Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
It comes vigorously in,
nudges the jetty and ties up,
the usually ill-tossed line tossed twice,
presses by engine pressure against
the pilings for a half-minute,
backs out, turns, and prow lifted
like the head of a swimming dog,
makes for the Lavender Bay jetty.
From the Fuji-view stand made of cinder block
a crow watches Fuji rise into daybreak.
Trash smoke light-blues the exhausted valley.
Hot-spring steam blows up out of steam holes.
Up the road leaving town a tanker truck groans.
An electric bullhorn starts crackling messages
to workers coming early out of their doors.
From the cinder block Fuji-view stand the crow
flies off repeating the round vowel “ah!”
to the mountain now risen bright into daybreak,
or else, in another mood, “ha! ha! ha!”
He turns the light on, lights
the cigarette, goes out on the porch,
chainsaws a block of green wood down the grain,
chucks the pieces into the box stove,
pours in kerosene, tosses in the match
he has set fire to the next cigarette with,
stands back while the creosote-lined, sheet-
metal rust-lengths shudder but just barely
manage to direct the cawhoosh in the stove—
which sucks in ash motes through gaps
at the bottom and glares out fire blaze
through overburn-cracks at the top—
all the way to the roof and up out through into
the still starry sky starting to lighten,
sits down to a bowl of crackers and bluish milk
in which reflections of a 40-watt ceiling bulb
appear and disappear, eats, contemplates
an atmosphere containing kerosene stink,
chainsaw smoke, chainsmoke, wood smoke, wood heat,
gleams of the 40-watt ceiling bulb bobbing in blue milk.
Black earth
turned up, clods
shining on their
western sides, grass
sprouting on top
of bales of spoiled
hay, an old
farmer bent far
over, like Australopithecus
robustus, carrying two dented
pails of water out
to the hen yard.
On a stoop
the old man
is drinking him
some beer,
the boy in
his yellow shirt
is playing
him some banjo tune,
the old fellow
hasn’t any
teeth, the boy
sings him then
some song.
She can drink from a beer bottle.
She can light a cigar and sneeze out the match.
She can drag on it so hard the end blazes.
She can inhale without coughing.
She can blow a smoke ring or two.
She can withdraw and introspect.
She can play the nose flute: f# with lower hole unstopped; a with both holes unstopped; c# with both stopped: the tonic, the mediant, the dominant of the chord of F# major.
She can suck the whole instrument inside, where it continues to sing and cry.
She can speak a pouting, pidgin blabber.
She can clench on the ictus and moan on the arsis but cannot come on the thesis.
She can wink and throw French kisses.
She can motherly-kiss the fuzzy cheeks of young sailors.
She can pick up the money they toss, including the dollar bills.
She can count but not give change.
She can smile.
It is the white of faces from which the sunburn has been scared away.
It has the rounded shoulders of one who fears he will pass the rest of his days alone.
The black residue inside the line of nine nail holes—three close together, three far apart, three close together—is the memory hammered just in case of shipwreck into those vanishing places.
A carpenter’s plane’s long, misericording shhhhhhhhh’s long ago soothed away the halo-segments that a circular saw longer ago tormented across it.
The pebbles it rubs itself across fuzz up all over it a first beard, white from the start.
The grain cherishes the predicament of the Norway spruce, which has a trunk that rises and boughs that droop.
Its destiny, which is to disappear, could be accomplished when a beachcomber extracts its heat, leaving the smoke and ashes; or in the normal way, through a combination of irritation and evanescence.
The screaming produced by the great fright machines—
one like a dough beater that lifts, whirls, plunges the victims strapped in its arms,
one a huge fluted pan that tries to fling its passengers off the earth,
one that holds its riders upside down and pummels them until they pour out their screams freely,
and above them the roller coaster, creeping seemingly lost among its struts and braces,
and under them the Ghost Train that jerks through dark tunnels here and there suddenly lighted by fluorescent bones—
has fallen still today.
To us who live on Lavender Bay,
once Hulk Bay, before that probably few if any now know what,
it seemed the same easily frightened, big-lunged screamer cried out in mock terror each night across the water, and we hardly heard or took notice.
But last night shrieks of true terror pierced through our laughter, and kept at it, until we sat up startled.
The Ghost Train, now carrying seven souls and the baffled grief of families,
has no special destination,
but, looking for forgetfulness, must thrust forward, twist, backtrack through the natural world,
where all are born, all suffer, and many scream,
and no one is healed but gathered and used again.
As soon as they come over the peak
into the Connecticut Valley and espy the river
that they will follow until nightfall,
bodies, or cells, begin to tumble
between the streamers of their formation,
thinning the left, thickening the right,
until like a snowplowing skier the flock shifts weight
and shaking up its inner equipoise
turns, and yahonks and spirit-cries
toward the flow of light spelled
into the river’s windings eons ago,
each body flashing white against
the white sky when the wings lift,
and black when they fall, the invisible
continuously perforating the visible—
and trembles away, to vanish, but before that
to semi-vanish, as a mirage or deepest
desire does when it gets the right
distance from us and becomes rhythmic.
Lifted by its tuft
of angel hairs, a milkweed
seed rises and dips
across a meadow, chalking
in outline the rhythms
wavering through air all along.
Spinus tristis, who expends
his days transfiguring gold
back into sod, sinks and soars,
following the same undulations.
What immense coat or shroud
that can wrap the whole earth
are these golden needles
stitching at so restlessly?
When will it ever be finished?