Love's Last Number. Christopher Howell
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looks in all his leafy cupboards
for testimonials and diplomas.
Finding none, he says, perhaps
I am an hawk, and he can feel
his beak bend down and a pleasurable
bloodlust fill his mind like gasoline.
Oh, I’m a killer now, I am,
he says to his glinting talons,
but it’s night, I really ought to be
sleeping. So he sleeps. In his dream
he is a melon and a huge blade
severs one half of him from the other.
When he wakes, falling, he is two
blackbirds with one wing each.
THE BODY IN MOTION
Is it true that things return
when they are not the same,
that they wait
till recognition bends
like water around a rock
and we say, oh, it is almost you
whom I touched in the blades
of forest light
naked as you were and have been
always in that room in me where you live
like clear water in a bowl.
And you are not the same, yet
here you are. Clearly the beautiful
spirit clothed in time
persists
and I bow to that, smoothing
its bright leaves and surrender,
its wanting to be known.
KANSAS
A man is standing in a field
at the edge of a town so small
it sometimes forgets itself and goes home
to its pale, lopsided houses and dry, leaf-filled
fishponds in the weedy corners
of its yards. If it’s almost dark
someone might suppose
he has come to lift his arms and ask
for a life that would remember him
or for a vision of horses wading toward the moon
just rising to signal that all’s well. But
as to that, who knows; so far
it might as well mean his mother
is calling her old dog in
from the barn, the barn that burned
and the dog that has been dead for fifty years.
He might as well be anyone come to that edge
that says things end
at the beginning of something else, that even wind
fingering the grass
knows this, teasing his mother’s mad white hair
in another life, where the fields continue to begin,
where the path that brought him ends and doesn’t care
how large or far or bright the rising moon, or if the dog
comes a last time when she calls.
THIS MORTAL COIL
1. On the Nature of Things
Lucretius believed that contentment could not be
contained, since soul is its definitive essence,
and since the particular shade of its formality
insists soul be experienced as a long, empty
stretch of beach. Evening reminds me of this.
Windows brighten with darkness and lilac leaves
brush their shadows into place. The daylilies fall
to their knees. One by one the moments become
themselves as Lucretius, in a golf shirt and slacks,
examines their unassuming surprise. He is not
surprised, on this street of bungalows and modest
swank. From one of the interstices between worlds,
he looks back at the future that’s eyeing him
and scratches under his left arm. In a while he will
join me on my porch. Four hundred miles inland,
we will contemplate the sea and he will remind me
again that death is nothing to us.
2. The After Hours Afterlife
The drummer sets down his tools
and the lights come up.
Four men hop in circles to describe their joy.
The hostess is secretly aflame with a grapelike fullness
I can’t bear to watch. Perhaps the sky is not, as we have been told,
the province of gods, but of spaniels.
I think of Henry Ford and the Pyramid Society
as the drummer lights a foot-long cigarette and places his wig on
a stand.
Tolstoy is the barman and refuses all payment
in the name of virtue.
Usual women slide between the chairs.
When someone shouts “Fire,” everyone laughs
but Tolstoy
who is busy pouring crème de menthe into a whiskey bottle
as I tell him I’m a big fan, that I’ve read Crime and Peace six times.
He says, “The butler did it,
or the drummer.” He hasn’t decided.
The four men are now hopping in squares
and their barking falls like a dark blue snow of sound.
The cigarette girl wants to have the drummer’s baby.
Tolstoy hands me money and a horrible drink
and says, “I died in a train station. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”
Then he throws back his head and screams, “Last call!
All aboard!”
3. The Parable as Originally Told
It was a story nobody knew,
a nobody-could-possibly-know-it story
more or less untold: a man with no arms
finds a railroad spike and a hunk of cheese
beside a dying cat. To the man
with no arms the cat says, “When I must shed
this mortal