Post-Elegy
24 Landings
25 Ballad (American, 21st Century)
26 Hoax Bomb
27 Some Notes on Human Relations
28 Image: Psychotherapy
29 21st Century Museum
30 For Harper, 20 Months Old
31 Allegory of the Boat
32 Post-Elegy
33 On Breathing
34 Envoi
Notes
Acknowledgments
[T]he past is not closed, it receives meaning from our present actions.
CZESŁAW MIŁOSZ
POST-
THE DEBT
He entered through the doorway of his debt.
Workmen followed, bringing box after box
until everything he’d gathered in his life
inhabited his debt. He opened the sliding door to the yard—
a breeze blew through the spaces of his debt,
blew the bills from the table onto the floor.
The grove of birches and, farther,
the beach of driftwood and broken shells
were framed by the enormous window—
that lenslike architectural focus of his debt.
He drove into town on the coiled springs
of his debt; when he bought fish at the market
he proffered his MasterCard. The dark woods
stretching inland were pocked by lightfilled cubes
of debt. The very words he used to describe
his surroundings were glittering facets
of debt. Each visit, we smoked on the deck
and, over drinks, he reminded me
with love and genuine pride: one day
all this debt would be mine.
POST-ELEGY
After the plane went down
the cars sat for weeks in long-term parking.
Then, one by one, they began to disappear
from among the cars of the living.
———
When we went to retrieve his
you drove the rows of the lot
while I pushed the panic button on the fob.
———
Inside, a takeout coffee cup
sat in its cradle,
a skim of decay
floating beneath the lid.
I’d ridden in his car
many times but never driven it.
———
When I turned the key
the radio
opened unexpectedly,
like an eye.
———
I was conscious of the ground
passing just beneath the floor—
and the trapped air in the tires
lifting my weight. I realized
I was steering homeward
the down payment
of some house we might live in
for the rest of our lives.
SWALLOWS
We place our blanket—
the child inside you
and you and I
radiating from her.
We open our books;
the arbor curls over.
Then: swallows
skimming the surface
of the field
as if on lines, glinting
like hydrofoils
cutting a bay.
Today we saw
the child move sharply
in the dark of you—
though still
just sand in a screen,
her 2-D cockpit.
And now: swallows
scratching lines
on the glass of the air.
To the child curled
in her window
of sound
we are nothing.
We watched her heart
blur
