An autumn evening in the modest square

of a small town proud to have made the atlas

(some frenzy drove that poor mapmaker witless,

or else he had the daughter of the mayor).

Here Space appears unnerved by its own feats

and glad to drop the burden of its greatness—

to shrink to the dimensions of Main Street;

and Time, chilled to its bone, stares at the clockface

above the general store, whose crowded shelves

hold every item that this world produces,

from fancy amateur stargazers’ tel-

escopes to common pins for common uses.

A movie theater, a few saloons,

around the bend a café with drawn shutters,

a red-brick bank topped with spread-eagle plumes,

a church, whose net—to fish for men—now flutters

unfilled, and which would be paid little heed,

except that it stands next to the post office.

And if parishioners should cease to breed,

the pastor would start christening their autos.

Grasshoppers, in the silence, run amok.

By 6 p.m. the city streets are empty,

unpeopled as if by a nuclear strike.

Just surfacing, the moon swims to the center

of this black window square, like some Eccles-

iastes, glowering; while on the lonely

highway, from time to time, a Buick beams

its blinding headlights at the Unknown Soldier.

The dreams you dream are not of girls half nude

but of your name on an arriving letter.

A morning milkman, seeing milk that’s soured,

will be the first to guess that you have died here.

Here you can live, ignoring calendars,

gulp Bromo, never leave the house; just settle

and stare at your reflection in the glass,

as streetlamps stare at theirs in shrinking puddles.

1972

Translated by George L. Kline