New and Selected Poems Read Online Free PDF

faintly toward
The new century. Innocent. Why not?
All of them like ragdolls of the period
With those chubby porcelain heads
That shut their long eyelashes as you lay them down.
    Â 
In a kind of perpetual summer twilight . . .
One can even make out the shadow of the tripod and the black hood
That must have been quivering in the breeze.
One assumes that they all stayed up late squinting at the stars,
And were carried off to bed by their mothers and big sisters.
While the dogs remained behind:
Pedigreed bitches pregnant with bloodhounds.
Shirt
To get into it
As it lies
Crumpled on the floor
Without disturbing a single crease
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Respectful
Of the way I threw it down
Last night
The way it happened to land
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Almost managing
The impossible contortions
Doubling back now
Through a knotted sleeve
Begotten of the Spleen
The Virgin Mother walked barefoot
Among the land mines.
She carried an old man in her arms
Like a howling babe.
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The earth was an old people’s home.
Judas was the night nurse,
Emptying bedpans into the river Jordan,
Tying people on a dog chain.
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The old man had two stumps for legs.
St. Peter came pushing a cart
Loaded with flying carpets.
They were not flying carpets.
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They were piles of bloody diapers.
The Magi stood around
Cleaning their nails with bayonets.
The old man gave little Mary Magdalene
    Â 
A broken piece of a mirror.
She hid in the church outhouse.
When she got thirsty she licked
The steam off the glass.
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That leaves Joseph. Poor Joseph,
Standing naked in the snow.
He only had a rat
To load his suitcases on.
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The rat wouldn’t run into its hole.
Even when the searchlights came on
Up in the guard towers
And caught them standing there.
Toy Factory
My mother works here,
And so does my father.
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It’s the night shift.
At the assembly line,
They wind toys up
To inspect their springs.
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The seven toy members
Of the firing squad
Point their rifles,
And lower them quickly.
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The one being shot at
Falls and gets up,
Falls and gets up.
His blindfold is just painted on.
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The toy gravediggers
Don’t work so well.
Their spades are heavy,
Their spades are much too heavy.
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Perhaps that’s how
It’s supposed to be?
The Little Tear Gland That Says
Then there was Johann,
the carousel horse—
except he wasn’t really a carousel horse.
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He grew up in “the naive realism of the Wolffian school
which without close scrutiny regards
logical necessity and reality as identical.”
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On Sundays, his parents took him
to the undertaker’s for cookies.
“All these people flying in their dreams,”
he thought.
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Standing before the Great Dark Night of History,
a picture of innocence
held together by his mother’s safety pins,
short and bowlegged.
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Cool reflection soon showed
there were openings among the signatories of
      death sentences . . .
plus free high leather boots that squeak.
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On his entrance exam he wrote:
“The act of torture consists of various strategies
meant to increase the imagination
of the
Homo sapiens
.”
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And then . . . the Viennese waltz.
The Stream
    for Russ Banks
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The ear threading
the eye
    Â 
all night long
the ear
on a long errand
for the eye
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through the thickening
pine
white birch
over no-man’s-land
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pebbles
is it
compact in their anonymity
their gravity
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accidents of location
abstract necessity
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water
which takes such pains
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to convince me
it is flowing
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•
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Summoning me
to be
two places at once
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to drift
the length
of its chill
its ache
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hand white
at the knuckles
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live bait
the old hide-and-seek
in and out
of the swirl
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luminous verb
carnivorous verb
innocent as sand
under its blows
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•
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An insomnia as big
as the stars’
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always
on the brink—
as it were
of some deeper utterance
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some harsher
reckoning
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at daybreak
lightly
oh