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For Little John Approaching Three
What bird pursues its shadow
Down the rolled valleys of your brain
No specialist presumes to explain.
Those fields which lie all fallow
No plough’s sharp tongue can ever turn,
Whatever seeds fall there must burn
In gay intensities of joy
Or chafe to the dark scrapings of sorrow.
No crop is looked for there tomorrow:
That yellow hill, soft banked
Waves with bright weeds, not fat combed wheat.
A silver rattle grinds your teeth.
All is one day, the same,
As if God bid the world to exist
But for the opening of his fist
Which then closed tight and slammed,
Total and drastic as a clot.
A wild colt crops the wild weed plot.
How clearly the doctors have explained,
Although the first birds poised, they met
Their shadows, and did falter, yet
Recover briefly, before descending:
How early the gay bats come out
To wheel and flicker and cavort.
From A Brahms Card Ballad
Dead Friends Society
How comfortably, after a few years, our dead
friends live in our heads.
There’s room for any number.
They pack in and sit side by side,
not speaking, but friendly. Some are family.
Bill never met Emily,
Hermione didn’t know Don,
but here they meet––well, they almost do––
and it’s really quite cozy
as we sit thinking of them.
At first, their presence spooked us
and we drove them away.
Now, drawing closer to them, we see
how we too will sit waiting to be thought up
like a patient to be called in to the doctor’s office
from the waiting room, hastily dropping
the out-of-date magazine––
and yet, if we’re not, none the worse.
From Happy in an Ordinary Thing
Black Angel
An old photograph of Los Angeles
By Gallows Hill—a treeless, dry incline
Grazed on by six or seven lean black kine––
A man in black, in broad black hat, head bowed,
Is praying above the raised heads of a crowd
Deep as his hips—but wait: peer in again
Through what’s been printed with a steel-nibbed pen
In neat white lettering without a smudge:
A Chinaman takes part (the caption’s nudge)
in an impromptu hanging. Ah!—the cord
Threaded up to the crossbeam heavenward,
As if God, for a single local screening,
Lowered an angel down to speak His meaning.
From A Brahms Card Ballad
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