New and Selected Poems Read Online Free PDF Page A

up.
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A wall all by itself,
Poorly lit, beckoning,
But no sense of the room,
Not even a hint
Of why it is I remember
So little and so clearly:
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The fly I was watching,
The details of its wings
Glowing like turquoise.
Its feet, to my amusement
Following a minute crack—
An eternity
Around that simple event.
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And nothing else; and nowhere
To go back to;
And no one else
As far as I know to verify.
The Terms
A child crying in the night
Across the street
In one of the many dark windows.
That, too, to get used to,
Make part of your life.
Like this book of astronomy
Which you open with equal apprehension
By the light of table lamp,
And your birdlike shadow on the wall.
A sleepless witness at the base
Of this expanding immensity,
Simultaneous in this moment
With all of its empty spaces,
Listening to a child crying in the night
With a hope,
It will go on crying a little longer.
Eyes Fastened with Pins
How much death works,
No one knows what a long
Day he puts in. The little
Wife always alone
Ironing death’s laundry.
The beautiful daughters
Setting death’s supper table.
The neighbors playing
Pinochle in the backyard
Or just sitting on the steps
Drinking beer. Death,
Meanwhile, in a strange
Part of town looking for
Someone with a bad cough,
But the address is somehow wrong,
Even death can’t figure it out
Among all the locked doors . . .
And the rain beginning to fall.
Long windy night ahead.
Death with not even a newspaper
To cover his head, not even
A dime to call the one pining away,
Undressing slowly, sleepily,
And stretching naked
On death’s side of the bed.
The Prisoner
He is thinking of us.
These leaves, their lazy rustle
That made us sleepy after lunch
So we had to lie down.
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He considers my hand on her breast,
Her closed eyelids, her moist lips
Against my forehead, and the shadows of trees
Hovering on the ceiling.
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It’s been so long. He has trouble
Deciding what else is there.
And all along the suspicion
That we do not exist.
Empire of Dreams
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.
Hour before the curfew.
A small provincial city.
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.
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I am on a street corner
Where I shouldn’t be.
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.
Prodigy
I grew up bent over
a chessboard.
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I loved the word
endgame
.
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All my cousins looked worried.
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It was a small house
near a Roman graveyard.
Planes and tanks
shook its windowpanes.
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A retired professor of astronomy
taught me how to play.
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That must have been in 1944 .
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In the set we were using,
the paint had almost chipped off
the black pieces.
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The white King was missing
and had to be substituted for.
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I’m told but do not believe
that that summer I witnessed
men hung from telephone poles.
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I remember my mother
blindfolding me a lot.
She had a way of tucking my head
suddenly under her overcoat.
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In chess, too, the professor told me,
the masters play blindfolded,
the great ones on several boards
at the same time.
Baby Pictures of Famous Dictators
The epoch of a streetcar drawn by horses,
The organ-grinder and his monkey.
Women with parasols. Little kids in rowboats
Photographed against a cardboard backdrop depicting an idyllic sunset
At the fairgrounds where they all went to see
The two-headed calf, the bearded
Fat lady who dances the dance of seven veils.
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And the great famine raging through India . . .
Fortunetelling white rat pulling a card out of a shoebox
While Edison worries over the lightbulb,
And the first model of the sewing machine
Is delivered in a pushcart
To a modest white-fenced home in the suburbs,
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Where there are always a couple of infants
Posing for the camera in their sailors’ suits,
Out there in the garden overgrown with shrubs.
Lovable little mugs smiling