Shadow Train Read online

  The Absence of a Noble Presence

  If it was treason it was so well handled that it

  Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia

  In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable

  Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

  That makes us aware of certain moments,

  That the end is not far off since it will occur

  In the present and this is the present.

  No it was something not very subtle then and yet again

  You’ve got to remember we don’t see that much.

  We see a portion of eaves dripping in the pastel book

  And are aware that everything doesn’t count equally—

  There is dreaminess and infection in the sum

  And since this too is of our everydays

  It matters only to the one you are next to

  This time, giving you a ride to the station.

  It foretells itself, not the hiccup you both notice.

  The Prophet Bird

  Then take the quicklime to the little tree.

  And ask. So all will remain in place, percolating.

  You see the sandlots still foaming with the blood of light

  Though the source has been withdrawn.

  What stunted fig or quince pierced those

  Now empty pairs of parentheses. You shout

  With the holy feeling of an oppressor, a scourge,

  In order for the details to stick,

  Like little blades of grass, stubborn and sick.

  It is still too many ideas for a landscape.

  In another time the tide would have turned, automobiles and the factory

  Gushing in to frame the shining, clever, puzzled faces.

  There would be even less to pick over, to glean.

  But take this idea with you, please. It’s all there,

  Wrapped up. In the time it takes for nothing to happen

  The places, the chairs and tables, the branches, were yours then.

  Qualm

  Warren G. Harding invented the word “normalcy,”

  And the lesser-known “bloviate,” meaning, one imagines,

  To spout, to spew aimless verbiage. He never wanted to be president.

  The “Ohio Gang” made him. He died in the Palace

  Hotel in San Francisco, coming back from Alaska,

  As his wife was reading to him, about him,

  From The Saturday Evening Post. Poor Warren. He wasn’t a bad egg,

  Just weak. He loved women and Ohio.

  This protected summer of high, white clouds, a new golf star

  Flashes like confetti across the intoxicating early part

  Of summer, almost to the end of August. The crowd is hysterical:

  Fickle as always, they follow him to the edge

  Of the inferno. But the fall is, deliciously, only his.

  They shall communicate this and that and compute

  Fixed names like “doorstep in the wind.” The agony is permanent

  Rather than eternal. He’d have noticed it. Poor Warren.

  Breezy Stories

  “Not spoiling it for later, yet few are

  So febrile, so flourishing, and I extract

  Digits from the Carolinas to fill out those days in Maine,

  Only now trusting myself, as in the latter period I had not yet learned to do.”

  And on top of all this one must still learn to judge the quality

  Of those moments when it becomes necessary to break the rule,

  To relax standards, bring light and chaos

  Into the order of the house. A slatternly welcome

  Suits some as well, no doubt, but the point is

  There are still others whom we know nothing about

  And who are growing, it seems, at a rate far in excess

  Of the legislated norm, for whom the “psychological consequences”

  Of the forest primeval of our inconsistency, nay, our lives

  If you prefer, and you can quote me, could be “numbing.”

  Thus, one always reins in, after too much thoughtfulness, the joke

  Prescription. Games were made to seem like that: the raw fruit, bleeding.

  Oh, Nothing

  The tent stitch is repeated in the blue and red

  Letters on the blocks. Love is spelled L-O-V-E

  And is echoed farther down by fear. These two are sisters

  But the youngest and most beautiful sister

  Is called Forward Animation. It all makes sense

  If you look at her through the clock. Now,

  Such towns and benign legends as were distilled

  To produce this moment of silence are dissolved

  In the stream of history. Of her it may be said

  That what she says, she knows, and it will always come undone

  Around her, as you are thinking, and so the choice

  Is still and always yours, and yet

  You may move on, untouched. The glassy,

  Chill surface of the cascade reflected her,

  Her opinions and future, de-defining you. To be amused this way

  Is to be immortal, as water gushes down the sides of the globe.

  Of the Islands

  Then the thirty-three-year-old man

  Then the young but no longer powerfully young man

  Gnashed at the towel’s edge chewed the rag

  Brought it home to him right out sighed with the force of

  Palm winds: to do it unto others

  Is to leave many undone and the carvings that are “quite cute”

  May end up as yours dry in your storehouse

  And this should be good for you yet

  “Not as a gift but as a sign of transition”

  The way all things spread and seem to remain under the lolling

  Fronds and it is not your way as yet.

  Only to be an absentee frees from the want of speculation

  Drawing out conversations in the lobby more than you care

  And each gift returns home to the bearer idly, at suppertime

  Odd that he noticed you diminished in this case, but with any

  The true respect conserves the hoofprint in the dust.

