of it” especially, how sweet
and to the point it came over
into English with no effort at all
as I slept through the night. It was heavy,
that table. Two workers were called
from the east meadow to lift
and grunt and carry it
across the room, just those
few yards. Of course one of them
exaggerated the pain in his shoulder.
Not the older, the younger man.
No good reason
to cry out like that. But this
was art. And he did, something
sharp and in the air that
one time. All of them turning then,
however slightly. And there he was,
eyes closed, not much
more than a boy, before
the talk of beauty
started up again.
NEW PAPER
under a pen isn’t
snow. I see the real thing
out my window piled up
in cold sunlight. It just isn’t.
Isn’t a lapse
of anyone’s memory though
that might help me sleep. I’m anyone
at night.
New paper getting inked up
already with words. Revision: inked up
already with these words.
But it is, it is
a cold war movie
about Russia. Lots of tundra, and little
mustached figures bundled up
in the corner, waiting
to do something. On skis.
Or dog sleds. A throw-back. Before
the Revolution? Before the Revolution.
Or not. I can’t make it out
for the snow locked
back in that theater,
voices that blast
the eardrum
straight, such would-be whispers
of love. How is it
that time has
layers and layers,
some of which never move
or fill up. Meanwhile: a favorite word
any poem understands to be
snow’s most legendary suggestion.
The second: melt.
The third: I need to
freeze first.
STUDYING HISTORY
Not the underwater goggles to see
great distances, not the let’s pretend
of the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”
its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sized
dummy at the counter,
stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed to retrieve
his blank good will. Nor is it
book after book of the same war
over remembered time, the old nun called it,
speeded up for the test. Wars of different
colors, weaves and counterweaves,
different surgical instruments, different
agonies via different
far-off blasts, different endlessly
pointless outcomes, different
tiny viruses ingesting
the lungs first, derailing trains there,
breath starting and stopping
at each smoky depot.
I sat at a desk
where we all sat. I opened
that book of flags. Once a woman took up
a whole half page, looming there,
middle of the 19th century, absolutely
glacial because happiness is momentary
and eternity is work, the camera
shrouded, laying
its slow black against white until her
terrible face found me.
Was that
childhood going on? That noise
in the background—half-starved, deranged bird,
half Hallelujah Chorus sung
by the whole town, bad tenors included? Ache
of cold metal on the playground,
one glove lost forever, night,
hours of it, caught
by a streetlight?
Which is simply
the past. In that book now, isn’t
