To the Left of Time Read online

  Glass Eye

  Which eye is my glass eye? the children always ask.

  Which one looks more human? I say.

  They say, Which is your rubber hand? They both look real.

  You could tell if you touched them, I say.

  Did it hurt your ears? asks a girl.

  No, I was already legally deaf.

  Which lung did they take, a bold one asks.

  All of them, I say. Right and left

  and the one in the middle.

  So your teeth, are they yours?

  All but one, I say, which I lost before

  I lost an eye, a hand, my ears, and all my lungs.

  Nothing hurts until you wake up, concussed.

  Why did you go? the last child asks. I say, Which eye

  looks more alive?

  Manure Pile Covered in Snow

  When the horses’ heads got too close to the beams above,

  and they pinned back their ears each time they saw me,

  I had no choice

  but to lay wide barn boards

  on the four feet of snow

  for thirty yards or so

  from the stalls to the top of the pile.

  Load a wheelbarrow—I favored a pitchfork first,

  next the shovel. Then get a running start

  on the downslope board

  from the stable door,

  rush it to the pile’s top, and flip

  both handles with a hard twist.

  It was labor—and my father said

  to do it—to be done.

  Aesthetics? I had none.

  So: I ruined a pristine mound

  of snow. A mound so symmetrical, so round,

  it seemed a Half-Sphere from the Spheres,

  or perhaps a sky god’s giant tear

  fallen and frozen, smothered by white.

  And I soiled it, tossing one barrowload left,

  the next right, over and over. After each run,

  I carved on the stable door: 1,

  then 1, then 1, and one more,

  then crossed all four.

  And started another. I worked hard

  until the horses stood level again

  in their stalls, and accepted extra oats.

  They were shaggy in their winter coats.

  It never snowed again that year,

  and not near to four feet since.

  So Bury Me in a Barrel

  painted with flames

  in unsanctified ground,

  as they did to Cayetano Ripoll, a schoolteacher.

  They hanged but did not burn him.

  Hence the barrel’s flames.

  But he didn’t go there. First

  the paint—red and yellow and orange—faded

  in the dirt,

  and then the staves

  fell from their iron bands,

  and then the iron

  went back to its ore.

  July 26, 1826

  The Day

  Day I didn’t blink, and the day was gone.

  Day I woke up on an anatomist’s table.

  Day my mother, her head on the dayroom slab . . .

  Day sails appeared, and then disappeared.

  No rain came one day for 200.

  Man misinterpreted God one day, and again the next.

  The oleaginous world, one day, becomes non-oleaginous.

  God interpreted man and got it wrong: took a day.

  My father fell into me from his deathbed: that day.

  The day blank called to stop me vaporing on: happy day.

  Sleet cut cold air eight days in one day.

  Grade Schools’ Large Windows

  weren’t built to let the sunlight in.

  They were large to let the germs out.

  When polio, which sounds like the first dactyl

  of a jump-rope song, was on the rage,

  you did not swim in public waters.

  The awful thing was an iron lung.

  We lined up in our underwear to get the shot.

  Some kids fainted; we all were stung.

  My cousin Speed sat in a vat

  of ice cubes until his scarlet fever waned,

  but from then on his heart was not the same.

  My friend’s girlfriend was murdered in a hayfield

  by two guys from Springfield.

  Linda got a bad thing in her blood.

  Three times, I believe, Bobby shot his mother.

  Rat poison took a beloved local bowler.

  A famous singer sent condolences.

  In the large second-floor corner room

  of my fourth-grade class the windows are open.

  Snow in fat, well-fed flakes

  floats in. They and the chalk motes meet.

  And the white rat powder, too, sifts down

  into a box of oatmeal

  on the shelf below.

  II

  ODES

  Ode to the Joyful Ones

  Shield your joyful ones.

  —from an Anglican prayer

  That they walk, even stumble, among us is reason

  to praise them, or protect them—even the sound

  of a lead slug dropped on a lead plate, even that, for them,

  is music. Because they bring laughter’s

  brief amnesia. Because they stand,

  talking, taking pleasure in others,

  with their hands on the shoulders of strangers

  and the shoulders of each other.

  Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

  Because if there are two pork chops

  they will serve you the better one.

  Because they will give you the crutch off their backs.

  Because when there are two of them together

  their shining fills the room.

  Because you don’t have to tell them to walk toward the light.

  Ode to the Eating Establishment Where the Utensils Were Chained to the Table,

  much like the pens at the post office

  or a bank. I’d never had reason to enter a bank.

  I bought a stamp once. I stood in line

  with two dimes

  and some pennies,

  though not many.

  More than a stamp,

  I wanted a pencil

  so I’d feel like I went to school.

  Those were difficult times.

  There were different rules.

  Often I dined

  at the above establishment.

  One was permitted to bring one’s own spoon.

  I didn’t have a spoon but hoped to soon.

  Nevertheless, I ate my belly full.

  I was a young man

  and I walked out into the green cornet of morning!

  Ode to the Fire Hydrant

  Who has not wanted to tip his hat

  to the big lug-nut top hat it wears?

  Unless you were impelled to paint them

  through a long summer to repay

  a societal debt, and had also a boss with a quota

  of hydrants and asses to kick.

  As an artist, I could not create under such conditions!

  There was never the right north light.

  The brushes were cheap and left bristles in my work,

  which I did not intend. On a few, as symbols

  of oppression, in the right-by-accident place,

  they edified and were, therefore, intentional.

