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works to be beautiful,

  how we metabolize loss

  as fast as we have to.

  Bud Powell, Paris, 1959

  I'd never seen pain so bland.

  Smack, though I didn't call it smack

  in 1959, had eaten his technique.

  His white-water right hand clattered

  missing runs nobody else would think

  to try, nor think to be outsmarted

  by. Nobody played as well

  as Powell, and neither did he,

  stalled on his bench between sets,

  stolid and vague, my hero,

  his mocha skin souring gray.

  Two bucks for a Scotch in this dump,

  I thought, and I bought me

  another. I was young and pain

  rose to my ceiling, like warmth,

  like a story that makes us come true

  in the present. Each day's

  melodrama in Powell's cells

  bored and lulled him. Pain loves pain

  and calls it company, and it is.

  Listening to Lester Young

  for Reg Saner

  It's 1958. Lester Young minces

  out, spraddle-legged as if pain

  were something he could step over

  by raising his groin, and begins

  to play. Soon he'll be dead.

  It's all tone now and tone

  slurring toward the center

  of each note. The edges that used to be

  exactly ragged as deckle

  are already dead. His embouchure

  is wobbly and he's so tired

  from dying he quotes himself,

  easy to remember the fingering.

  It's 1958 and a jazz writer is coming home

  from skating in Central Park. Who's that

  ahead? It's Lester Young! Hey Pres,

  he shouts and waves, letting his skates

  clatter. You dropped your shit, Pres says.

  It's 1976 and I'm listening

  to Lester Young through stereo equipment

  so good I can hear his breath rasp,

  water from a dry pond—,

  its bottom etched, like a palm,

  with strange marks, a language

  that was never born

  and in which palmists therefore

  can easily read the future.

  The Icehouse, Pointe au Baril, Ontario

  Each vast block in its batter

  of sawdust must have weighed

  as much as I did. The sweat

  we gathered running down

  the path began to glaze.

  We could see our breaths,

  like comic strip balloons

  but ragged, grey, opaque.

  A warehouse of water on an island.

  Once we arrived by seaplane:

  the island looked like a green footprint.

  Someone in a hurry saved time

  by not sinking with each step.

  In the icehouse I'd clear my name

  on a block of ice and the dank film

  of sawdust on my finger was as dense

  as parts of grown-up conversation,

  the rivalry of uncles and managing

  money. The managers I knew

  wore baseball caps and yelled.

  As for money, I thought it was like food.

  When blueberries were in season

  we ate them all the time.

  I always hoped to find a pickerel

  in some block of ice

  I was signing. Eyes frozen clear,

  the tiny teeth like rasps on a file, the head

  tapering to so fine a point it seemed

  it could drill its way out....

  I'd smear the block clean with both hands cold

  white under their gloves of sawdust.

  Look here, I'd say clearly.

  The Mail

  The star route man downshifts

  his pale purple jeep called a Bronco

  instead of a Rat or a Toucan.

  The mailbox gets fed. Sharon mutters

  out in her sweater, imploring

  herself. What about? The wind,

  water, the dead current of woodgrain

  in the headboard of the bed.

  She goes in to open the mail

  which mainly says Read Me

  I'm Here and See You

  Tomorrow, (signed) little ripples

  of ink. They make her want

  to brush her hair and if it could

  her hair would rise to the brush

  like a happy pet. She stares

  out the window. She could go anywhere.

  Though the wind doesn't stop,

  nor the light, to write a few words

  beginning Dear Sharon, Dear Hair,

  Dear Snowgrains Swirled Off The Roof,

  Dear Window Pulling Me There.

  Taking the Train Home

  1

  Dusk grew on the window.

  I'd listen for the click

  of the seams in the rails

  to come at the same speed

  the telephone wires sagged

  and then shot upward to the pole.

  All night I slept between

  the rails, a boy on a stretcher.

  When I'd wake up outside

  Chillicothe I felt like a fish.

  Alfalfa and cows peered in

  as I went by in my

  aquarium, my night

  in glass. Dawn flew against

  my window the same way

  a fly swarms by itself

  against the heat of a bare

  light bulb, like a heart attack.

  I'd be home soon, 7:15,

  all out for Cincinnati.

  2

  It's Sunday and I'm only four

  and my grandparents are taking

  me to Sharonville, to the roundhouse.

