Zone Journals Read Online Free PDF

cheeks,
The smell of chlorophyll
climbing like desperation across my skin:
The maple is flocked, and the sky is choked with cloud tufts
That print a black alphabet
along the hillsides and short lawns,
Block gutturals and half thoughts
Against the oily valves opening and closing in the leaves,
Edgy, autumnal morning,
April, stretched out at ease above the garden,
that rises and bows
To whatever it fancies:
Precious stones, the wind’s cloth, Prester John or the boy-king of
Babylon,
April,
dank, unseasonable winter of the dead.
    â€” 27 April 1985
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    â€”Visiting Emily Dickinson
    Â 
    We stood in the cupola for a while,
JT, Joe Langland and I,
And then they left and I sat
Where she’d sat, and looked through the oak tree toward the hat
factory
And down to the river, the railroad
    Â 
    Still there, the streets where the caissons growled
with their blue meat

Still there, and Austin and Sue’s still there
Next door on the other side.
And the train station at the top of the hill.
And I sat there and I sat there
    Â 
    A decade or so ago
One afternoon toward the end of winter, the oak tree
Floating its ganglia like a dark cloud
outside the window.
Or like a medusa hung up to dry.
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    And nothing came up through my feet like electric fire.
And no one appeared in a white dress
with white flowers
Clutched in her white, tiny hands:
No voice from nowhere said anything
about living and dying in 1862.
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    But I liked it there. I liked
The way sunlight lay like a shirtwaist over the window seat.
I liked the view down to the garden.
I liked the boxwood and evergreens
And the wren-like, sherry-eyed figure
    Â 
    I kept thinking I saw there
as the skies started to blossom
And a noiseless noise began to come from the orchard—
And I sat very still, and listened hard
And thought I heard it again.
And then there was nothing, nothing at all,
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    The slick bodice of sunlight
smoothed out on the floorboards,

The crystal I’d turned inside of
Dissembling to shine and a glaze somewhere near the window
panes,
Voices starting to drift up from downstairs,
somebody calling my name …
    â€” 6 May 1985
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    â€”Ficino tells us the Absolute
Wakens the drowsy, lights the obscure,
revives the dead,
Gives form to the formless and finishes the incomplete.
What better good can be spoken of?
    â€” 9 May 1985
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    â€”In the first inch of afternoon, under the peach trees,
The constellations of sunlight
Sifting along their courses among the posed limbs,
It’s hard to imagine the north wind
wishing us ill,
Revealing nothing at all and wishing us ill
In God’s third face.
The world is an ampersand,
And I lie in sweet clover,
bees like golden earrings
Dangling and locked fast to its white heads,
Watching the clouds move and the constellations of light move
Through the trees, as they both will
When the wind weathers them on their way,
When the wind weathers them to that point
where all things meet.
    â€”15 May 1985
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    â€”For two months I’ve wanted to write about Edgar Allan Poe
Who lived for a year where I live now
In 1826,
the year that Mr. Jefferson died.
He lived, appropriately enough, at 13 West Range:
One room with a fireplace and bed,
one table and candlestick,
A small trunk and a washstand.
There’s a top hat and a black hat box on the trunk lid.
There’s a gray cape on the clothes rack
and a bowl of mold-haired fruit
On the washstand.
There’s a mirror and cane-back chair.
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    Over the door, in Latin, are bronze words
About the Magni Poetae which I don’t believe
Any more now than I used to before I lived here.
Still, there’s something about the place
that draws me
A couple of times a week
To peer through the slab-glass door,
To knock twice with my left hand on the left doorjamb
Each time I go there,
hoping to call the spirits up
Or just to say hello.
He died in fear and away from home.
    Â 
    I went to his grave once in Baltimore,
a young lieutenant
Intent on