I
NE-ARMED, one-legged, and one-headed,
The pensioner sits in the sun
He is telling a story to the leaf
Of the new maple in his new yard:
“The Department of the Interior has sent Jack Frost with a
spray-gun
To paint you red.”
The leaf pulls hard
To get away—it believes the man
And a blue Chevrolet sedan
Draws up and leaves a check for the man in the mail-box.
“You’re as good as dead,”
Says the man, with a mocking smile, to the leaf;
And somebody knocks
At the front door and the man doesn’t answer
But sits back in his white board chair
Holding a mallet, by a stake with rainbow rings
And rubs his eyes, and yawns like a dog when the dog
Next door whines and rattles its chain.
He looks at the leaf, as he looks at things,
With mixed feelings
And says, “I’ve changed.”
The good dreams keep haunting
The ghost with a check in the mail-box, the fox
With four quick brown wooden legs.
With one military brush, in the morning,
He pulls forward, or brushes back, the fair
Hair on the living head,
And brushes his firm white teeth, and the porcelain jacket
On his left front tooth, that is dead.
The leaf is alive, and it is going to be dead;
It is like any other leaf.
You keep flipping the coin and it comes down heads
And nobody has ever seen it come down anything but heads
And the man has stopped looking:
it’s heads.
He looks at the leaf-it is green
And says with a flat black leather gesture:
“Never again.”
II
He says: “My arm and leg
My wooden arm, my wooden leg~
Wrestled with each other all last night
The way you whet a carving-knife
Till they stood crisscross against dawn
Over what seemed to me a tomb.
I felt for the dog-tags on the cross.
“I could find one number on the leg
And a different number on the arm.
The grave was empty.
“I thought first, ‘I have arisen,’
And looked up past the cross into the dawn
And saw my own head, burning there,
Go out.
But in the darkness
The leaves fell one by one, like checks,
Into the grave;
And I thought: I am my own grave.
“Then I awoke; I could see the toaster
On its rack over the waffle-iron
And the dew on the wickets; at breakfast the bread
Pops up, all brown, from its—
‘It’s all a dream,’
I said to myself. ‘I am a grave dreaming
That it is a living man.’”
The man, as he has learned to,
Gets up and walks to the door.
As he opens the door
He watches his hand opening the door
And holds out his good hand
And stares at them both, and laughs
But he says softly: “I am a man.”
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