  Pop drives. The part in the white crest

  of his hair is like a compass needle.

  Non sings. From the back seat

  I lean between them, I can

  feel the soot, the cinders

  like black popcorn under my feet.

  The roundhouse ceiling is charred

  by sparks, and grime

  smears its highest windows.

  Coalcars smolder on sidings

  while the engine turns

  away from its arrival.

  I was going to live in a roundhouse

  when I grew up, a lighthouse.

  Every morning the moon

  would steam in over the sea

  and turn around.

  The table would be set for breakfast

  before I went to bed,

  my little tower of pills

  beside the juice glass.

  My hair would be white, like Pop's,

  and by its light the ships,

  long pods of sleep and fuel oil,

  coffee beans, brooms

  with real straw,

  by the light of my hair

  ships would sleep into port

  and germinate.

  3

  In my dream I'm only four

  again, Pop is alive.

  He walks slowly—emphysema.

  I've eaten something

  metallic, something

  I don't understand.

  I circle away from him

  to vomit among roadside weeds.

  I force it up.

  It's like gruel, with roofing nails

  for lumps.

  I love this dying man.

  I look up and he bobs over a wave

  in the road, he's swimming

  out to sea. I begin

  following but my legs are too short,

  death is my father,

  this is my body

  which will fall apart.

  I'm sleeping on the ocean.

  I'm asleep on a train

  outside Red Lion, Ohio.

  I don't know; I can't tell, />
  but it seems to me

  that if I could watch my body sleep

  it would glow,

  growing its antibodies

  to eternal life,

  growing the lives we give away

  when we wake.

  Waking at Dusk from a Nap

  In the years that pass through

  an afternoon's dream, like tape

  at Fast Forward, there are

  syllables, somehow, in the waterfall,

  and in the dream I hear them each

  clearly, a classroom

  of children reciting their names.

  I am not in the dream; it's as if I am

  the dream, in which such distinctions

  go without saying. And in which

  a confusion I may soon have—did I

  wake at dawn or dusk?—seems

  anticipated: a strand of stars

  goes by, like elephants spliced

  trunk-to-tail in children's books

  or ivory carvings, and the dream won't say

  if they're through for the night

  or amiably headed for work.

  And the dream—and once, I remember,

  it seemed I was the dream—

  the dream tilts up to pour me out.

  For an instant when I wake

  there's a whir, perhaps of props

  and stagehands, and a laggard star

  scrambles over the transom.

  The grainy world with its sworls

  and lesions, its puckering dusk light,

  its dimming patina, its used and casual

  beauty, reassembles itself exactly.

  And I climb down from the bed, gather

  my spilled book from the floor,

  and watch the lights come on

  in the valley, like bright type

  being set in another language.

  In Memory of W. H. Auden

  1

  His heart made a last fist.

  The language has used him

  well and passed him through.

  We get what he collected.

  The magpie shines, burns

  in the face of the polished stone.

  2

  His was a mind alive by a pure greed

  for reading, for the book

  which "is a mirror,"

  as Lichtenberg said: "if an ass

  peers into it, you can't expect

  an apostle to look out."

  It was a mediating mind.

  There were the crowds like fields of waving wheat

  and there was the Rilkean fire

  he didn't like

  at the bottom of the night.

  He loomed back and forth.

  The space shrank.

  The dogs of Europe wolved

  about the house,

  darks defining a campfire.

  3

  My friend said Auden died

  because his face

  invaded his body.

  Under the joke is a myth—

  we invent our faces:

  the best suffer most and it shows.

  But what about the face

  crumpled by a drunk's Buick?

  Or Auden's

  face in its fugue of photographs

  so suddenly resolved?

  It isn't suffering that eats us.

  4

  They were not painting about suffering,

  the Old Masters. Not the human heart but

  Brueghel turns the plowman away

  for compositional reasons

  and smooths the waters for a ship he made

  expensive and delicate.

  The sun is implied by how

  the sure hand makes the light fall

  as long as we watch the painting.

  The sure hand is cruel.

  Nurse Sharks

  Since most sharks have no flotation bladders and must swim

  to keep from sinking, they like to sleep in underwater caves,

  wedged between reef-ledges, or in water so shallow

  that their dorsal fins cut up from the surf.

