The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read online

  singly, this shadow, it falls down to each

  as he opens the door of his car,

  it wholly becomes the space

  behind each door, beneath each lid, top and cover

  he has closed, and turns from now.

  The instant he ceases smiling

  at his victims and beneficiaries and closes

  his mouth he is filled so with blackness

  it spills behind him even

  in the broad noon.

  Yet as he fumbles for correct change only, and is angry,

  observes the long-stemmed roses

  opening in the greenhouses

  in the winter, and is afraid,

  you find that you love him:

  see how he polishes his car

  though it holds the whisper of his death, be filled

  with joy as he expends

  himself like a breath

  into this, the loveliest of air,

  climbing into that instrument that goes quietly,

  driven by bright fire.

  The Two

  The airplane is like silver

  that bears the two of them

  to Mexico under the sun

  to be divorced. Disembarking

  they begin to bicker

  over small matters: She

  wants to be divorced

  in the morning, refreshed,

  but he says forget all about

  the morning, I want to do it now.

  You cheap, continually drowning me,

  she says, by God

  I want a divorce. He says fine,

  you’ve got it: right now.

  She replies she would like to wait

  till morning. This goes on.

  The two work their hatred

  till it is like a star reduced

  to the dimensions of a jewel.

  The airport is quiet. The janitor’s

  broom whispers to the floor,

  the day talks to the night,

  saying just what the ocean says

  to the land, what the blood

  is saying to the heart,

  contained, but coming, going.

  Looking Out the Window Poem

  The sounds of traffic

  die over the back lawn

  to occur again in the low

  distance.

  The voices, risen, of

  the neighborhood cannot

  maintain that pitch

  and fail briefly, start

  up again.

  Similarly my breathing rises

  and falls while I look out

  the window of apartment

  number three in this slum,

  hoping for rage, or sorrow.

  They don’t come to me

  anymore. How can I lament

  anything? It is all

  so proper, so much

  as it should be, now

  the nearing cumulus

  clouds, ominous,

  shift, they are like the

  curtains, billowy,

  veering at the apex

  of their intrusion on the room.

  If I am alive now,

  it is only

  to be in all this

  making all possible.

  I am glad to be

  finally a part

  of such machinery. I was

  after all not so fond

  of living, and there comes

  into me, when I see

  how little I liked

  being a man, a great joy.

  Look out our astounding

  clear windows before evening.

  It is almost as if

  the world were blue

  with some lubricant,

  it shines so.

  There Are Trains Which Will Not Be Missed

  They tell you if you write great poems

  you will be lifted into the clouds

  like a leaf which did not know

  this was possible, you will never

  hear of your darkness

  again, it will become

  distant while you become

  holy, look,

  they say, at the emptiness

  of train tracks and it is poetry

  growing up like flowers between

  the ties, but those

  who say this

  are not in control of themselves

  or of anything and they must

  lie to you in order

  that they may at night not bear witness

  to such great distances cascading and such

  eternities unwinding

  around them as to cause even the most powerful

  of beds to become silences, it

  is death which continues

  over these chasms and these

  distances deliberately like a train.

  Commuting

  We understand well that we must hold

  our lives up in our arms like the victims

  of solitary, terrible accidents,

  that we must still hold our lives to their promises

  and hold ourselves up to our lives

  to be sure always they are larger,

  wholer, realer than we ourselves, though we

  must carry them.

  We on this train with our lives in our laps

  are waiting patiently for the next moment

  and maybe we will be lifted away by our lives

  as are the moments we rise up to hold with us,

  or maybe we will just slacken

  above our drinks in the club car chatting baseball,

  all of us headed

  to apply for the same job, all of us qualified,

  all of us turning now into snowflakes

  too delicate,

  yet each holding in itself a tiny

  stark particle of darkness

  and weight, the heart’s cinder

  turning over.

