Circles on the Water Read Online Free PDF

goes out in little dumpcars smoking,
    but even less does he want to be in Today’s Action Army
    in Vietnam, in the Dominican Republic, in Guatemala,
    in death that hurts.
    In him are lectures on small groups, Jacksonian democracy,
    French irregular verbs, the names of friends
    around him in the classroom in Gary in the pillshaped afternoon
    where tomorrow he will try and fail his license to live.

Half past home
    Morning rattles the tall spike fence.
    Already the old are set out to get dirty in the sun
    spread like drying coverlets around the garden
    by straggly hedges smelling of tomcat.
    From the steep oxblood hospital
    hunched under its miser’s frown of roof,
    dishes mutter, pumps work, an odor
    of disinfectant slops into the street
    toward the greygreen quadrangles of the university.
    Pickets with the facts of their poverty hoisted on sticks
    turn in the street like a tattered washing.
    The trustees decline to negotiate
    for this is a charitable institution.
    Among the houses of the poor and black nearby
    a crane nods waist-high among broken bedrooms.
    Already the university digs foundations
    to be hallowed with the names of old trustees.
    The dish and bottle washers, the orderlies march
    carrying the crooked sick toward death on their backs.
    The neighborhood is being cured of poverty.
    Busses will carry the moppushers in and out.
    Are the old dying too slowly in their garden?
    Under elms spacious and dusty
    as roominghouse porches the old men mutter
    that they are closing the north wing,
    for the land is valuable when you get down to it
    and they will, down to the prairie dog bones.
    This is the Home for Incurables: and the old are.
    Many are the diseases that trustees are blind to,
    or call incurable, like their own blindness
    wide as the hoarse wind blows, mile after mile
    where the city smokes sweetly as a barbecue
    or sizzles like acid under nobody’s sun.

Simple-song
    When we are going toward someone we say
    you are just like me
    your thoughts are my brothers and sisters
    word matches word
    how easy to be together.
    When we are leaving someone we say
    how strange you are
    we cannot communicate
    we can never agree
    how hard, hard and weary to be together.
    We are not different nor alike
    but each strange in our leather bodies
    sealed in skin and reaching out clumsy hands
    and loving is an act
    that cannot outlive
    the open hand
    the open eye
    the door in the chest standing open.

For Jeriann’s hands
    for Jeriann Hilderley
    When I hug you, you are light as a grasshopper.
    Your bones are ashwood the Indians used for bows.
    You bend and spring back and can burn the touch,
    a woman with hands that know how to pick things up.
    Stiff as frozen rope words poke out
    lopsided, in a fierce clothespin treble.
    You move with a grace that is all function,
    you move like a bow drawn taut and released.
    Sometimes your wrists are transparent.
    Sometimes an old buffalo man
    frozen on the prairie stares from your face.
    Your hair and eyes are the color of creek
    running in the afternoon opaque under slanted sun.
    You are stubborn and hardy as a rubber mat.
    You are light as a paper airplane and as elegant
    and you can fly.
    The secret of moving heavy objects is balance, you said
    in a grey loft full of your sculpture,
    figures piercing or hung on boundaries,
    leaping their thresholds, impaled on broken mirrors,
    passing and gone into new space.
    Objects born from you are mended, makeshift.
    Their magic rides over rust and splinters and nails,
    over shards of glass and cellophane beginning to rip.
    Fragments of your work litter the banks of minor highways,
    shattered faces of your icons lie on Hoboken junkyards,
    float as smog over the East River,
    grow black with the dust of abandoned coalbins.
    One summer you made small rooms of wax
    where people stood in taut ellipses staring and blind
    with tenderness, with agony, with question and domestic terror.
    They were candles burning.
    You wanted to cast them in bronze but could not