Ballistics Read Online Free PDF Page A

“the March of Dimes”?
    She showed such patience for a dog
    without breeding while I went on—
    in a whisper now after shouts from a window—
    about “helmet laws” and “tag sale”
    wishing I only had my camera
    so I could carry a picture of her home with me.
    On the loopy way back to my hotel—
    after some long and formal goodbyes—
    I kept thinking how I would have loved
    to hang her picture over the mantel
    where my maternal grandmother
    now looks down from her height as always,
    silently complaining about the choice of the frame.
    Then, before dinner each evening
    I could stand before the image of that very dog,
    a glass of wine in hand,
    submitting all of my troubles and petitions
    to the court of her dark-brown, adoring eyes.

Addendum
    What I forgot to tell you in that last poem
    if you were paying attention at all
    was that I really did love her at the time.
    The maritime light in the final lines
    might have seemed contrived,
    as false as any puffed up Italian sonnet,
    and the same could be said
    for the high cliffside flowers
    I claimed to have introduced to her hair
    and sure, the many imaginary moons
    I said were circling our bed as we slept,
    the cosmos enclosed by the walls of the room.
    But the truth is we loved
    to take long walks on the windy shore,
    not the shore between the sea of her
    and the symbolic land of me,
    but the real shore of empty shells,
    the sun rising, the water running up and back.

On the Death of a Next-Door Neighbor
    So much younger and with a tall, young son
    in the house above ours on a hill,
    it seemed that death had blundered once again.
    Was it poor directions, the blurring rain,
    or the too-small numerals on the mailbox
    that sent his dark car up the wrong winding driveway?
    Surely, it was me he was looking for—
    overripe, childless, gaudy with appetite,
    the one who should be ghosting over the rooftops
    not standing barefooted in this kitchen
    on a sun-shot October morning
    after eight days and nights of downpour,
    me with my presumptuous breathing,
    my arrogant need for coffee,
    my love of the colorful leaves beyond the windows.
    The weight of my clothes, not his,
    might be hanging in the darkness of a closet today,
    my rake idle, my pen across a notebook.
    The harmony of this house, not his,
    might be missing a voice,
    the hallways jumpy with the cry of the telephone—
    if only death had consulted his cracked leather map,
    then bent to wipe the fog
    from the windshield with an empty sleeve.

Separation
    With only a two-and-a-half-inch wooden goose
    to keep me company at this desk,
    I am beginning a new life of discipline.
    No more wandering out in thunderstorms
    hoping to be hit by a bolt of lightning
    from the raised hand of Randall Jarrell.
    No more standing at an open window
    with my lyre strings finely tuned
    waiting for a stray zephyr to blow my way.
    Instead I will report here every morning
    and bend over my work like St. Jerome
    with his cowl, quill, and a skull for a paperweight.
    And the small white goose with his yellow
    feet and beak and a black dot for an eye
    is more than enough companionship for me.
    He is well worth the dollar I paid for him
    in a roadside trinket shop in New Mexico
    and more familiar to me than the household deities
    of this guest cottage in the woods—
    two porcelain sphinxes on the mantel
    and a pale, blank-eyed Roman bust on a high shelf
    on this first morning without you—
    me holding a coffee I forgot to pay for
    and the gods of wind and sun contending in the crowded trees.

   
four
     

Adage
    When it’s late at night and branches
    are banging against the windows,
    you might think that love is just a matter
    of leaping out of the frying pan of yourself
    into the fire of someone else,
    but it’s a little more complicated than that.
    It’s more like trading the two birds
    who might be hiding in that bush
    for the one you are not holding in your hand.
    A wise man once said that love
    was like forcing a horse to drink
    but