Chicago
Only out-of-towners hear the el at night,
the city reflected in passing windows of the evening train
like a film shown to an empty house.—
O somewhere else
they are drinking to your memory tonight.
The wind howling over the empty prairie.
An immense anguish.—
Lawyerly summation.
In darkness
sensibility is honed
right on the floor.
Knuckles scraped.
Heart aching.
This is important.
No, it is theatrical.
I mean it is anecdotal.
Yes, it is ontological:
One folds away a handkerchief,
the day’s architecture an arrested motion
over which we have traveled—
overheated rooms
in which we feel like children again.
OLD TOOTH
How queer to sit here looking at a piece of myself
that has fallen off
like a hat.
The fragment of tooth in a box
one good match, one burnt,
smooth and yellow as a tusk
Old ivory.
One imagines museum-goers
on tip toe peering over
the glass, imagining
the beast
DOG
For a while
I kept myself aloof.
Ate little
and spoke rarely.
And what I said was measured out
by need.
Then I came to hate the sight of myself,
my dumb, hanging mouth,
so I sought to strive among men.
Their power,
their affection,
all that they withheld
raised the hackles of me
like a hairbrush.
And what I thought
was not my thoughts,
and what I said
was not my words
but the words of men
which concern a human fate.
Only sometimes at night the long,
tremulous thing
would come over me,
oh and I would run out into the wind
like a fool, like a drunkard,
heedless of everything I’d become.
HERRING KILL
On harvest moon they spill from ponds
like seeds from split fruit. Wet jewels
on the cutting board. And the long knife
at your throat.— The terrible beauty
of your life just now.
As greatness drops its leaf
into the faltering brook, an equal part of you
is spilt…. or did you think you were safe
inside your point of view? —
Hardly suspecting you were something else,
you are foundering in the brook,
and lying in wait
for the fat season which was not
to be yours.