The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly (2 page)

no one can know through what silence she moves. for long

nights, through an eternity of stealth

she has tracked her own dim form drifting there

ahead, has seen her

self, lost again, keep swimming through this wealth

of solitude. it must be wrong,

that i should watch her. i'm afraid that she

will turn her eyes to me, show me the fast

outdistancing of years she sees, and i

would clutch terribly

after my past days as if for the last

thing i would see, as if for me

all those long moments, each friendly second i'd known

was lost, gone to the air, was really gone.

the dry dry land. here

and there from the

rasp and muscle of its flatness

a tree gushes forth. i

have seen trees, have

heard them at night being

dragged into the sky.

i know that they are very

real. i know they know.

lover, i am not

a tree, you would

never mistake me

for one, my arid movements

for its flowing coolness. but

sometimes in the dark silken

air of this room

i feel that we are

a liquid jumble of trees

falling interminably away from

the land, its dry infinitude.

from the sidewalk i can see her,

as she barely stands, easily mired

among supermarket products,

as if rapidly and all

too soon the swimming hole

had turned solid. around her,

housewives search for a detergent

that will cleanse away the years;

locking her vision into

a box of tide she must see

the finances crumbling

in the distant bank, or the remembered

friends, who she knew

would be winding up here.

i cannot touch

you. i would like to hold you forth

and say, here is the television

sign-off music; this

is the vision crept up on

by cloudiness, first in the corners;

here is the morning

trickling from the house. but i can't

reach you: just as easily the sidewalk

holds me, and i love you,

i want to crook my finger beneath

your dress, and unearth

your trembling, delicate loins.

in exactly the same

way that the animals were launched

onto the sand, frightened

after so many eons by the sudden

darkness of the sea,

a very large number

of children plunge daily in their last great

evolutionary spasm from the wombs

of pale, inarticulate women. it is wide

and kind of empty where one stands,

now, years after, and floats

drastically his hips

against the pin-ball machine. outside,

the detective wail of his own

impossible child is overturning the streets,

as he maneuvers this unloveable machine, deftly

and like a great ship,

through the stages of his life. just

as confused as ever, i observe

the buildings increasing under the sky,

knowing that soon i must

become him, and elude

my children and bludgeon the waves

in skillful drunkenness. i tremble,

like an old indian, for just a little

rain over this desert.

if you want to know

the time you must look

at a clock, or stare continuously

into the moon,

until it grows round like a clock.

under the moon growing round

a hunter strolls; he must be saying,

“i have killed an animal.” however,

as the evening draws

close in for a better look, it is

nine p.m. and the hunter's arms

are loaded with air, his belly

swells with the solitude. he is saying,

“i
think
i have killed an animal,

a barely visible bird,

at eight p.m., or the dim

figure of a woman bent over

her sewing, in a distant house,

who glanced occasionally

at the big moon. and i shot

a telephone pole as it strained

into the sky, wanting desperately the moon.”

as he continues among the trees,

the ticking of the city becomes

larger, moving the birds and insects

from the air, rattling

the moon so that it opens

and tolls down upon the hunter.

his hands try to caress the sudden,

awkward hush, and he wonders more often,

“have i killed an animal?”

i would like to be just an old man with my gin,

retiring even from these leaves into

my big, gradual silence beyond the wood

and it will be good,

wife, because i have pointed to you,

and you have become real. within

this darker stillness my eyes grow too wide.

it must be that seeing you in the trees

becoming softer than i ever dreamed

has made it all seem

a multitude of nonsense, all the seas,

the planets, all i wrote. i lied,

i swear to you i lied, becoming old and so

very drunk, when i did not lie to you.

emptying into

the freezing, quiet alleys

there is the voice of a single

ferreting drunk. if he is singing

it is lovely, and if he talks on

strangely, he, at least,

understands. by the river, noiselessly,

some lovers have frozen

in the winter, and they will be taken

away, with the floods of spring.

in an upper window

of the county jail, the sleepless man

who was framed knows

that all along, all along,

this snow that rests

more heavily over the reach of branches

has been descending.

