved

  her face a little more every

  day into yours?

  I thought you were watching me out of her eyes,

  I thought every night I heard the telephone

  clatter to the floor again,

  and your daughter

  scream so she couldn’t stop.

  And for months afterward

  you came to me like

  nobody—secondhand,

  through a daughter’s hindsight,

  her unblinking, horrified love,

  as night

  after night the room filled

  with the dark and the air

  burned with your murdered presence,

  until I couldn’t possibly make love to the dark gold

  woman, vessel of your self, the torn

  strings of your motherhood dripping

  from her like an ocean

  where she drowned but couldn’t die.

  Who would drag us before some tribe of elders

  to be scorned,

  or have anything but pity

  on us, that we turned to other lovers

  and lost each other?

  Glenna,

  forgive me: tonight, in a moment

  of learning that is as clear

  and absolute as ice, and hurts

  as much to be inside of,

  I see how much like him

  I’ve become, the man

  who beat you until you died with something

  they never found—

  walking in an anger of love

  and hatred through these streets

  just as the geraniums

  of light around the baseball

  diamonds are coming on—

  oh, God, inside me I carry a black

  night you climb through like

  the moon in which the Asians

  see a woman:

  higher

  and smaller, Glenna, farther

  and farther away,

  and nothing

  will ever bring you back.

  And nothing will ever get rid of you.

  The Flames

  In 1972 I crossed Kansas on a bus

  with a dog apparently pursued to skinniness

  painted on its side, an emblem

  not entirely inappropriate, considering

  those of us availing ourselves

  of its services—tossed

  like rattles in a baby’s hand,

  sleeping the sleep of the ashamed

  and the niggardly, crying out

  or keeping our counsel as we raced over the land,

  flailing at dreams

  or lying still. And I awoke to see

  the prairie, seized by the cold and the early hour,

  continually falling away beside us, and a fire

  burning furiously in the dark: a house

  posted about by tiny figures—

  firemen; and a family

  who might have been calling out to God

  just then for a witness.

  But more than witness, I remember now

  something I could only have imagined

  that night: the sound of the reins breaking

  the bones in the farmer’s hands

  as the horses reared and flew back into the flames

  he wanted to take them away from.

  My thoughts are like that,

  turning and going back where nothing wants them,

  where the door opens and a road

  of light falls through it

  from behind you and pain

  starts to whisper with your voice;

  where you stand inside your own absence,

  your eyes still smoky from dreaming,

  the ruthless iron press

  of love and failure making

  a speechless church out of your dark

  and invisible face.

  FOUR
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  Minutes

  You and I—we agitate

  to say things, to dress every gash

  with a street address or a relative.

  We are found in the places of transport at an hour

  when only the criminals are expected to depart.

  We are blind and we don’t know that our mouths

  are moving as we place a hand to stay

  the janitor’s mop—I’ll tell you the story

  of my life, you’ll make a million—

  blind and we don’t know that our parents are dead

  as we enter the photo-booths.

  In there is the quiet like the kernel of a word:

  in there everything we were going to say

  is taken from us and we are given

  four images of ourselves. What are we going

  to do with these pictures? They hold

  no fascination for the abandoned,

  but only for us, who have

  relinquished them to the undertow

  that held us, too, but let us go,

  so that the hospitals opened like great vaults

  for us and we stepped from bed to bed

  on the faces of the diseased, the beloved,

  moving like light over a necklace

  of excruciations—I’ll tell you

  the story of my life,

  you’ll make a million…

  this is what it means to be human,

  to witness the heart of a moment like a photograph,

  the present standing up through itself relentlessly like a fountain,

  the clock showering the intersection with minutes

  even as it gathers them to its face

  in the so often alluded

  to Kingdom of Heaven—

  to watch one of those minutes open

  like a locket and brandish a picture

  of everyone we ever loved who drowned,

  while the unendurable generosity of everything

  sells everything out. Would you like

  to dance? Then here, dance with the terror

  that now is forever,

  my feet are stumps. The band is just

  outbreaking now with one that goes

  all the evidence / the naughty evidence / persuades

  the lovers endearing by the ponds /

  the truants growing older in the sleazy arcades /

  there’s no banishing / of anything /

  only con- / quering within /

  make it enough / make it enough / or eat

  suffering without end

  The Coming of Age

  Outside the spring

  afternoon

  is occurring, my love,

  just as our voices

  are going home from us

  to the plains, and the shapes

  of ourselves, as we impose

  them on this one, prepare

  to blend with other

  afternoons, possibly in

  this very room

  as tiny dusts uplifted

  in the bands of sunlight,

  or in other still chambers.

