Wakefulness: Poems Read Online Free

blue jays and fronds appear,
    bronzed with a special effect of light, that says
    it only to outdoors. To imagine what lies outside it
    you would have to be a king or confidence man. And alas,
    we have other plans for you. You are to come to see us
    this evening, in the confusion of evening, to test our reflexes,
    to speak to the dressmaker’s dummy, and derive of it what comfort you can.
    Your horoscope says so. What sign are you? Aw, Libra
    with Pisces rising. Then I command you back to the cold
    that you like so much, even though I had second thoughts
    about it and everything. Can’t you see the bear’s paw
    prints? They are elusively alive, held up by the trainer’s
    hoop, to be an example
    to the ferocious wilderness. Here, take these herbs.
    So many things, so many role models.
    Their eagerness dances in the firelight.
    We can’t just say no to them, they have to live us
    too. And in places where the water has ebbed the sky is midnight blue,
    like ink spreading from a nib. They’re all here, the catchers,
    umpires, men in blue flannel suits, women
    with a trace of tears like re-embroidered lace,
    dusty with diamonds, seams in place. There is the mother;
    she calls to the son. The tortoise and the hare
    have come to tolerate us. Out on the lagoon
    macaws are coughing. It is important to respect our situation.
    One of them tries to get back to “normal,”
    but the place is too exaggerated. Madame Nola is here.
    And the bishop’s children. And silly Irmgard.
    And Rodney’s commando. The teacher’s pet. The cigar baron.
    Marshal Tito. The young Eleanor Roosevelt.

DEEPLY INCISED
    If this is july, why does it look like August?
    Sadly growing up into the real world
    I don’t even ask these questions myself.
    Why are the shutters drawn
    over that restaurant?
    The moon’s backwash is like a deeply incised
    hairnet against the stadium.
    Bats drool into the gutter.
    If everybody is so intent on illustrating what they know ,
    why is the ant syllabus closed?

TROPICAL SEX
    Yes, making a point of using it
    makes a point, and otherwise all is but fish scales
    and fish delivery—the clear-eyed blue trough of song
    in whose pit I stumbled. O Lord,
    help me to get over it. That’s better, for a minute
    there I thought I was a goner
    and now I brushed up this interesting world
    of lutanists and lunacy, and afterlife
    not unlike the one we were used to—
    Gosh, it’s so thrilling,
    everyone is so nice,
    one had almost forgotten chiggers existed,
    and bedpans, and dumb ugly coffers
    like the one we lived in.
    But that is only a sign now.
    Be warned. A slight distance.
    Or picture an insect struggling.
    But it’s going to be all right, I tell you.
    We can live in The Heights and conjecture interestingly
    about how life is made, how a man is paid
    after all the contracts and ledgers are signed, blotted
    in the sun. And surely one can stagger then,
    get up and stagger to the nearest public telephone
    and make slurping sounds at an invisible opponent: gone, warned
    away, washed away. This siding came in with a crumpled
    building already on it. Now only frogs can compute
    the earth-sign that led gradually to dementia and panic.
    The storage place is over there. I can see thistles
    out of the corners of my eyes. It must be we are waiting
    on another’s aggression, handmaidens to the very plot
    that would destroy us. We can
    manage a giggle or handshake, but in the end the ink seeps through
    and the person who did this wants very much to believe it,
    has put himself inside us for this purpose. O chilblains,
    weather vanes in the aching March wind,
    did you want this ending? For this to happen
    even as we were sitting all nice inside
    the house, and by its hearth, and the brutal call
    of the scarecrow fell like a hush over everything?
    My friend thinks so—tell her
    the bad news: “up to our ears in debt,” playing a little
    on the tidal lawn, abashed by our failure
    to keep track of the consequences as they happened, and now a