Robert Penn Warren
The old buccaneers are leaving
now. They have had
their fill. A blue halo
has circled the imitation
gold, and the real, and they
are bewildered. All
is shimmering. The sea
is shimmering like a marvelous belly
viewed from the outside
during a blizzard in the mountains.
For each other
they are shimmering.
They do not know what splendor
is balanced
atop the foresail now, what
it is that is moving, moving
toward them, down.
They rub their bodies.
The skin is a fine lace
of salt and disease,
and something is moving
just under the skin
and they know
that it is not blood.
Flight
for K.
Like a glum cricket
the refrigerator is singing
and just as I am convinced
that it is the only noise
in the building, a pot falls
in 2B. The neighbors on
both sides of me suddenly
realize that they have not
made love to their wives
since 1947. The racket
multiplies. The man downhall
is teaching his dog to fly.
The fish are disgusted
and beat their heads blue
against a cold aquarium. I too
lose control and consider
the dust huddled in the corner
a threat to my endurance.
Were you here, we would not
tolerate mongrels in the air,
nor the conspiracies of dust.
We would drive all night,
your head tilted on my shoulder.
At dawn, I would nudge you
with my anxious fingers and say,
Already we are in Idaho.
Grace
The one thing that sustained
the faces on the four
corners of the intersection
did not unite them,
did not invite others to join.
Their inner eyes as the light
changed did not change,
but focused madly precise
on the one thing until
it scared them. Then
they all went to the movies.
I was just beginning
to understand when one
who represented the desperate
shrunken state came toward
me, bisecting the whole mass
of concrete into triangles;
and handed me a package.
I carried it with me for
the rest of my life, never
opening it, telling no one.
The Last Days of April
Through the ceiling comes
the rain to cool my lover
and me. The lime carpeting
darkens, and when we cross
to retrieve our glasses
of gin from the mantle, our
feet sink as into drifts
of leaves. We have a deep
thirst, for it is the end
of April, and we know that
a great heat is coming soon
to deaden these passions.
Uncle
Homer was a ventriloquist;
so drunk, one day he projected his voice
so far it just
kept going and going (still is).
Joe Ray insisted
Homer was afraid of work, but he’s
had 130 jobs or more
just recently, he didn’t think in terms
of careers.
The family never
cared for Homer
even after
he ginned himself into a wall
and died balling
with a deaf-mute in an empty Kansas City hall.
Joe Ray insisted
Homer would have made a fine dentist
had he kept his mouth shut; that is,
had he lived. Still is
heard about the house
jiggling glasses,
his devoted astral voice coming back.
How the Friends Met
So what do you do? What
can you do? Leave the room
altogether? Crazy.
Your eyes are the wallpaper;
makes it tough, doesn’t it?
Peel them away. You call
that pain? It’s not. It’s insane.
You make it. Keep going.
Confront a lightpole. Smoke
a mythopoeic
cigarette forever.
Mark a spot with your
mysterious shoe; scratch
Hate in the sidewalk.
A man will come along
and there will be reason
enough to knife him. Sure
enough, there comes along
a worse-than-Bogart….
There you are, smoking
the lightpole. The spot
you marked appears between
your eyes, and then becomes
a sidewalk, and the man
walks