My Noiseless Entourage: Poems (2 page)

I'll jump over a park fence
Right where the lilacs are blooming
And the trees are feverish with new leaves.
The swing I saw in a painting once
Is surely here somewhere?

And so is the one in a long white dress,
With eyes blindfolded
Who gropes her way down a winding path
Among her masked companions
Wearing black capes and carrying daggers.

This is all a dream, fellows,
I'll say after they empty my pockets.
And so are you, my love,
Carrying a Chinese lantern
And running off with my wallet
In the descending darkness.

Lovers hold hands in never-opened novels.
The page with a recipe for cucumber soup is missing.
A dead man writes of his happy childhood on a farm,
Of riding in a balloon over Lake Erie.

A sudden draft shuts his book in my hand,
While a philosopher asks how is it possible
To maintain the theologically orthodox doctrine
Of eternal punishment of the damned?

Let's see. There may be sand among the pages
Of a travel guide to Egypt or even a dead flea
That once bit the ass of the mysterious Abigail
Who scribbled her name teasingly with an eye pencil.

after a Walker Evans photograph from the thirties

Hard times brought them out early
On this dreary stretch of road
Carrying a suitcase and a bedroll
With a frying pan tied to it,
The kind you use over a campfire
When a moss-covered log is your pillow.

He's hopeful and she's ashamed
To be asking a stranger to take them
Away from here in a cloud of flying
Gravel and dust, past leafless trees
With their snarled and pointy little twigs.
A man and a woman catching a ride
To where water tastes like cherry wine.

She'll work as a maid or a waitress,
He'll pump gas or rob banks.
They'll buy a car as big as a hearse
To make their fast getaway,
Not forgetting to stop for you, mister,
If you are down on your luck yourself.

Let those who so desire continue to dream
Of heavenly mansions
With their vast chambers and balconies
Awash in the light of a golden afternoon.

I'll take this January wind, so mean
It permits no other thought
Than the one that acknowledges its presence
Among these weedy tombstones
And these trees out of a vampire flick
Bending to the breaking point

And then straightening up—intact,
With the wind busy elsewhere,
Nudging dead leaves to take a few quick hops
Right up to the branch they fell from.

Sea waves destined to repeat themselves,
Forever stammering excuses
To the gulls lining up your shores.
Or you, gusting wind, troubling these pines
With your wild oratory.

Even you, coming darkness,
And you tumbleweeds rolling over,
Through a ghost town
With the bug that lives one day
On a torn window screen
And a sky full of white clouds.

One torn photograph after another
Whose pieces do not fit—
And why should they, grim whispers,
With all your seasonings of folly?
Every time I went to the sea and sky
To seek advice, this is what I got.

Another grim-lipped day coming our way
Like a gray soldier
From the Civil War monument
Footloose on a narrow country road.
A few homes lately foreclosed,
Their windows the color of rain puddles
About to freeze, their yards choked
With weeds and rusty cars.

Small hills like mounds of ashes
Of your dead cigar, general,
Standing bewhiskered and surveying
What the light is in no hurry
To fall upon, including, of course,
Your wound, red and bubbling
Like an accordion, as you raise your saber
To threaten the clouds in the sky.

As if you had a message for me...
Tell me about the grains of dust
On my night table?
Is any one of them worth your trouble?

Your burglaries leave no thumbprint.
Mine, too, are silent.
I do my best imagining at night,
And you do yours with the help of shadows.

Like conspirators hatching a plot,
They withdrew one by one
Into corners of the room.
Leaving me the sole witness
Of your burning oratory.

If you did say something, I'm none the wiser.
The breakfast finished,
The coffee dregs were unenlightening.
Like a lion cage at feeding time—
The floor at my feet turned red.

Two-room country shack
On a moody lake.
A black cat at my feet
To philosophize with

Stretched out on the bed
Like a gambler
Who's lost his trousers
And his shoes,

Listening to a birdie raise its voice
In praise of good weather,
Little wiggling worms,
And other suchlike matters.

My neighbor was telling me
About her blind cat
Who goes out at night—
Goes where? I asked.

Just then my dead mother called me in
To wash my hands
Because supper was on the table:
The little mouse the cat caught.

The clips of the scissors
And the voices
Difficult to discern at first
Even as I press my ear against the wall.

The barber and his customer
Talking of greasy spoons,
Late night back alleys,
Rats leaping out of trash cans

Then, nothing further...
Had they wandered off
Deeper into the wall,
Or possibly inside my head?

Where else? Where else?
Someone replied cheerfully,
Her identity and whereabouts
A complete mystery, a scandal.

for Michael Krüger

Snowflake and laughter salad.
Cuckoo-clock soup.
Andouillettes of angel and beast.
Bowlegged nightingale in aspic.

Peep-show soufflé.
Fricassee of Cupid with green peas.
Roasted bust of Socrates with African postage stamps.
Venus in her own gravy.

