The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (4 page)

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. it

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

singly, this shadow, it falls down to each

as he opens the door of his car,

it wholly becomes the space

behind each door, beneath each lid, top and cover

he has closed, and turns from now.

The instant he ceases smiling

at his victims and beneficiaries and closes

his mouth he is filled so with blackness

it spills behind him even

in the broad noon.

Yet as he fumbles for correct change only, and is angry,

observes the long-stemmed roses

opening in the greenhouses

in the winter, and is afraid,

you find that you love him:

see how he polishes his car

though it holds the whisper of his death, be filled

with joy as he expends

himself like a breath

into this, the loveliest of air,

climbing into that instrument that goes quietly,

driven by bright fire.

The airplane is like silver

that bears the two of them

to Mexico under the sun

to be divorced. Disembarking

they begin to bicker

over small matters: She

wants to be divorced

in the morning, refreshed,

but he says forget all about

the morning, I want to do it now.

You cheap, continually drowning me,

she says, by God

I want a divorce. He says fine,

you've got it: right now.

She replies she would like to wait

till morning. This goes on.

The two work their hatred

till it is like a star reduced

to the dimensions of a jewel.

The airport is quiet. The janitor's

broom whispers to the floor,

the day talks to the night,

saying just what the ocean says

to the land, what the blood

is saying to the heart,

contained, but coming, going.

The sounds of traffic

die over the back lawn

to occur again in the low

distance.

The voices, risen, of

the neighborhood cannot

maintain that pitch

and fail briefly, start

up again.

Similarly my breathing rises

and falls while I look out

the window of apartment

number three in this slum,

hoping for rage, or sorrow.

They don't come to me

anymore. How can I lament

anything? It is all

so proper, so much

as it should be, now

the nearing cumulus

clouds, ominous,

shift, they are like the

curtains, billowy,

veering at the apex

of their intrusion on the room.

If I am alive now,

it is only

to be in all this

making all possible.

I am glad to be

finally a part

of such machinery. I was

after all not so fond

of living, and there comes

into me, when I see

how little I liked

being a man, a great joy.

Look out our astounding

clear windows before evening.

It is almost as if

the world were blue

with some lubricant,

it shines so.

They tell you if you write great poems

you will be lifted into the clouds

like a leaf which did not know

this was possible, you will never

hear of your darkness

again, it will become

distant while you become

holy, look,

they say, at the emptiness

of train tracks and it is poetry

growing up like flowers between

the ties, but those

who say this

are not in control of themselves

or of anything and they must

lie to you in order

that they may at night not bear witness

to such great distances cascading and such

eternities unwinding

around them as to cause even the most powerful

of beds to become silences, it

is death which continues

over these chasms and these

distances deliberately like a train.