  Once I woke a nurse shark (so named because it was

  thought to protect its young by taking them

  into its mouth). It shied from the bubbles I gave up

  but sniffed the glint the murky light made on my regulator.

  My first shark at last. I clenched

  every pore I could. A shark's sense of smell

  is so acute and indiscriminate that a shark crossing

  the path of its own wound is rapt.

  Once a shark got caught, ripped open by the hook.

  The fisherman threw it back after it flopped

  fifteen minutes on deck, then caught it again

  on a hook baited with its own guts.

  Except for the rapacious great white

  who often bites first, sharks usually nudge

  what they might eat. They're scavengers and like

  food to be dead or dying. Move to show you're alive

  but not so much as to cause panic: that's what the books

  advise. The nurse shark nibbled at my regulator

  once, a florid angelfish swam by, the shark

  veered off as if it were bored. Its nubbled skin

  scraped my kneecap, no blood

  but the rasped kneecap pink for a week.

  Another year I swam past a wallow of nurse sharks asleep

  in three feet of water, their wedge-shaped heads lax

  on each other's backs. One of them slowly thrashed

  its tail as if it were keeping its balance in the thicket

  of sharks sleeping like pick-up sticks. Its tail sent

  a small current over me, a wet wind.

  I swirled around a stand of coral and swam

  fast to shore, startling the sharks to a waking frenzy:

  moil, water opaque with churned-up sand,

  grey flames burning out to sea. Last time I go diving

  alone, I promised myself, though I lied.

  Long

  for Stanley Plumly

  It's about to be too late.

  Every shred of the usual weather

  is precious and sexual as it goes,

  the way the links of a fugue become

  one another's strict abandonments.

  As for the future, it will not swerve.

  Fire sleeps in the tree. Which tree?

  Fire sleeps without dreaming and cannot

  say. If we call the future's name

  it becomes our name, by echo.

  And from the dead, not even

  a plea that we leave them

  alone, each dead locked

  in its dead name. If the dead complained,

  they would say we summon them poorly,

  dull music and thin wine, nor love

  enough for the many we make,

  much less for the melted dead

  in their boxes. Above them

  we talk big, since the place is vast

  and bland if we tire of looking closely,

  washed bland by light from what light

  lets us see, our study,

  the scripture of matter,

  our long narcosis of parting.

  Flood (1982)

  New

  The long path sap sludges up

  through an iris, is it new

  each spring? And what would

  an iris care for novelty?

  Urgent in tatters, it wants

  to wrest what routine it can

  from the ceaseless shifts

  of weather, from the scrounge

  it feeds on to grow beautiful

  and bigger: last week the space

  about to be rumpled

  by iris petals was only air

  through which a rabbit leapt,

  a volley of heartbeats hardly

  contained by fur, and then the clay-

  colored spaniel in pursuit

  and the effort
less air

  rejoining itself whole.

  Cows Grazing at Sunrise

  What the sun gives us,

  the air it passes through aspires

  to take back, and the day's long

  bidding begins, itself a sort

  of heat. Up goes the warm air

  and down comes the cold.

  In the cows' several bellies the bicker

  of use is loud. Their dense heads

  spill shadows thirty feet long,

  heads that weigh as much as my grown

  children, who can crack my heart:

  the right tool makes any job

  easy. And don't the cows know it,

  and the dewy, fermenting grass?

  And isn't the past inevitable,

  now that we call the little

  we remember of it "the past"?

  Housework

  How precise it seems, like a dollhouse,

  and look: the tiniest socks ever knit

  are crumpled on a chair in your bedroom.

  And how still, like the air inside a church

  or basketball. How you could have lived

  your boyhood here is hard to know,

  unless the blandishing lilacs

  and slant rain stippling the lamplight

  sustained you, and the friendship of dogs,

  and the secrecy that flourishes in vacant lots.

  For who would sleep, like a cat in a drawer,

  in this house memory is always dusting,

  unless it be you? I'd hear you on the stairs,

  an avalanche of sneakers, and then the sift

  of your absence and then I'd begin to rub

  the house like a lantern until you came back

  and grew up to be me, wondering how to sleep

  in this lie of memory unless it be made clean.

  Bystanders

  When it snowed hard, cars failed

  at the hairpin turn above the house.