there is the chance that you will step

ahead of me into the traffic

alive, and that there will be

an accident. always i am walking,

i am seeing your heels and thinking

of something else, but always i am

asking you to remember: if you step carefully

into the screeching

of tires and become bloody, i must not

be the one extending himself awkwardly

into the confusion to say, my dear

mrs. hutchins, do

forgive the way we have arranged

your body, dead like that

on the pavement, but surely you

understand? it must

not be me who is the one

fisherman to fish you up drowned among

all that seaweed. it cannot

be me looking in all

directions for help, knowing all

along that it is just you

and me, finally, and that i am

alone to hear the sound of the breakfast

bell opening as it did

into the corners of the barnyard, and your

mother's voice calling back

and forth among the animals. am i

positioned here alone to welcome

you from such a very distant

place, and must i now tell you what every

second in your life, what all the

breathing and the continual inching

forward of the body through each and every

day, when i am so absolutely

young, when i am so

unprepared, must i

tell you what it has all

at last come to? you are

dead, mrs. hutchins, amid this

mob craning to see your own blood,

which has somehow

gotten away from you in all

the excitement—i am so truly sorry,

of course it isn't fair, you weren't

prepared, but don't you see it works

this way for all of us, for instance that

i am here just isn't fair, either, because

of my unpreparedness, because of my lack

of anything to say except you're dead,

you're dead, i didn't

do it, i didn't do it.

morning,

the door opening, changing

into a doorway. half

the night i stayed awake and smoked

and watched the mousetraps.

the mice were there, nudging

into cups and plates, one fell

into the toaster, but escaped.

they waited until i gave up and slept to die.

for these mice

the night will be long, i heard

the iron snapping

in my sleep and dreamed my wife was

closing the door.

two mice are dead, for my wife.

mice make her legs

go watery, as they do sometimes after her climax.

one mouse's head is barely

in the trap, one eye probing

toward the ceiling where i could tell him

there is nothing.

the other mouse is flung willingly under the iron

bar. i wonder, were they

married? was she pregnant? they are

going out together,

in the garbage this morning. it was

morning when we were married.

it has been morning

for a long time. that mouse, with his

eye. did he hear the iron snapping,

and dream it was his

wife with her stretching, laden tits

closing the door?

for Ed Schroeder

at night here in the park it is different:

the man by the seal pool stalks

through an acute emptiness, encircled

by the city. is he

taking off his clothes?

by day i have seen

the seals, enclosed, blundering

among the spattered rocks. they climb

like prisoners of a ferris wheel, above

their pool and above

the peanuts floating through

air, high over the sudden, too large

teeth of the spectators. but at night

without their land-locked captors moving

gracefully by, the seals

seem less inept, even

on the hostile rocks.

before dawn they rise

and dive, becoming masters

in the water. the figure in

underwear on the left is not

a seal. before me and

an audience of trees he has

joined the seals. drunk, perhaps,

and, a staggerer on land,

perhaps he hopes to move cleanly,

like a seal, through water. or,

sober, perhaps he dives to assume

the clumsiness now shed by the seals: then

he will tumble drunk onto

the ground, and the seals, plunging

landward, will find

no awkwardness among the rocks, will

no longer wonder deep

within themselves at a dry hardness

which is not ice. each day

he will return, wetness

forever staining through his pants,

to watch his seals as they rise

above the rocks to pluck the floating

bits of food, as they slide through

the air over the trees, the

ferris wheel grown

stationary with shame, the tiny

unfamiliar bodies jerking

under balloons through the lighted park.

i should have brought

an axe to this white place and seen

for sure if, far beneath,

a city is falling irretrievably away.

as it is i can only guess

that this spot, warmer

than the rest, is where the tallest

steeple was cut loose to unmoor the town.

i wonder: could i nudge my vision

over onto the spaces below?

it has thus far been

easy to locate myself, somewhere between hands

warming in pockets and the hands that waken,

empty, out of the shadows

of buildings. i know

what's going on; the stars

evade the oceans, thank goodness,

and just here there are

the trees fumbling with roots under the earth.

to chip through to a town

that will not come back might

put me anywhere, i might become

that someone on the farther bank, who is standing

still within the movement of trees, as if

one step would lose him gradually

into the stars. he may be

the one who has leaned

his head into the air underneath and seen

another dawn glowing like a deep fish,

seen, as here above,

the citizens in the morning

growing tinier, weightless

and lost from their families,

preparing for beautiful

supermarkets, for an endlessness

of downward flight under an expanse of snow.