  Farm Film

  Takeitapart, no one understands how you can just do

  This to yourself. Balancing a long pole on your chin

  And seeing only the ooze of foliage and blue sunlight

  Above. At the same time you have not forgotten

  The attendant itch, but, being occupied solely with making

  Ends meet, or the end, believe that it will live, raised

  In secrecy, into an important yet invisible destiny, unfulfilled.

  If the dappled cows and noon plums ever thought of

  Answering you, your answer would be like the sun, convinced

  It knows best, maybe having forgotten someday. But for this

  She looked long for one clothespin in the grass, the rime

  And fire of midnight etched each other out, into importance

  That is like a screen sometimes. So many

  Patterns to choose from, they the colliding of all dispirited

  Illustration on our lives, that will rise in its time like

  Temperature, and mean us, and then faint away.

  Here Everything Is Still Floating

  But, it’s because the liquor of summer nights

  Accumulates in the bottom of the bottle.

  Suspenders brought it to its, this, level, not

  The tempest in a teapot of a private asylum, laughter on the back steps,

  Not mine, in fine; I must concentrate on how disappointing

  It all has to be while rejoicing in my singular

  Un-wholeness that keeps it an event to me. These, these young guys

  Taking a shower with the truth, living off the interest of their

  Sublime receptivity to anything, can disentangle the whole

  Lining of fa
bricating living from the instantaneous

  Pocket it explodes in, enters the limelight of history from,

  To be gilded and regilded, waning as its legend waxes,

  Disproportionate and triumphant. Still I enjoy

  The long sweetness of the simultaneity, yours and mine, ours and mine,

  The mosquitoey summer night light. Now about your poem

  Called this poem: it stays and must outshine its welcome.

  Joe Leviathan

  Just because I wear a voluminous cap

  With a wool-covered wooden button at its peak, the cries of children

  Are upon me, passing through me. The season at this time

  Offers no other spectacle for the curious part-time executioner.

  In his house they speak of rope. They skate past the window.

  I have seen and know

  Bad endings lumped with the good. They are in the future

  And therefore cannot be far off.

  The bank here is quite steep

  And casts its shadow over the river floor.

  An exploration, a field trip, might be worth making.

  We could have made some nice excursions together.

  Then he took a bat and the clams and

  Where hope is the door it is stained with the strong stench of brine.

  Inside too. The window frames have been removed. I mean

  He can pass with me in the meaning and we still not see ourselves.

  Some Old Tires

  This was mine, and I let it slip through my fingers.

  Nevertheless, I do not want, in this airy and pleasant city,

  To be held back by valors that were mine

  Only for the space of a dream instant, before continuing

  To be someone else’s. Because there’s too much to

  Be done that doesn’t fit, and the parts that get lost

  Are the reasonable ones just because they got lost

  And were forced to suffer transfiguration by finding their way home

  To a forgotten spot way out in the fields. To have always

  Had the wind for a friend is no recommendation. Yet some

  Disagree, while still others claim that signs of fatigue

  And mended places are, these offshore days, open

  And a symbol of what must continue

  After the ring is closed on us. The furniture,

  Taken out and examined under the starlight, pleads

  No contest. And the backs of those who sat there before.

  A Prison All the Same

  Spoken over a yellow kitchen table (just the ticket

  For these recycling-minded times): You’ve got to show them who you are.

  Just being a person doesn’t work anymore. Many of them drink beer.

  A crisis or catastrophe goes off in their lives

  Every few hours. They don’t get used to it, having no memory.

  Nor do they think it’s better that way. What happens for them

  Is part of them, an appendage. There’s no room to step back

  To get a perspective. The old one shops and thinks. The fragrant bulbs

  In the cellar are no use either. Last week a man was here.

  But just try sorting it out when you’re on top

  Of your destiny, like angels elbowing each other on the head of a pin.

  Not until someone falls, or hesitates, does the renewal occur,

  And then it’s only for a second, like a breath of air

  On a hot, muggy afternoon with no air conditioning. I was scared

  Then. Now it’s over. It can be removed like a sock

  And mended, a little. One for the books.

  Drunken Americans

  I saw the reflection in the mirror

  And it doesn’t count, or not enough

  To make a difference, fabricating itself

  Out of the old, average light of a college town,

  And afterwards, when the bus trip

  Had depleted my pocket of its few pennies

  He was seen arguing behind steamed glass,

  With an invisible proprietor. What if you can’t own

  This one either? For it seems that all

  Moments are like this: thin, unsatisfactory

  As gruel, worn away more each time you return to them.

