curling from tail-pipes in the cold
and shoreboatless days,
tall weeds you break off in the vacant lot
late in the year, the fires
burning like mirrors
hiding their pasts with impeccable nows,
into which you sink your hands
and dive head-long through your reflection
into the city where all things go backwards,
the clocks, the men who carry ladders,
the moon, your own steps
back to the bookstores,
back to your apartment, night after night,
all in slow motion,
an untranslatable quiet, like oceans
inside the ears of the deaf, inside a leaf
the conversations you would hear
if you were God:
everything speaks,
if you were only patient
as air, you would hear
the endless telegraph of footsteps
on a sidewalk, you would hear
the small sounds that fill a house,
the creaking wood, the long pauses, doors
and the resolute clicks of doorknobs,
as sentences drawn out
over hours and hours,
years, a poem
imageless, opaque
as the ice-block
relieved from the rope that lowered it
onto the loading dock
in the hot East Texas town
where my father was born
and lived in a small white house
by the Cady railroad, until
he was seventeen,
and like the mongrel they'd chained to the hackberry
tree
forever, escaped
to the rain
and the small white house
where I was born, and lived, until
my grandfather stood at the screen-door,
turned towards the field he'd brought
from Illinois: before long, I wake,
falling through the open night
of my grave: it's a Greyhound station
and Pompeii's bleary-eyed immortals stay up
in the plastic chairs
of a waiting room
embalmed in the blizzard
that only snows when I shake it:
the glass dome is glued
to the base of the world
where the village is:
angels take turns trumpeting
over the candles
house after house
on Christmas Eve,
smorgasbords and steins laid out
for no one...
The stove is turned on low,
the borscht
steams the windows
of the loft,
black bread
warms in the oven, and I
am glad to be inside
chopping garlic, drinking wine
with you
who've come to visit me
in the almost dark
Where are you?
I've set out a bowl and spoon
at the table, and
don't tell me you're not here.
Are you
hiding in a book, are you
a lake,
are you mad at me
because I'm here and you're
the blade of an axe
as it withdraws, or
are you the stone pieta
alone in the sky
with the Pleiades
crying like a symphony?
Do you sleep, ever?
Would you like
an ashtray
or a little piece of metal,
a postcard,
a ticket stub?
