Even in September noon, the groundhog
casts his divining shadow: summer will never
end and when it does it will never come again.
I’ve only the shadows of doubts, shadows
of a notion. The leaves turn in tarnished
rain like milk. Hearts, rotund with longing,
explode like dead horses left in a creek,
our intentions misunderstood, misrepresented
like that day they turned the candles
upside down, thumped them out and we all
lost our jobs. Nothing personal. Handshakes around.
Of course we’re not guilty
of what we’ve been accused of
but we’re guilty of so much else, what’s it matter,
I heard on the radio. I hate the radio,
how it pretends to be your friend.
You could be eating, you could be driving around
and then you’re screaming, What, what did that fucker say
but by then it’s someone else with the voice
of air-conditioning saying, Take cover,
storm on the way. It’s amazing
word hasn’t gotten back to us from irritated
outer space how some creatures of spine and light
have finally had enough. Shut up, they beep back
but we’re so dense, so unevolved, we think
it’s just the usual interference: Bill next door
blending his Singapore Slings during Wheel
of Fortune. Right now they’re working on something
that’ll make our fillings fall out,
turn our checking accounts to dust,
something far more definitive.
There’s a man starting his mower in the bedroom.
There’s a woman burning photos in a sink.
I hate the phone, how it pretends to be
your friend, but I called you anyway,
got some curt, inchoate message that means
everyone’s miserable, little shreds of your heart
rain down on me, twitching like slivered worms.
Upstairs, they’re overflowing the tub again,
they’re doing that Euripidean dance. I knew
a guy in college who stuck his head through a wall.
It seemed to decide something, to make us all
feel grateful, restored to simple things:
cars starting, cottage cheese, Larry, Curly, Mo.
It was, of course, a thin wall, a practice wall,
a wall between nowhere and nowhere’s bedroom,
nothing like that 16th century woodcut
where the guy pokes through the sky into
the watchback of the cosmos. Tick, tick.
The cosmos gives me the creeps.
I like a decent chair where you can sit
and order a beer, be smiled at while you wait
for a friend who just had his sutures removed,
who rolls a quarter across his knuckles
to get them working again.