1
Breakfast for hundreds of believers
is opening morning with devotions.
Willing to think the inexperienced dawn light babied me,
I used to sit by a hyacinth—
(some grotto)—and pray in the breath
of its distracting perfume.
To pray was like living on the road
that goes on to someone else’s house
even when it is too far to walk.
Now I’m too far away from hometown streets
to know any listener, being among strangers approaches
being among the imaginary.
2
The river is a thread, the end licked
to pass through town after town.
To ancestors approaching from the ocean
this land looked just what they had hoped for.
Where they set foot they knew neither the plants
nor animals nor what kind of people.
Their German Bluebird was gold after all.
But they kept on naming. They named a nation
for its feet, its stomach, the back
of its head. But the people,
who already knew about themselves,
called the newcomers murder mysteries.
3
It is a fine day for a strange place.
I’ve taken a room above a bird’s nest.
It is above a pleading noise.
There are more nests higher up.
What all these voices want becomes an ingredient
in a gourmet soup I’ve never had.
The room’s decor equals all the roomers
escaping to separate steamy baths, a nylon
of mist over each face in a mirror
like a teller’s window. “Pea soup”
they say of fog, who within their journeys
were straining to see the moment ahead.
4
The sheets are overlaundered and salesmen
rub their elbows raw.
Outside the pane the outdoor bed:
fern shoots over the old fronds, mosquitoes
after blue hairstreaks, smallnesses
runners or laughers could consume.
Violets and lilacs narrowly missing
each other’s season.
They don’t give in to coincidences or mindread.
They lean on one another and divine
room for the blossom, for the chrysalis’ door,
for the wakers.
5
A botany class comes close
where I am wandering the spongy ground around
a spring. How unlikely they will identify me,
stop and pronounce the existence of anyone
moving faster than locust or colt’s foot.
But then, if I could even approach, on foot
or with an extrovert word,
I wouldn’t bow out to meditate, awkward
as that duck, green and bronze, strolling grass-spattered
through bamboo. Strangers
are so fast, no slowing you, no halting the wings
of the hummingbird.
6
There are no longer single rooms:
any bedroom has an unused bed
beside my rumpled one.
I sleep as if beside a corrective mirror
which relieves the maid—
while grassflowers and mosquitoes
crop up, break in, and harry her
on my side of the mirror.
Finally I place you in the pane
you come through like a dove
and the dove’s echo from towns I’ve just
passed through: me suggesting you.
7
Say I know you shallowly, I know you like
a firefly following a plane, no better.
Say it’s too early spring for fireflies.
Say I see you planing on the tennis court,
running off your fat, drumming out your sweat,
the art of your oil and water
like two kinds of painting.
Say I paint you sitting outside full courts
with your one white glove on
as it gets dark and you leave.
It all seems so familiar, the dark,
you’d think somebody would be.
8
Your face once lay on mimeograph purple
as you fell to dreaming against the only
printing your work had had. I read your words—
and was happy they were you
but you were also that extended body
that didn’t wake up a word.
As for words, this town speaks in a dialect
of mass bells, fire sirens, wind warnings.
Which is which and what should I do?
Go to the center of the room, kneel
at a pew, protect my skin.
But I read your words and am happy they are you.
9
These are the people I have known: the precautious
ferris wheel operator, the masseur disinfecting
his metal house with carpet broom,
the rootbound man carved from a fern-tree,
the wooden boy saint
with lotioned hands behind his back.
But that sailor, that sailor was unreal.
He found someone for everybody.
He gently shouldered two of everything onto his boat,
mating dragonflies of analagous colors
that neither sting nor bite.
He started the world over with deuces.
10
Dear, I pray you think of me, not as a tourist,
but as an enormous melancholy salesman
opening the window and leaning out
where you are in springtime—
so that all the samples fall out of my pockets
into nests and forsythia bushes.
For now I have nothing to show you.
Now I turn back into the cell and find a face
the face of a clock. And a voice the voice of
a cricket. And me suggesting you as one dove suggesting
another in another town
believes in the empty air.
Ohio 1975
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