English

All spring I"d been playing hide and seek
with the groundhog living under the shed,
looking out for it when I went in or out
of the house, peeking from behind the garage
or sitting still enough reading in a lawn chair
that it would poke its head out tentatively
then venture farther by degrees to munch
my weedy lawn or just lounge in the sun,
our common pleasure. Its roguishness amused me,
as did the way it bolted toward the shed,
revealing the russet fur of its outstretched legs.

How different (though about the same size)

In the unbreaking summers
heat muffled even the stars
and the nights were a stalled black
sea with no smallest wind the days
empty as the ears of the deaf
the colors of forest and sky faded
like ageing ink and our hands lost
the rivering lines that named us

heat pulled the lakes and streams
out of their beds and took them elsewhere
hummingbirds fell from dulled air
into the dying flowers

Before much longer a child again
will learn water this time
not by touch but by absence

When I say loss, I mean loss.
Blue is elaborated by the blue jay,
black by the black fly,

but loss only licks the wounds
of more loss. Likewise,
the sea does not equivocate,

nor do the trees hesitate
in their implications.
Wind moves through the leaves,

italicizing them.

When someone steps extremely gingerly
onto the subway there is a mystery

for our times, it is a little
pennant flown between the man and the state

and if he should exit at a very
bourgeoisie stop he slows us down

lanyard with an ID card
hanged from the end of it

shoes made in a Chinese prison
whose colors we are free to choose

there is something in a thin stream of air

Here is a picture of the author, here is the mother
of her mother, here is a picture of the family forehead,
which wrinkled and creased like the forehead of Literature,
here is the author trapped in a classroom, with her grammar
open in front of her face. Here is the author"s pet wasp,

who had a straight line for a stinger, who perched on her finger
as she wrote; here is a picture of her bedroom wall,
where she made
a slash mark every day, and because she was religious,
a diagonal

Pity the beautiful,
the dolls, and the dishes,
the babes with big daddies
granting their wishes.

Pity the pretty boys,
the hunks, and Apollos,
the golden lads whom
success always follows.

The hotties, the knock-outs,
the tens out of ten,
the drop-dead gorgeous,
the great leading men.

Pity the faded,
the bloated, the blowsy,
the paunchy Adonis
whose luck"s gone lousy.

Pity the gods,
no longer divine.
Pity the night
the stars lose their shine.

One fine morning, in the country of a very gentle people, a magnificent man and woman were shouting in the public square. " My friends, I want her to be queen! " " I want to be queen! " She was laughing and trembling. He spoke to their friends of revelation, of trials completed. They swooned against each other.
In fact they were regents for a whole morning as crimson hangings were raised against the houses, and for the whole afternoon, as they moved toward groves of palm trees.

I. A WIFE WILL WEAN

by coming between

her husband
and the woman who

whelped him. And
should he bemoan

the sweet taste gone,
she"ll boast of how she

helped him — helped
him get beyond

his milks at last, and cut
from gums beneath

— the better to shake
her memory with —

permanent teeth.

II. A MOTHER WILL WOO

a married man who

was once her darling
son. She can"t conceive

Kant says, transcendental
idealism. In Aquinas,

we exist apart from bodies
but only on Thursdays

when his famous ox
flies by the window

wiser at Cologne
where Albertus Magnus,

his real name, appoints
Aquinas to magister studentium,

master of students. Aquinas
is petrified but says yes.

He feels his soul
sailing out of his head

floating near the roof
where a blue ox wings by.

On Wednesday, two bodies

The silence of night hours
is never really silent.
You hear the air,
even when it doesn"t stir.
It"s a memory of the day.
Nothing stirs. Memory lags.
No traffic hushing up
and down tricky hills
among the camphor trees.

No foghorns, no streetcars"
shrilling phantoms before
they emerge from tunnels.
These absences keep us alert.
No rain or street voices,
nobody calling to someone else,
Hannah, you walk the dog
tonight yet or what?

Only certain things to hear: