show.
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least, thank god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,
then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be,
and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he’d known,
all along, that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,
I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.
It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,
and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then realized made a figure eight,
what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,
and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.
Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he’d blazed,
but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away,
up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,
with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically
against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.
In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white,
its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.
My Mother’s Lips
Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could
but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my mother, all through my childhood,
when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking
so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.
Or, even more disconcertingly — wildly so now that my puberty had erupted — before I said them.
When I was smaller, I must just have assumed that she was omniscient. Why not?
She knew everything else — when I was tired, or lying; she’d know I was ill before I did.
I may even have thought — how could it not have come into my mind? — that she caused what I said.
All she was really doing of course was mouthing my words a split second after I said them myself,
but it wasn’t until my own children were learning to talk that I really understood how,
and understood, too, the edge of anxiety in it, the wanting to bring you along out of the silence,
the compulsion to lift you again from those blank caverns of namelessness we encase.
That was long afterward, though: where I was now was just wanting to get her to stop,
and considering how I brooded and raged in those days, how quickly my teeth went on edge,
the restraint I approached her with seems remarkable, although her so unprotestingly,
readily taming a habit by then three children and a dozen years old was as much so.
It’s endearing to watch us again in that long-ago dusk, facing each other, my mother and me.
I’ve just grown to her height, or just past it: there are our lips moving together,
now the unison suddenly breaks, I have to go on by myself, no maestro, no score to follow.
I wonder what finally
Gazing through the golden letters of their name, they’re not, at least, thank god, laughing.
Now the buddy, grabbing at a hydrant, gets himself erect and stands there for a moment, panting.
Now he has to lift the other, who lies utterly still, a forearm shielding his eyes from the sun.
He hauls him partly upright, then hefts him almost all the way into the chair, but a dangling foot
catches a support-plate, jerking everything around so that he has to put him down,
set the chair to rights, and hoist him again and as he does he jerks the grimy jeans right off him.
No drawers, shrunken, blotchy thighs: under the thick, white coils of belly blubber,
the poor, blunt pud, tiny, terrified, retracted, is almost invisible in the sparse genital hair,
then his friend pulls his pants up, he slumps wholly back as though he were, at last, to be let be,
and the friend leans against the cyclone fence, suddenly staring up at me as though he’d known,
all along, that I was watching and I can’t help wondering if he knows that in the winter, too,
I watched, the night he went out to the lot and walked, paced rather, almost ran, for how many hours.
It was snowing, the city in that holy silence, the last we have, when the storm takes hold,
and he was making patterns that I thought at first were circles, then realized made a figure eight,
what must have been to him a perfect symmetry but which, from where I was, shivered, bent,
and lay on its side: a warped, unclear infinity, slowly, as the snow came faster, going out.
Over and over again, his head lowered to the task, he slogged the path he’d blazed,
but the race was lost, his prints were filling faster than he made them now and I looked away,
up across the skeletal trees to the tall center city buildings, some, though it was midnight,
with all their offices still gleaming, their scarlet warning beacons signaling erratically
against the thickening flakes, their smoldering auras softening portions of the dim, milky sky.
In the morning, nothing: every trace of him effaced, all the field pure white,
its surface glittering, the dawn, glancing from its glaze, oblique, relentless, unadorned.
My Mother’s Lips
Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could
but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my mother, all through my childhood,
when I was saying something to her, something important, would move her lips as I was speaking
so that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was saying as I was saying them.
Or, even more disconcertingly — wildly so now that my puberty had erupted — before I said them.
When I was smaller, I must just have assumed that she was omniscient. Why not?
She knew everything else — when I was tired, or lying; she’d know I was ill before I did.
I may even have thought — how could it not have come into my mind? — that she caused what I said.
All she was really doing of course was mouthing my words a split second after I said them myself,
but it wasn’t until my own children were learning to talk that I really understood how,
and understood, too, the edge of anxiety in it, the wanting to bring you along out of the silence,
the compulsion to lift you again from those blank caverns of namelessness we encase.
That was long afterward, though: where I was now was just wanting to get her to stop,
and considering how I brooded and raged in those days, how quickly my teeth went on edge,
the restraint I approached her with seems remarkable, although her so unprotestingly,
readily taming a habit by then three children and a dozen years old was as much so.
It’s endearing to watch us again in that long-ago dusk, facing each other, my mother and me.
I’ve just grown to her height, or just past it: there are our lips moving together,
now the unison suddenly breaks, I have to go on by myself, no maestro, no score to follow.
I wonder what finally
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