Thirteen Elegies for the Twentieth Century
Must be a Wo –
A loss or so –
To bend the eye
Best Beauty’s way –
- Emily Dickinson
1
Of a mouse -- What’s left --
Wings of an owl
To the ear -- Dropped watch in a field of grass
And streetlight –-
In a dog’s house, leash or bone -- Not the wind,
But the lights below -- And the snuffalump stumbling
Through the weeds –-
And something green we can’t get to sleep –-
No matter how hard we try –-
2
What’s left where there are books
-- And there are books --
And there are birds -- Something in me wrote
the foggy temples and their prayer flags –-
Not an hour later, the spirits came
Bearing gifts -- Not the wind
But light from below
3
-- And just when we know that we’re done for
-- The white moth -- In the shadow –
Paddles -- Down
To the garden –-
Where the hose drops its mouth
By the fence –-
And across the fence
The man with the broomstick and two garbage bags
Walks away from the dumpster
Muttering –-
4
Kids in new clothes walk to school
In threes –-
A crowd of pigeons on the line –-
And between the light from the sun
And the light from their eyes --
In a world where time sneaks closer every step-- Delmore Schwartz
Takes a cab to John Berryman
And paces
Three minutes off the greeting room rug –-
Doesn’t say a word and takes
The same cab home –-
5
Our lives
Have become a kind
Of money
6
There are flags and there are fences –-
We are eight thousand pages and boxes full
Of sawdust –-
Hum of the carpenter bee’s wings
From a hole in our porch
Post to the black
-- Back of our creeping
Cat -- And the dirt at the root
In the spearmint’s clay pot
Is a caterpillar –-
Watch for the green ones,
The little fat ones –-
7
And not a week later that poor fucker
Delmore Schwartz dies
Abandoned –-
O Genius
Poetry -- Face down in the gutter –-
Quite
Literally –-
The tower leans into the alley,
The cat jumps over the moon –-
Eight million pages or a wide-eyed starlet –-
Our messenger birds
Have never stood
A chance –-
8
In the mulch pile foot long worms squirm & draw –-
Another kind of light
Entirely –-
9
O! O! But that light
From below! O! O! But here we still
Go! -- When I die
I wanna die like Allen Ginsberg
& sit up straight
In my bed! –-
When I die, I wanna die
Like Allen Ginsberg
& sit up straight
When I’m Dead!
10
But over in Pristina in the black-edged leaves
-- They back their black tanks
Like black carpenter bees
Back --
Into a house any one of us could’ve been born in
& Children appear & then they
Disappear –- It’s only been five minutes
-- After the door knock?
Black masks on neighborhood dogs
Broken feet
& Mountains of bodies -- Fire in every window
And women marched off
-- Like soldiers in their bathrobes--
Cows & horses everywhere -- Dead & mostly
Burnt -- And there are children
Who carry machine-guns
11
-- Every night
Becomes a late night –-
Sleep like a retired security guard at his desk –-
Who chased the dumpster
Divers
Away -- The universe is a blizzard
In a forest of storms
And each of us was a god there –-
By God –-
There –-
12
-- A week after he dies,
The willow my grandfather wanted to pull out
And off the backyard water-line
Falls -- A month and grandma’s lilac bush
What never in seven years
Bloomed before
Blooms –-
That’s ok –-
My mother will say –-
Across eighty billion miles of telephone wire
-- That makes
Perfectly good sense --
13
-- This inflatable world
In a backyard baby pool
On a second birthday in July -- With death all around
But not here
-- Like now-two-year-old Tynan Shifflet’s
Giant plastic-earth-ball with its wide-blue-mountains
And green-deep-oceans
-- You can jump on it --- You can
Bounce it off the floor -- But not here
-- Go ahead -- You can
Bounce it
Off the rafters
But not here -- Everything always touching on something else
Somewhere
-- We are people of small crowds and we
Move each other around