  Until one day you rip the canvas from its frame

  And take it home with you. You think the god-given

  Assertiveness in you has triumphed

  Over the stingy scenario: these objects are real as meat,

  As tears. We are all soiled with this desire, at the last moment, the last.

  Something Similar

  I, the city mouse, have traveled from a long ways away

  To be with you with my news. Now you have my passport

  With its color photo in it, to be sweet with you

  As the times allow. I didn’t say that because it’s true,

  I said it from a dim upstairs porch into the veiled

  Shapely masses of this country you are the geography of

  So you can put it in your wallet. That’s all we can do

  For the time being. Elegance has been halted for the duration

  And may not be resumed again. The bare hulk tells us

  Something, but mostly about what a strain it was to be brought

  To such a pass, and then abandoned. So we may never

  Again feel fully confident of the stratagem that bore us

  And lived on a certain time after that. And it went away

  Little by little, as most things do. To profit

  By this mainstream is today’s chore and adventure. He

  Who touches base first at dusk is possessed first, then wins.

  Penny Parker’s Mistake

  That it could not be seen as constituting an endorsement

  Any way she looked, up, down, around, around again, always the same

  For her, always her now, was in the way it winked back.

  For naturally, to be selling these old Indian dinosaur

  Eggs and to be in some obscure way in their debt, not

  For the modest living they provided, rather in having come to know

  Them at all (not everybody need know everybody, and when you

  Stop to think of it, this fits each of us tighter than

  Any of the others) was the throwback to the earlier

  Age each dreamed, a dream with little gold flecks

  And reflection of wet avenues in the japanned facing of it.

  Now, naturally we caring for the success of the success

  Cannot cancel postures from some earlier decade of this century

  That come to invade our walking like the spokes of an umbrella

  And in some real way undermine the heaven of attitudes our chance was.

  To be uncoiling this way, now, is the truer, but slier, stage of inebriation.

  Or in My Throat

  To the poet as a basement quilt, but perhaps

  To some reader a latticework of regrets, through which

  You can see the funny street, with the ends of cars and the dust,

  The thing we always forget to put in. For him

  The two ends were the same except that he was in one

  Looking at the other, and all his grief stemmed from that:

  There was no way of appreciating anything else, how polite

  People were for instance, and the dream, reversed, became

  A swift nightmare of starlight on frozen puddles in some

  Dread waste. Yet you always hear

  How they are coming along. Someone always has a letter

  From one of them, asking to be remembered to the boys, and all.

  That’s why I quit and took up writing poetry instead.

  It’s clean, it’s relaxing, it doesn’t squirt juice all over

  Something you were certain of a minute ago and now your own face

  Is a stranger and no one can tell you it’s true. Hey
, stupid!

  Untitled

  How tall the buildings were as I began

  To live, and how high the rain that battered them!

  Why, coming down them, as I often did at night,

  Was a dream even before you reached the first gullies

  And gave yourself over to thoughts of your own welfare.

  It was the tilt of the wine in the cavalier’s tilted glass

  That documents so unerringly the faces and the mood in the room.

  One slip would not be fatal, but then this is not a win or lose

  Situation, so involved with living in the past on the ridge

  Of the present, hearing its bells, breathing in its steam….

  And the shuttle never falters, but to draw an encouraging conclusion

  From this would be considerable, too odd. Why not just

  Breathe in with the courage of each day, recognizing yourself as one

  Who must with difficulty get down from high places? Forget

  The tourists—other people must travel too. It hurts now,

  Cradled in the bend of your arm, the pure tear, doesn’t it?

  At Lotus Lodge

  After her cat went away she led a quiet but remarkable

  Existence. No tandem ways, but once out of town

  The boxcars alternated with scenes of the religious life

  In strong, faded colors. There is something in every room

  Of the house, and in the powder room one truly inconceivable thing

  That doesn’t matter and is your name. You arrived late last night.

  In between then and now is a circle for sleeping in

  And we are right, at such moments, not to worry about the demands of others;

  They are like trees planted on a slope, too preoccupied

  With the space dividing them to notice this singular tale of the past

  And the thousand stories just like it, until one spills over

  Into dreams, and they can point to it and say, “That’s a dream,”

  And go about their business. There is no compelling reason

  For this moment to insist, yet it does, and has been with us

  Down from the time England and Scotland were separate monarchies. She got