Poetry 365

Our masters are gone and if they returned
Who among us would hear them, who would know
The bodily sound of heaven of the heavenly sound
Of the body, endless and vanishing, that tuned
Our days before the wheeling stars
Were stripped of power? The answer is
None of us here. And what does it mean if we see
The moon-glazed mountains and the town with its silent doors
And water towers, and feel like raising our voices
Just a little, or sometimes during late autumn
When the evening flowers a moment over the western range
And we imagine angels rushing down the air’s cold steps
To wish us well, if we have lost our will,
And do nothing but doze, half hearing the sighs
Of this or that breeze drift aimlessly over the failed farms
And wasted gardens? These days when we waken.
Everything shines with the same blue light
That filled our sleep moments before,
So we do nothing but count the trees, the clouds,
The few birds left; then we decide that we shouldn’t
Be hard on ourselves, that the past was no better
Than now, for hasn’t the enemy always existed,
And wasn’t the church of the world always in ruins?

Minerva stepped out calmly from my head
And I will be forever crowned with blood
There is reason within and sky above my skull
Where Goddess you were buckling on your arms

Of my misfortunes this is not the worst
This almost mortal wound became a star
The secret sorrow which is my despair
Is more than any other soul could hide

I bear with me a suffering of fire
Just as a glow-worm bears his body’s flame
As in a soldier’s heart France is on fire
Just as rich pollen fills the lily’s heart

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The focal length is all wrong, I say
to the meteor shower.

Be calm, they say,
or the chimney swallows will steal

ember by ember
everything keeping you close to him

lying on the lawn, counting stars
shaken from the night’s branches

in summer storm.
I promise to pay the medical bill

for August’s sky: orbits of iron
pith & cloud-seed broken

against our atmosphere.
The telescope we built—

a cardboard tube, Teflon
& mirror—is a close for seeing

only what could have been,
can’t tell you anything

about this moment. Here, light
means destruction. A mattress

dragged across the wet field
means light. The swallows

ember in the chimney.
Lie still, the meteors say

above the apple’s barren
branches. Sometimes

the sky can only be torn apart
with the naked eye.

it is best
to focus your eyes
a little off to one side;
it is better to know things
drained of their color, to fathom
the black horses cropping
at winter grass,
their white jaws that move
in steady rotation, a sweet sound.

And when they file off to shelter
under the trees
you will find the dark circles of snow
pushed aside, earth opening
its single, steadfast gaze:
towards stars ticking by, one by one, overhead,
the given world flaming precisely out of its frame.

Stars through the windshield glinted,
shrunken, delirious as the eyes
of sharks. I heard mother’s
heart (my head
cradled in her elbow’s
crook) chant faster, and father
tramped down the pedal
when his lane was clear. Later,

lungs drowning in my chest, I sucked
at oxygen fresh from a tank. Thin
voices leaked in, trembling
the tent’s wrinkled,
transparent skin. My mother’s
face was a pale smear on the air,
her jacket a haggard ghost. “Doctor,’

father said. (I remembered his brown
palms, coarser than emery cloth
on my back, circling slowly
to draw insomnia from my blood;
the fat scar barnacled on
his thumb would whisper
along my ribs: A man becomes
all that he’s lost.) He rasped,
“Doctor…will he die?” I let

go: he hiss of piped air drowned
his answer. And when I came to,
they were gone. Bones of cold light
flickered above my bed; hot urine
eeled between my legs and froze;
fins, in my fever’s depth, ripped
through swelling tides of sleep:

the blackness swallowed its stars.

Star, that looked so long among the stones
And picked from them, half iron and half dirt,
One; and bent and put it to her lips
And breathed upon it till at last it burned
Uncertainly, among the stars its sisters—
Breathe on me still, star, sister