Wines of graveyard lovers—
Or so I read in a take-out menu
Someone slid under my door
While I sat staring at the wall.

That can't help creak at night
As if a spider
Let itself down
By a thread
To hang over it
With the chair quaking
At the outcome.

I'll set you up in a tiny cage over my pillow.
You'll keep me company,
Warn me from time to time
As the silence deepens.

My father spent nights in the bathroom
Thinking about the meaning of his life.
We'd forget all about him,
Find him asleep there in the morning.

O cunning walls, ceilings
And mirrors in the dark,
I heard his pocket watch tick on his grave—
Or was it a cricket?

In the same tall grass
Where eternity was being made
By a few solitary fireflies
In the tails of someone's black coat.

"I was lucky to have a Bible with me.
When the space aliens abducted me...."

America, I shouted at the radio,
Even at 2
A.M
. you are a loony bin!

No, I take it back!
You are a stone angel in the cemetery

Listening to the geese in the sky
Your eyes blinded by snow.

A dog trying to write a poem on why he barks,
That's me, dear reader!
They were about to kick me out of the library
But I warned them,
My master is invisible and all-powerful.
Still, they kept dragging me out by the tail.

In the park the birds spoke freely of their own vexations.
On a bench, I saw an old woman
Cutting her white curly hair with imaginary scissors
While staring into a small pocket mirror.

I didn't say anything then,
But that night I lay slumped on the floor,
Chewing on a pencil,
Sighing from time to time,
Growling, too, at something out there
I could not bring myself to name.

Any man or woman, this book tells me,
Can bring an egg to maturity under the arm,
Materializing thus in a wonderful fashion
What may seem to you wildly beyond belief.

If the parents have large ears and long noses,
That helps. Large ears are a sign of good memory
And brainpower, while a long nose denotes
A farsighted person, secretive but fair.

The newly hatched chickens walk
The yard with their eyes cast down
Looking for precious stones in the dirt
With which they hope to repay their parents.

As for a rooster procreated in such manner,
It inclines to idleness and frivolous pursuits,
Gaining whatever livelihood it can get
At state fairs and seaside penny arcades.

The cows are to be slaughtered
And the sheep, too, of course.
The same for the hogs sighing in their pens—
And as for the chickens,

Two have been killed for dinner tonight,
While the rest peck side by side
As the shadows lengthen in the yard
And bales of hay turn gold in the fields.

One cow has stopped grazing
And has looked up puzzled
Seeing a little white cloud
Trot off like a calf into the sunset.

On the porch someone has pressed
A rocking chair into service
But we can't tell who it is—a stranger,
Or that boy who never has anything to say?

Do people still whittle around here?
Do they carry clasp knives for that purpose?
Do they sit on porches and tree stumps
With shavings piling up at their feet?

Are dogs keeping a close eye on them?
Do they lay their heads on their paws
And sigh as the stick gets shorter?
What thoughts are they thinking as they whittle?

Little thoughts about many little things,
Or big thoughts about one big thing?
Come dark, is there enough of a stick left
To sit back and chew on a toothpick?

The wide-open door of a church.
The hearse with one flat tire.
The grandmother on the sidewalk
Leaning on a cane and cupping her ear.

The lodger no one has ever seen,
Drawing her bath upstairs.
The little boy who climbed on the roof
To keep the clouds company.

An old man carrying a chair
And a rope into the backyard
As if he meant to hang himself
And then sat down and lost track of time.

A woodpecker hammers
On the gutter of a nursing home
Where the war cripple sits
In a wheelchair by the gate.

The windows are wide open,
But no one ever speaks here,
Neither about the crazy bird,
Nor about that other war.

My stars have been guilty of benign neglect.
They neither procure riches for me
Nor burn my house down.
They've left me dangling halfway
Between good and bad luck.

A predicament I cannot afford to treat casually.
I'm all on edge. I look over my shoulder.
There goes some deadbeat
Stepping on shadows of pedestrians
As if they were scurrying mice.

I have to go into a church to avoid him.
To our Lord who has withdrawn
Into a corner with his wounds
I say, that world out there
Is a riddle even you can't solve.

Afterward, the coast clear, I rush to buy
A newspaper and read my horoscope.
A diet of small disappointments and minor
Contentments is to be my lot for the week,
Unless, of course, the astrologer blew it.

The groom is red-cheeked as he blows into a kazoo
And so is the bride as she blows one too.
The guests are blowing hundreds of kazoos
And the Minister as he prepares to bless their union.
The weeping bridesmaid covers her ears.
One sounds like a bad muffler on a hearse,
Another like a wedding dress ripped open at midnight.
Look, even our Lord on the cross is tooting a kazoo!
What are they playing? the hard of hearing are asking.
It's a wedding march, Grandpa, the ushers shout.