  Because of these and other compromises,

  I refused to sign

  my art, with one exception: the hydrant

  in front of my grammar school,

  which would have burned down without it

  in a fire I started.

  I trimmed a little tuft of grass

  (we were issued a pair of shears)

  and writ my initials with the corner of a brush,

  using the last few drops of red paint from a state paint can

  during the summer I was
asked many times

  why I was covered with blood.

  Ode While Awaiting Execution

  Into the mute and blue-

  green marble mailbox my dust deserves to go,

  though not for that which I’m going.

  I deserve to go, and not alone,

  because I did not sing loud enough

  about this life, this world.

  Singing poorly is acceptable. Not loud enough is not.

  There were too many things I saw

  of which I did not sing, things raw

  and eyeball-vibrating ravishing, or worse, things I forgot,

  until a pin-stick shock, a creak

  in a house of wood waking to heat,

  or a bent nail remembered for me.

  How did Spinoza define happiness?

  Patient acceptance of the inevitable?

  I find myself im-

  patient. I’m often impatient. Not for the inevitable,

  which can wait patiently for me.

  So far, the Governor’s not called the Warden,

  whose palm has an itch.

  He prefers an electrical switch.

  My lawyers, having, in law, no degrees,

  are not allowed in to counsel me.

  Appeals are exhausted, or at least very tired.

  So, I scratch this out on my last yellow legal pad’s last

  page: I deserve to go,

  but not for that which

  I’ll lie on a table

  and get the needle.

  Ode to What I Have Forgotten

  The joy-face of Larry Levis, age twenty-seven,

  in a bare apartment; lightening joy

  over a word game, blind joy, unbroken joy

  over a word game with friends;

  a Sunday afternoon, sunny, November, cold,

  in the heartland’s heart.

  I’ve half forgotten, I possess

  only a frame and a few details: my friend,

  installing carpet, stapled

  his thumb to a stair. As soon as he ripped it free

  he punched me in the face.

  He should have, I was laughing,

  but most of the blood was his.

  Cloudy also are the years I was a proletarian nomad,

  here-and-thereing around the middle of our country (who

  knew soybeans, in low rows, grew in multimiles of fields?);

  who knew its city (Chicago); who knew

  children went to colleges in Ohio?

  I forgot my overjoy that people ate pork chops

  for breakfast in Iowa. I forgot

  someone once said, I thought with undue alarm,

  in a house in a ravine: Freshets are coming!

  I thought: Ah, a nice breeze. I forgot

  the needle’s squeak scraping a rib.

  By the third or fourth time, I assisted, holding a wet,

  red-orange swab

  for the Dr. to wipe on my chest.

  I forgot when I was so hungry my parrot looked nervous.

  I forgot, disgracefully, the rachitic and the dejugulated.

  I’ve forgotten electric fences, with wires

  to pass through without touching.

  I forgot I owned a knife that wouldn’t sleep,

  a rifle almost as tall as me.

  I repressed the tub of sawed-off shotguns

  I saw once—a stubby, black, bristling bouquet.

  I forgot the creeping nervous fever.

  I’m probably misremembering

  why first grade took two years

  instead of one, and HS five years

  instead of four. I don’t recall

  the fruit of 15 dead acres, and I’m a little vague

  on she who commanded her lips to smile.

  Did I deliberately forget the fingerprints

  of the human pneuma all over

  our crimes? I’ve certainly suppressed

  near decapitation by barbwire fence

  while on a sled, on ice, and at a speed to slice

  off half, or my whole, head.

  I forget why I’m not dead.

  And I remember now

  my favorite stream: narrow, pitchy, swift, deep.

  I forgot, I did not forget, the joy-face of Larry Levis,

  over a word game, 1973, a cold November

  in the middle of our country.

  Ode to the Eraser as Big as a Bus

  —for Bruce Weigl

  Thank you for the relief, the rest,

  for leaving only palimpsest

  and a little rolled orange eraser dust,

  and not the xxxxx of a stitched-up wound,

  when you came to do what erasers do.

  The way you rubbed out, in one wide swath,

  the memory of that place

  six thousand miles away. Most

  of us never heard of it until

  a monk set himself on fire

  and sat there serenely in the center of the flames

  until he fell over. Why’d he do that?

  my friend said. We were in high school, in a town

  like thousands of towns.

  We were glad to be American—and I mean

  that, true. My friend also said,

  The only thing this town lacks is an ocean.

  We found one 101 miles away.

  Thank you for erasing the next years

  in that distant place,

  erasing a million people living there.

  Erasing how many thousands (I lost count

  along that black wall) of people living here

  who went there; some of my friends,

  and yours? And those who returned, we know some,

  who were strafed

  by the chemical that turns green to orange,

  now with electrodes in their brains,

  or their bodies cluster-bombed

  with tumors.

  Ode Elaborating on the Obvious

  It’s a miraculous apparatus, consciousness,

  even blinking off and on, even on a mattress

  as proto-coffin. I ate the pudding once

  from a plastic tray of lunch

  a kind nurse served my father. He didn’t

  want to eat it, or anything.

  A friend wrote that he found Jesus.

  A friend wrote that his wife is dying.

  The friend who found Jesus wrote again

  that he lost Jesus: He was just here, now He’s not.

  My friend whose wife is dying did not write