  I don’t want you to be afraid

  as we stand here losing

  our lives, unable to speak,

  soon to enter the dream

  of once having touched

  this portion, that smoothness

  of flesh now buried dead

  and having heard the lovely

  tones ascending on a voice

  merely speaking; there is

  the chance there will be

  the singing of the voiceless,

  unraveling into the unenclosed

  emptiness a silence

  drawn taut so

  slowly its

  high music encounters

  us before

  it begins, and we are dancing.

  You

  You were as blind to me

  as your footprints last Friday,

  but I saw you dancing

  with that girl who wasn’t me—

  because I don’t dance

  and laugh in that terrible

  style with every stranger.

  But you are no stranger.

  But you were strange when you were dancing,

  and the room turned all yellow

  and the glass I was holding

  spilled burgundy wine.

  I got out by the side door

  and I leaned on a box,

  and I saw you at the end

  of every street,

  and in the Flame Inn

  I watched the men shooting

  eight-ball and mule-kicking

  the jukebox till it worked.

  On the wall they had many,

  many wooden plaques

  bearing humorous sayings

  that I will never say

  to you even if you begged me,

  not even if you came out

  of a prison, and begged me.

  Poem

  There was something I can’t bring myself

  to mention in the way the light

  seemed trapped by the clouds,

  the way the road dropped

  from pavement to dirt and the land from pine

  to scrub—

  the red-headed vultures on dead animals,

  the hatred of the waitress breaking

  a cup and kicking the shards across the café

  that looked out on the mountain and on the white smear

  of the copper mine that sustained these people.

  I claim there was something you wouldn’t

  have wanted to speak of either,

  a sense of some violent treasure

  like uranium waiting to be romanced

  out of the land…

  They sat under white umbrellas,

  two or three together, elbows on card tables

  at the dirt roads leading to the mines,

  rising each at his turn to walk

  around a while with a sign

  announcing they were on strike,

  their crystalline and indelible

  faces in the hundred-degree

  heat like the faces of slaughtered hogs,

  and God forgive me,

  I pulled to the side of the road and wrote this poem.

  Radio

  He bears a rakish feather

  through the streets in a hat

  on his head and has had

  several drinks, and is crying.

  He totters at the change

  of traffic lights.

  I do not know if he has just

  been orphaned, or what.

  From a room above the stores

  the insistent test-tone

  of the Emergency Broadcasting

  System stares at him, and he

  cannot stop hearing it.

  The perfectly desolate afternoon’s

  single utterance is this sound

  like an ambulance across

  the mild lake whose driver

  swims while the siren cries.

  It is putting the man

  in the feathered hat at

  the intersection under arrest.

  I do not know if he has just

  been informed, or what.

  I know it is my radio, but

  I am only beginning to understand

  whose orphanhood, whose tears.

  Tomorrow

  I take

  you by your arm of stained glass

  while the moon turns warm and wet

  as the kitchen window of a distant

  restaurant in the beautiful

  moments after closing,

  and we walk up and down—

  oh! don’t we promenade?

  Every radio in the town

  plays the same station through doorways

  thrown wide to the elements and we are

  buoyed and relayed how tenderly along

  this underground railroad of tuneful oldies.

&nbs
p; It is a nighttime filled

  with animals, bubbles, tiny lights.

  Now we do not fear treachery,

  now we are not asking ourselves how

  will we know if the insect lies,

  how will we know if the fire lies.

  The ache of our loving just

  throttles us speechless inside the midnight,

  though the radios are all crying out

  that the weather tomorrow in

  the mountains will be unprecedented.

  The Confession of

  St. Jim-Ralph

  OUR PATRON OF FALLING SHORT,

  WHO BECAME A PRAYER

  I used to sneak into the movies without paying.

  I watched the stories but I failed to see the dark.

  I went to college and drank everything they gave me,

  and I never paid for any of that water

  on which I drifted as if by grace until

  after the drownings, when in the diamond light

  of seven-something A.M., as the spring was tearing

  me up in Cartajena, only praying

  on my knees before the magnifying ark

  of the Seventh St. Hotel could possibly save me,

  until falling on my face before the daughter

  of money while the world poured from the till

  brought the moment’s length against the moment’s height,

  and paying was what I was earning and eating and wearing.

  This to the best of my recollection

  my uncle said in 1956,

  moving against my father like a bear

  on fire as the evening of his visit

  killed the rum. He’d come from Alaska

  or some place like that, the Antarctic, maybe,

  and he left in a hot rage, screaming by the door

  that nothing would save me from my awful father,

  just as he, my uncle, had been saved

  by nothing. Thirteen weeks from then, he died.

  “This family’s full of the dead,” my father told me.

  I was eight. I used to make excuses

  to join him in the washroom as he bathed

  in the mornings, soaping himself carefully

  so as not to splash the automatic pistol