Ballistics Read Online Free PDF Page B

checked in.
    Leave the receiver off the hook
,
    the directory advises,
    and your infant can be monitored by the staff
,
    though the staff
, the entry continues,
    cannot be held responsible for the well-being
    of the baby in question
.
    Fair enough, someone to listen to the baby.
    But the phrase did suggest a baby who is listening,
    lying there in the room next to mine
    listening to my pen scratching against the page,
    or a more advanced baby who has crawled
    down the hallway of the hotel
    and is pressing its tiny, curious ear against my door.
    Lucky for some of us,
    poetry is a place where both are true at once,
    where meaning only one thing at a time spells malfunction.
    Poetry wants to have the baby who is listening at my door
    as well as the baby who is being listened to,
    quietly breathing by the nearby telephone.
    And it also wants the baby
    who is making sounds of distress
    into the curved receiver lying in the crib
    while the girl at reception has just stepped out
    to have a smoke with her boyfriend
    in the dark by the great sway and wash of the North Sea.
    Poetry wants that baby, too,
    even a little more than it wants the others.

Bathtub Families
    is not just a phrase I made up
    though it would have given me pleasure
    to have written those words in a notebook
    then looked up at the sky wondering what they meant.
    No, I saw Bathtub Families in a pharmacy
    on the label of a clear plastic package
    containing one cow and four calves,
    a little family of animals meant to float in your tub.
    I hesitated to buy it because I knew
    I would then want the entire series of Bathtub Families,
    which would leave no room in the tub
    for the turtles, the pigs, the seals, the giraffes, and me.
    It’s enough just to have the words,
    which alone make me even more grateful
    that I was born in America
    and English is my mother tongue.
    I was lucky, too, that I waited
    for the pharmacist to fill my prescription,
    otherwise I might not have wandered
    down the aisle with the Bathtub Families.
    I think what I am really saying is that language
    is better than reality, so it doesn’t have
    to be bath time for you to enjoy
    all the Bathtub Families as they float in the air around your head.

Despair
    So much gloom and doubt in our poetry—
    flowers wilting on the table,
    the self regarding itself in a watery mirror.
    Dead leaves cover the ground,
    the wind moans in the chimney,
    and the tendrils of the yew tree inch toward the coffin.
    I wonder what the ancient Chinese poets
    would make of all this,
    these shadows and empty cupboards?
    Today, with the sun blazing in the trees,
    my thoughts turn to the great
    tenth-century celebrator of experience,
    Wa-Hoo, whose delight in the smallest things
    could hardly be restrained,
    and to his joyous counterpart in the western provinces, Ye-Hah.

The Idea of Natural History at Key West
    When I happened to notice myself
    walking naked past a wall-length mirror
    one spring morning
    in a house by the water
    where a friend was letting me stay,
    I looked like one of those silhouettes
    that illustrate the evolution of man,
    but not exactly the most recent figure.
    I seemed to represent a more primitive stage,
    maybe not the round-shouldered ape
    dragging his knuckles on the ground,
    but neither the fully upright hominoid
    ready to put on a suit and head for the office.
    Was it something in the slope of my brow
    or my slack belly?
    Was this the beginning of the Great Regression
    as the anthropologists of tomorrow would call it?
    I was never the smartest monkey on the block,
    I thought to myself in the shower,
    but I was at least advanced enough to be standing
    under a cascade of steaming water,
    and I did have enough curiosity to wonder
    what the next outline in the sequence might look like:
    the man of the future stepping forward
    like the others rising to their hind legs behind him,
    only with a longer stride, a more ample cranium,
    and maybe a set of talons,
    or a pair of useless, cherubic wings.

The