Who could believe such dumb luck
as to hear Agnus Dei after the white
clutch releases,
when you are face down in the culvert,
cold rain muzzling your neck,
air pricked with the scent of — what is it? dog
lips?
You stand up on dead, stone-ancient legs,
soaked clothes seeped to skin,
and walk the three miles home. It is dark,
colder than obsidian. The moon is
nowhere to be found. Who would believe
such a story, the odds of being struck
by a million-watt nerve hammer?
Or later: the muse of muscles
and lesser viscera slowly letting go
it's cellular charge: your hand
become thing, heart the accordianist
of the Sagra della Bistecca
that year you fell in love with
a green-eyed girl from the vineyards.
Now you're gathered in the YMCA
with those few who understand that twinning
sense of luck and loss,
death come and averted, the rushing itch
of ignition. I was pinning laundry when,
the woman from South Dakota says,
and touches the pinkish scar
that travels ear to ankle like a testament
of chance, alchemic burn of circumstance.
You want to talk about your arm
as that arm, how it dangles
like a washrag, how on some days
you'd rather just cut it off
and be done with it. But you stare
out the window at the rain, struck
by a vision of loneliness: minutemen sleeping
in their silos, each wearing
a ninety-ton night cap of concrete.
You think about the air command's
symbol of hands holding lightning: deterrence
through strength. Was it easier to sleep
knowing the ruin of the world
was in someone else’s hands? Imagine
the isolation of two soldiers
ensconced in an underground room,
their every move a trained stop gap for liftoff
—
that 65,000 pound hammer, bleeding
fire, headed toward some nexus of unmaking
on the other side of the world, warhead
singing like that otherworldly turn
one minute and twenty-four seconds
into Barber's song.
Because Today is a Verb
I will praise the red maple shivering
out of her clothes. How
light
limns her lithe body in
the winter-
tinged air. Wind
caresses
every rough knob the blackbirds, dressed
in third-year epaulets,
guard
like jealous lovers. In
the warm sun
the campus flowers with young women
in flowing dresses, hair let down
just for the sheer pleasure of breeze.
Young men watch them, furtively, or not
so furtively, as the case
may be,
delirious with desire.
They hear
the sigh, as I do,
whispering through
the long grasses along
the river’s edge,
less sound than a song of
one word.
Soon winter will
arrive—that bleached
and cold production of
death,
badly acted. Each year
it grows longer,
swells more over-budget, filled
with black ice and the
cautionary wail
of ambulances. Now,
says the wind,
in the swirl of leaves. Now, says
the slanted light of afternoon. Even
the river of forgetting, miles-deep and blue
as midnight, has a secret fetish
for memory, which by now this has become.
Which all things become. Even the maple,
by evening: naked and holy as the air.
New, unpublished
