Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

In Stockholm that icy day

the rain blew from the north and then

by noon the run broke through; by three

the Swedes were outdoors sunning in thin sleeves,

strolling as though it were Easter,

while you and I, like birds of paradise

lost in Lapland, huddled in doorways, bitten through.

Everyone about us smiled at one another; we fought our way

street by street to our hotel, and buried ourselves

under blankets. And sighed at the lonely

displacement. How little we knew then,

newly married, of the cold that finds

the remotest parts of the body to lodge,

that there’s no defense except by slow degrees

to become acclimatized. And for a cold this deep

it would take years of freezing.

The last of my father’s brothers, that year

(a year before my father died at fifty-seven)

Jack refused to say goodbye to anyone –

instead he’d laugh and only turn away

as if his departing guests were simply

stepping out a moment into his yard

to listen to nightingales or smell the jacaranda

and sweet magnolia thick as constellations.

The brothers seemed to have a clock inside them,

set at fifty-six or so, Jack said.

And the best of them go out face down in the leaves

at home, and the worst in a drunk tank

in borrowed shows. Lucky, he said, the man

who knows the number of his days. Lucky

twice over if it’s autumn and the red leaves

and yellow rain haven’t given all their kisses away.

In the Oakland Greyhound all the people were dwarfs, and they pushed and shoved to get on the bus, even cutting in ahead of the two nuns, who were there first. The two nuns smiled sweetly at Miranda and Baby Ellen and played I-see-you behind their fingers when they’d taken their seats. But Jamie could sense that they found her make-up too thick, her pants too tight. They knew she was leaving her husband, and figured she’d turn for a living to whoring. She wanted to tell them what was what, but you can’t talk to a Catholic. The shorter nun carried a bright cut rose wrapped in her two hands.

She’d discussed killing herself, she confessed, with Sarah Miller, her best friend, who’d gone to the same high school in West Virginia. Discussed how she’d do it in the style of Marilyn Monroe. She’d clean the trailer completely, and dress up in her black negligee. She’d use Sarah’s ex-husband’s revolver, and Sarah would listen in the night for the shot, and then listen in case the kids woke up. She’d stand right in the doorway when she did it, so she’d be the first thing he found when he came home late from running around on her, stretched out on the floor like a dark Raggedy Ann doll with her brains in the kitchen. Because already he’d stayed out two nights in a row. That was that, that was all, so long. The note would go like this: No Thanks.

Now that the shooting was started, Bill Houston wanted it to go on forever. Holding his gun out toward the guard and firing was something like spraying paint—trying to get every spot covered. He wanted to make sure that no life was showing through. He didn’t want the guard to have any life left with which he might rise up and kill Bill Houston is return. When the guard was still, lying there at the open mouth of his C-shaped desk with his jaw hanging off to one side and the blood running down his neck and also back into his hair and his ear, Bill shot him twice more in the chest, and would have emptied his shotgun into the guard but caught himself up short, feeling he didn’t want to spend his shells, because shells were more precious than all the money that surrounded them now. The smoke of gunfire lay in sheets along the air around his head, where light played off the fountain’s pond and gave it brilliance. In the center of his heart, the tension of a lifetime dissolved into honey. He heard nothing above the ringing in his ears.

I don’t know why or how

Sometimes in August a maple

Will drop through a leaf burned through

Its tender parts with coral

While the veins keep green –

A rare device of color.

When I found such a one

I acted the despoiler,

Taking it from the woods

To give a friend for a trifle,

But her mind was on good deeds

And I turned shy and fearful.

The boobyhatch’s bars, the guards, the nurses,

The illimitable locks and keys are all arranged

To thwart the hand that continually rehearses

Its ending stroke and raise a barricade

Against destruction-seeking resolution.

Many of us in there would have given all

(But we had nothing) for one small razor blade

Or seventy grains of the comforting amytal.

So I went down in the attitude or prayer,

Yes, to my knees on the cold floor of my cell,

Humped in a corner, a bird with a broken wing,

An asked and asked as fervently and well

As I could guess to do for light in the mists

Of death, until I learned God doesn’t care.

Not only that, he doesn’t care at all,

One way or the other. That is why he exists.

   Yet had I not much

who went out – out! – among those

heartless all around, to look

   and talk sometimes and touch?

   In the big lunatic house

I did not fly apart nor spatter

the walls with myself, not quite.

   I sat with madness in my mouth.

   But never, it was never enough.

Else how could all these books

I did not write bend down my back

   grown now so old and rough?

You know it too! … The charm of funerals in the rain,

the special effects men with their hoses well aimed,

huge drops exploding on

classically beautiful

black umbrellas.

You know them, -

the houses like fat vegetables

stuffed with old lace, ceramics, silverware, dust –

secure as bank vaults.

                                    Who will inherit?

Vittorio is dining with

that Chinese actress again…

Will the kingdom be divided?

Who will keep

the chandeliers in good repair

and tend the lists of public enemies?

He finds the girl in the snow. Only he has seen her. She is so white, only a shred of bright hair might provide a focus for rifle-sights. In a split second, moving more quickly than a lizard, he has snatched her away. She is icy cold. If she is not to die he must carry her quickly down to the lake.

Yes, the sewers collapse,

we have potholes as in New York

and we love them incontinently.

The street is quiet. No one disturbs

the trees when they let fall

their leaves. This is a dream, I’m afraid

and the pavements (unpaved)

are swimming with darkness.

