Coal

 

 

He who spends his days removing

mountains and dropping them into streams

is a man of few words.  Some are numbers:

wages, mortgage, boat, a daughter’s 

tuition.  Some are names,

like “Bob,” which he must speed-dial

if he’s ever “approached”

by people who mean no good, who want

to ask questions.  Beyond these

is “the company,” strong and wise;

not a friend, more than a friend.

A mass of terms – little mysteries

of working a big machine – fills

his mind and pride.  But anyone 

would know what having one of those

is like.  Anyone employed.

Around all his words is the big word “job,” 

like a wire fence.  And if a man

should cross it and elude the guards

and wave, say, a bottle of black water,

an x-ray or a bag of dust

at him, the remover of mountains

will think, He looks like someone, could be me.

Which doesn’t matter because he isn’t.

    

 




Know It When You See It

 

 

One would have to go very far back, or down,

or in, whatever those terms mean,

for peace to come this way.  Like spring.

No announcement: nothing to talk on.

The guns not suddenly silent, only

a noticing that they are, a breath.

No treaties or parades; vines seconding

the motion of a shattered wing.

The tranquil hulk a platform only

for coral.  Coral returning.

 

And the men, still mostly men, who return

will be wrong somehow.  The type

that women said they wanted,

but now they must decide,

women I mean, if these men

who never raise a hand to them

or a voice, and are terrifyingly

good with the few new children –

weeping for hours by the cradleside –

are men, and strong.

 

Even their stories, veterans’ lies

upon which any civilization

is based, are strange.  No boasting, 

even about terror.  But the gung-ho

commandos who were found

changed into topiary.  The retreats

from enemy bodies who looked too dead.

The sardonic figure who emerged

from jungle, impervious to bullets,

and had never been named or expected.



 



The Blessing

 

 

Absurd to think she read my poem

or story, heard my song, or watched

my video.  I was told she could barely 

sit upright by the end, or see, 

let alone understand.  Yet somehow 

I recall an endlessly disappointed

and frightened voice complaining that my hero

resembled no one in the family,

that the girl wasn’t nice, the villains

unlike pogromchiks, whom I had let go

again unpunished.  That metaphor

was not what she knew as language, even

in America.  That my colors

weren’t those she could see from corners

where her chair docked for the day,

or had seen in airshafts.  That the music

was loud, the picture on the television

bad.  As I say, it’s absurd to imagine

she would have looked, or that I

would have asked, or that she somehow turned,

still querulous and weeping, 

to join her stream of complaint

to a deeper mourning 

from distant, scattered figures who

had nothing, but nonetheless hurried

forward at her pained gesture to give what they could.



 

 



From the Archives

 

 

Today I have the kid, and will keep him

almost to the point where his mumbling

about homework he has yet to do,

and his mother’s recriminations, on which 

I will hang up tomorrow, become tears.

We drive through the northern suburbs, stopping

for lunch, then drinks, at one or two

houses grander than he would see

in a lifetime ruled by his mother.

The owners, heart-attacked at forty,

impotent, hungry for taste or a reputation

for taste, are my clients and, I like to think,

friends; their wives my bedmates.  Hopefully, 

though timid, wordless, fat, the kid 

will not embarrass me. 

 

He will see the wealthy homes as ships,

destroyers, carriers lined up

on *Victory at Sea* to attack the Japs.

He will eat whatever he is given, 

then walk as soon as he can 

outside to observe the lack of sidewalks,

the lawns descending weedless to the streets,

the vistas of closed drapery, trees,

many birds and silence otherwise.

Concealed by a tree from the house,

its adults meaningless, 

their kids as menacing as any,

he sits on an iron bench and thinks

he will have a place like this

or the bigger one down the street,

though not exactly in the future.

The forward dimension, time,

for him is already imponderable, 

blocked; the direction 

of fulfillment, though he doesn’t grasp

the distinction yet, is vertical.

It is reached, the gap crossed,

to the extent it can be,

by a certain intensity:

a fantasy of will, 

an ecstasy of not being understood,

an imperceptible exultant hate. 

*He prepareth a table for me

in the presence of mine enemies* might

express it if he thought religiously,

or at all; but what fills his mind

are proto-thoughts – the kind

to which words come too late and seem unequal.

*Death is one.  It meanders

across his mind like fat through meat.

He also tells himself *Someday

the secret archives will be opened* …

He knows they are already full.