  Employment in the Small Bookstore

  The dust almost motionless

  in this narrowness, this stillness,

  yet how unlike a coffin

  it is, sometimes letting a live one in,

  sometimes out

  and the air,

  though paused, impends not a thing,

  the silence isn’t sinister,

  and in fact not much goes on

  at the Ariel Book Shop today,

  no one weeps in the back

  room full of books, old books, no one

  is tearing the books to shreds, in fact

  I am merely sitting here

  talking to no one, no one being here,

  and I am blameless.

  More,

  I am grateful for the job,

  I am fond of the books and touch them,

  I am grateful that King St. goes down

  to the river, and that the rain

  is lovely, the afternoon green.

  If the soft falling away of the afternoon

  is all there is, it is nearly

  enough, just

  let me hear the beautiful clear voice

  of a woman in song passing

  toward silence, and then

  that will be all for me

  at five o’clock.

  I will walk

  down to see the untended

  sailing yachts of the Potomac

  bobbing hopelessly in another silence,

  the small silence that gets to be a long

  one when the past stops talking

  to you because it is dead,

  and still you listen,

  hearing just the tiny

  agonies of old boats

  on a cloudy day, in cloudy water.

  Talk to it. Men are talking to it

  by Cape Charles, for them it’s the same

  silence with fishing lines in their hands.

  We are all looking at the river bearing the wreckage

  so far away. We wonder how

  the river ever came to be sor />
  gray, and think that once there were

  some very big doings on this river,

  and now that is all over.

  Working Outside at Night

  The moon swells

  and its yellow darkens

  nearer the horizon

  and soon all

  the aluminum rooftops

  shall appear, orange

  and distinct beside

  the orange sun,

  while the diamond

  flares in its vacuum

  within. It is simple

  to be with the shovel,

  thoughtless, inhabited

  by this divorce,

  it is good

  the luminous

  machinery, silenced,

  waits, nice

  that the conveyor

  belts choked with sand

  convey nothing.

  When I return home to

  coffee at

  7:45 the lithe

  young girls will be going

  to high school, pulling

  to their mouths stark

  cigarettes through

  Arizona’s sunlight.

  These last few months

  have been awful, and when

  around five the roosters

  alone on neighboring

  small farms begin

  to scream like humans

  my heart just lies down,

  a stone.

  An Inner Weather

  This is the middle of the night.

  There are no stars. It’s been lightly snowing

  a while, and it is silent. Many men are sleepless,

  and for some, within, it is blazing noon.

  The commander cries in the street dirt,

  the apprentice rides on the mayor.

  And yet one pool of light

  is succeeded by another tonight,

  as always, amid silence, beneath the lamps,

  but even these impenetrable things

  waver, and aren’t quite real,

  and we take no comfort from them.

  For the fathers parade as leering women,

  the entrails of pets drape the sewer-grates.

  Our shadows are black stumps.

  Some of us fire

  with our mouths open,

  amazed, firing.

  The cup is overturned by the dagger

  and blood dots the window-glass.

  This is the way of it

  for many men this quiet night of snow.

  The snow descends in a sparkling light but many are blind,

  walking out without jackets as if into the sun,

  and they would not say anything of the snow,

  but would say only this

  of the weather, that something falling burns on them.

  The Supermarkets of Los Angeles

  The supermarkets

  of Los Angeles are blinding,

  they are never closed,

  they are defended

  by the mountains

  on the North, on

  the Southeast by the

  desert and on

  the West by the large,

  sad Pacific Ocean.

  We enter such

  brilliance as we entered

  the world, without

  shopping list, perfectly.

  It is unpleasant,

  but each is thinking

  he may be here

  to escape still worse.

  What? There is nothing

  out there other

  than late winter,

  Hollywood, the moments

  before morning.

