English

capable of feeling
while in contact with another?

I look at the red-tiled roofs outside,
at all the angles

facing the white-blue cloudless sky
like the creases in Bellini"s angel"s

silver-blue dress, Tintoretto"s white one
that"s practically transparent in his

Annunciazione at the San Rocco
— cloth complex as thought!

Then the bells start, flood the void.

We had been married for six or seven years
when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me
that she screams underwater when she swims —

that, in fact, she has been screaming for years
into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool
where she does laps every other day.

Buttering her toast, not as if she had been
concealing anything,
not as if I should consider myself

personally the cause of her screaming,
nor as if we should perform an act of therapy
right that minute on the kitchen table,

Today is a trumpet to set the hounds baying.
The past is a fox the hunters are flaying.
Nothing unspoken goes without saying.
Love"s a casino where lovers risk playing.
The future"s a marker our hearts are prepaying.

The future"s a promise there"s no guaranteeing.
Today is a fire the field mice are fleeing.
Love is a marriage of feeling and being.
The past is a mirror for wishful sightseeing.
Nothing goes missing without absenteeing.

Nothing gets cloven except by dividing.
The future is chosen by atoms colliding.

The universe, they tell us now,
is not the universe. Somehow
it"s multiple. And they"re not done.
I wasn"t even used to one.

In goes the cafeteria worker in her hairnet.
In goes the philosophy teacher
explaining the theory of eternal
return, and Anton Stadler with his clarinet,
still owing money to Mozart. In
goes Mozart. Everyone flopped into the creel
of the happy fisherman, everyone eaten.
Every river is Lethean,
so why should we care
if it"s not the same river? I hate
how everything changes, tree
to failing term paper, chatelaine
to beheaded plotter, drug dealer to narc.
The heart softening faster than cereal

They were nearing the end of their story.
The fire was dying, like the fire in the story.
Each page turned was torn and fed
to flames, until word by word the book
burned down to an unmade bed of ash.
Wet kindling from an orchard of wooden spoons,
snow stewing, same old wind on the Gramophone,
same old wounds. Turn up the blue dial
under the kettle until darkness boils
with fables, and mirrors defrost to the quick
before fogging with steam, and dreams
rattle their armor of stovepipes and ladles.

In the barn demoted to garage,
the ax in a cherry stump can"t be budged.

Daylight perforates siding despite
the battered armor of license plates —

corroded colors, same state: decay,
their dates the only history

of whoever tilled the soil
and left, as a welcome, the skull

of a possum nailed to the door, and the trail
of lime to the torn sack

in a corner where cobwebs festoon a scythe.
Rusted sharp, it sings

when he grips its splintery handle, swings,

I get there early and I find a chair.
I squeeze my plastic cup of wine. I nod.
I maladroitly eat a pretzel rod
and second an opinion I don"t share.
I think: whatever else I am, I"m there.
Afterwards, I escape across the quad
into fresh air, alone again, thank god.
Nobody cares. They"re quite right not to care.

I can"t go home. Even my family
is thoroughly contemptuous of me.
I look bad. I"m exactly how I look.
These days I never read, but no one does,
and, anyhow, I proved how smart I was.

It was her first time coming home from college.
She headed downtown for a drink or two.
Her girlfriend went home early. That was Christmas.
Now, under sapling pine trees in the clearing,
snowdrops are coming back to their old places.
They had been gone a lifetime. Now they stand,
poised like a choir on the verge of singing:
Nature is just. There"s nothing left to fear.
The worst thing that can happen happened here.

One bright morning in a restaurant in Chicago
as I waited for my eggs and toast,
I opened the Tribune only to discover
that I was the same age as Cheerios.

Indeed, I was a few months older than Cheerios
for today, the newspaper announced,
was the seventieth birthday of Cheerios
whereas mine had occurred earlier in the year.

Already I could hear them whispering
behind my stooped and threadbare back,
Why that dude"s older than Cheerios
the way they used to say

Why that"s as old as the hills,