Hairline cracks appear

even in the beautiful autumn sky

supplied by the American conglomerate.

I have a garden in my brain

shaped like a maze

I lose myself

in, it seems. They only look for me

sometimes. I don’t like my dreams.

The nurses quarrel over where I am

hiding. I hear from inside

a bush. One is crisp

and cuts; one pinches. I’d like to push

them each somewhere.

They both think it’s funny

here. The laughter sounds like diesels.

I won’t come out because I’m lazy.

You start to like the needles.

You start to want to crazy.

It was 1945, and it was May.

White crocus bloomed in St. Louis.

The Germans gave in but the war shoved on,

and my father came home from work that evening

tired and washed his hands

not picturing the black-goggled men

with code names fashioning an atomic bomb.

Maybe he loved his wife that evening.

Maybe after eating she smoothed his jawline

in her palm as he stretched out

on the couch with his head in her lap

while Bob Hope spoofed Hirohito on the radio

and they both laughed. My father sold used cars

at the time, and didn’t like it,

so if he complained maybe she held him

an extra moment in her arms,

the heat in the air pressing between them,

so they turned upstairs early that evening,

arm in arm, without saying anything.

It shows up one summer in a greatcoat,

storms through the house confiscating,

says it must be paid and quickly,

says it must take everything.

Your children stare into their cornflakes,

your wife whispers only once to stop it,

because she loves you and she sees it

darken the room suddenly like a stain.

What did you do to deserve it,

ruining breakfast on a balmy day?

Kiss your loved ones. Night is coming.

There was no life without it anyway.

Child or woman. Memory or need. Today, again, I can see you

in her eyes, today her eyes again pursue the ground, look

for some sign, some path to follow away from her route.

Her sweatshirt is zipped to the throat and I am realizing that

we are both then, somehow ashamed of what has suddenly happened

between us. And I’m slowing down a little, as if to let

the spring sun catch up to these hands on the steering wheel,

to these hands that will not ever stop needing breasts to

make them hands, as if to uncover my mouth

and yell across the lawns to her.

I think I came to understand there’s only one storm,

it just keeps circling the earth till it gets to us again,

and that the pounding I felt even in my hair the first

time you innocently brushed it back

was just two ordinary clouds boiling over that edge

where what we can’t see stops and starts

and slamming into each other

with an inevitability we’d eventually have to imitate.

Like smoke in a bottle, like

hunger, sometimes light fits,

wraps itself around a person

or thing and doesn’t let go.

The light becomes a name,

and that name becomes a voice

through which light speaks to us.

Maybe this is what a friend means

when she says there is a pair of lips

in the air, maybe this is desire

and need too. Or maybe

this is just how to love a potato,

how to see what the potato sees,

the childish, white arms that reach out

through its eyes into the dark of our cabinets

to bless them.

When the future spoke—as it did every day now—it spoke through jukeboxes. In the paradise of affluence Dionne Warwick was always signing a Burt Bacharach song, as a Greek island came into view at starboard. The stars—movie actresses, pop singers, grizzled dissipated novelists, intellectual fashion designers—got hilariously drunk in ship’s bars, alternately fell half-naked down casino steps or announced their intention of filming the work of Genet or Ouspensky. The planet was their plaything. Having the power of free movement to and from anywhere, they jetted between Corfu and Bhutan and Seychelles, colliding briefly with one another to invent new psychic spaces, to share the new fun of the incandescent future.

The rainbow shirts contrast effectively with the verdant lawn. The beautiful young people dance on the meadow in springtime. The pond nymph is radiant in the beflowered heat. A man sits on a rock and exhibits tranquility. Another man leaps in the air and exhibits exuberance. Man and woman and child sit naked on the grass to illustrate the familial tenderness of the new age. A goateed man, his hair in pigtails: the shaman. And so on: the juggler, the magician, the extravagant pirate, the spontaneous light-footed maiden symbolizing life energy. You get lost in the thick of it.

The killing and the talk of killing went on continuously now. Death, by assassination or suicide or police brutality or mistimed explosion of revolutionary matériel, had become a form of punctuation. Friends amazed themselves by making lists of the deaths. The only question was what could top what they had already witnessed. They felt ready for anything: plague, ice age, neo-Nazi putsch. Perhaps the recent cataclysms were part of a master plan to soften them up for the impending apocalypse—an event about which they grew more and more curious. If that was to be their fate, they might as well get on with it.

Often they seem to be falling forward

but I pretend not to notice

how well they use their bodies:

the girl, that tall delicate boy,

even the father in pink satin –

ardent, flashy. Now something scares me

and I turn away.

                        In the dream

they walk the beach –

my children and their father –

equally exposed, ridiculous suits

in the same ice-cream colors.

Terrible things are happening in slow motion:

a child turns in a low drifting fall,

a man finds cover in a doorway

where inside his shop the pharmacist

slumps over scales on the counter,

and a girl – bright skirt, hair flying –

tries to run, tries to scream.

Then in the street people

are quiet and figures swinging

from the terraces are quiet

and she is trying to open her mouth

as the officer from the mountains explains:

We did not massacre anyone.

We just surrounded the town

and did not let anyone surrender.

A cane swings through the street

announcing him. He chooses something bent,

disfiguring – that branch

cut from a blackthorn tree

is polished and well made.

He dares you pity him.

Blackthorn, blackthorn,

have I become someone

who needs a crooked stick?