  We are never alone

  here: above our heads, though

  close enough nearly

  to touch, is television,

  in which may be disclosed

  our own faces. They do not

  become us. They are

  the little faces we wore

  as children, now wrinkled,

  as if we were not grown

  but only aged. We want

  to cleanse those wrinkles

  of accumulate filth,

  these faces whose names

  are being withheld, so tiny

  in the relaxed fist of

  Los Angeles, hearing

  Los Angeles singing

  to the murdered. We see

  the eyes, and we see

  what the eyes see,

  we see the mouths moving

  in utter silence, but of

  course we know exactly

  what the mouths are saying.

  “This Is Thursday. Your Exam Was Tuesday.”

  It is a fine, beautiful

  and lovely time of warm dusk,

  having perhaps just a touch

  too much

  enveloping damp;

  but nice, with its idle strollers,

  of whom I am one,

  and it’s true,

  their capacity for good

  is limitless, you can tell.

  And then—ascending

  over the roofs, the budded tips

  of trees, in the twilight, very whole

  and official,

  its black

  markings like a face

  that has loomed in every city

  I have known—it arrives,

  the gigantic yellow warrant

  for my arrest,

  one sixth the size

  of the world. I’m speaking

  of the moon. I would not give

  you a fistful of earth for

  the entire moon, I might as well tell you.

  For across the futile and empty

  street, in the excruciating

  gymnasium, they

  are commencing—

  degrees are being bestowed

  on the deserving,

  whereas I’m the incalculable

  dullard in the teeshirt here.

  Gentlemen of the moon:

  I don’t even have

  my real shoes on. These are some reformed

  hoodlum’s shoes, from the Goodwill. Let

  me rest, let me rest in the wake

  of others’ steady progress,

  closing my eyes,

  closing my heart,

  shutting the door

  in face after face

  that has nourished me.

  Falling

  There is a part

  of this poem where you must

  say it with me, so

  be ready, together we will make

  it truthful, as there is gracefulness

  even in the motioning of those

  leafless trees, even in

  such motion as descent. Fired,

  I move downward through it all again

  in an aquarium of debt, submerging

  with the flowering electric

  company, with March the 10th, 1971,

  its darkness, justice and mercy

  like clownfish, funnily striped.

  Let them both as a matter of policy

  redevour the light that

  escapes them, Shakespeare

  had just candles, lamps,

  Milton had only the

  dark, and what difference? as

  poetry, like failure, is fathered

  in any intensity of light, and light

  in all thicknesses of darkness,

  as your voice, you out there,

  wakes now, please, to say

  it with me: There

  are descents more final, less graceful

  than this plummeting

  from employment; it is the middle of a false

  thaw, the ice undercoating

  of a bare branch is

  in the midst of falling. Where

  can it all be put except

  in this poem, under us, breaking this fall,

  itself falling

  while breaking it? Look

  at this line, stretching out, breaking even as it

/>   falls to this next, like a suicide,

  the weather singing

  past his face, and arising to kill him

  this first last line in weeks.

  Students

  They hold out their hands crushed

  by misfortunes and I kiss

  my fingers, touch my lips.

  When they talk I can’t help it,

  I recede,

  the words fall down and break.

  I shut all the windows of my house

  and look out onto the green lawn and am ashamed.

  Students, for me, life

  is just the ice-pick lying

  beside the letter from the County Clerk

  of Court, and the hesitation

  of a hand between them,

  hand I can’t get

  my own hand out of.

  And the world—it’s merely this place

  of unfair vending machines

  and women with short hair dyed red

  who order another, and weep, and are unmasked.

  Then later the world

  is a repetitive street.

  The hour is too late,

  all, all is closed.

  The red-haired woman touches the single

  discolored tile in the bathroom.

  She touches the marks the elastic

  makes on her belly, her shoes awry.

  She journeys

  into the vast bed.

  She reaches to the lamp

  and makes it dark, relaxing.

  She is not rising or even moving

  but like many people at the verge of the dream

  she feels as though she begins, now, to fly.

  What This Window Opens On

  Several of those faces on the avenue

  are blossoming