hates the glory
of the church she
abandoned for the
glory
of her Ozark cave.
She gave
her sons to the wolves.
Rescue
For the first time the only
thing you are likely to break
is everything because
it is a dangerous
venture. Danger invites
rescue—I call it loving.
We’ve got a good thing
going—I call it rescue.
Nicest thing ever to come
between steel cobwebs, we hope
so. A few others should get
around to it, I can’t understand
it. There is plenty of room,
clean windows, we start our best
engines, a-rumm … everything is
relevant. I call it loving.
The Mirror
She tells me
that I can
see right through
her, but I
look and can
see nothing:
so we go
ahead and
kiss. She is
fine glass, I
say, throwing
her to the
floor….
The Tabernacle
Poor God was always there,
but He was something sinister,
and we worshiped the fear
we had of Him,
we had of the church on Tenth,
near the end
of the whole dark city.
The way the family
gathered murmuring on a Sunday,
surreptitious, solemn,
down to the midwest harlem
to give our worn
and rusty souls an airing—
grandmother swearing
at Ruthanna’s hoop ear-rings,
and Uncle Barrington,
hesitant, knowing what would come,
stealing his Sunday swill of rum
invariably. Once there, it was not
as bad as we had thought;
it was not God at all, but
Pentecostal
joy. A man would wrestle
with his soul, and all
the other sinners cheered,
and soon we heard
the voices of another tongue—
garbled, and far too
inflated for us
to understand who
taught them how to sing such songs.
Late Harvest
I look up and see
a white buffalo
emerging from the
enormous red gates
of a cattle truck
lumbering into
the mouth of the sun.
The prairie chickens
do not seem to fear
me; neither do the
girls in cellophane
fields, near me, hear me
changing the flat tire
on my black tractor.
I consider screaming
to them; then, night comes.
Today I Am Falling
A sodium pentothal landscape,
a bud about to break open—
I want to be there, ambassador
to the visiting blossoms, first
to breathe their smothered, secret
odors. Today I am falling, falling,
falling in love, and desire
to leave this place forever.
II
from The Oblivion Ha-Ha
(1970)
Poem
High in Hollywood Hills a door opens:
a man disguised as a man appears,
sunglasses on his nose, a beard.
He can smell the flowers—camellia,
bougainvillea—the word,
itself a dream; the reality of the scene
was in the Chinese
