To the Left of Time Page 3

  to say his wife is not dying.

  Here’s a nice sound—if they’re two leafy blocks

  over at the schoolyard: children.

  This is something I like to look at: thick yellow brushstrokes.

  I love to whiff winter’s cilantro snows.

  The taste of chokecherry’s bitter breaking on my tongue.

  I loved to touch my child’s forehead

  for fever and the feeling of finding none.

  Ode to All Songs, Poems, Stories That Begin “I Woke Up This Morning”

  As in: I woke up this morning and I could see,

  I heard a bird, the night’s clouds

  of chloroform were dispersed by clean winds.

  It was my nose, which is also good for breathing,

  told me this.

  As in: I woke up this morning in biological truth.

  As in: discontinuity postponed.

  As in: I woke up this morning and can’t be arrested

  for a facial crime (not smiling at mention

  of the leader’s name),

  nor do I have to take a dance class if I don’t want to.

  As in: I woke up this morning with a red milkweed beetle

  on my pillow, and his red stripe was a shiver’s pleasure.

  I woke up this morning and ate neither gruel nor rice jelly.

  I woke up this morning and thought of my mother,

  who woke up 33,580 mornings and then didn’t.

  As in: I woke up this morning with a cruise ship ticket

  in my pocket and it was not crossing

  the Green Sea of Darkness.

  As in: I woke up this morning.

  Ode to IQ And Aptitude Tests,

  which were given to discern

  not how smart we were

  but how dim, and what tasks

  best fit our talents, or lack

  thereof. I took the tests

  and did OK, which perturbed

  the testers and teachers

  who inverted the bell curve

  and saw me as the child

  in a flipped kayak, upside

  down, head under water, paddle in the air.

  I had easy access to an elsewhere.

  I didn’t fidget or bounce off walls (kids who did

  got bounced off walls!), but words

  didn’t mean much

  to me unless they were nouns.

  I was good at nouns. Tree. Anvil. Hayrick.

  Nouns I could say with my eye or ear.

  I focused well on small things right in front of me.

  That I be a cobbler was considered

  until handed a hammer

  and very sharp, small nails.

  One test said: Consider the clergy,

  nondenominational, with faith but no God.

  Another said: Sit him on a seacliff to count sails.

  A third noted my abilities with a broom.

  I was glad to know where I stood, even askew.

  Looms. Gravel. Cabbage.

  I never meant to confuse

  those who thought—without malice

  and with some concern—otherwise: I was average.

  Ode to the Unbroken World, Which Is Coming

  It must be coming, mustn’t it? Churches

  and saloons are filled with decent humans.

  A mother wants to feed her daughter,

  fathers to buy their children things that break.

  People laugh, all over the world, people laugh.

  We were born to laugh, and we know how to be sad;

  we dislike injustice and cancer,

  and are not unaware of our terrible errors.

  A man wants to love his wife.

  His wife wants him to carry something.

  We’re capable of empathy and intense moments of joy.

  Sure, some of us are venal, but most not.

  There’s always a punch bowl somewhere,

  in which floats a . . .

  Life’s a bullet, that fast, and the sweeter for it.

  It’s the same everywhere: Slovenia, India,

  Pakistan, Suriname—people like to pray,

  or they don’t,

  or they like to fill a blue plastic pool

  in the backyard with a hose

  and watch their children splash.

  Or sit in cafés, or at table with family.

  And if a long train of cattle cars passes

  along West Ridge,

  it’s only the cattle from East Ridge going to the abattoir.

  The unbroken world is coming

  (it must be coming!), I heard a choir,

  there were clouds, dust,

  I heard it in the streets, I heard it

  announced by loudhailers

  mounted on trucks.

  Ode to the Electric Fish That Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,

  which regenerate their tails

  and also eat only the tails of other electric eels,

  presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat . . .

  Without consulting an ichthyologist—eels

  are fish—I defer to biology’s genius.

  I know little of their numbers

  and habitat, other than they are river dwellers.

  Guess which river. I have only a note,

  a note taken in reading

  or fever—I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All

  I know is it seems

  sensible, sustainable: no fish die,

  nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more

  than a tail; the sting, the trauma,

  keep the bitten fish lean and alert.

  The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile.

  They’ll eat smaller tails for a while.

  These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

  Ode to Small Islands

  For they are dry oases in vast waters.

  For on some, to gather guano is a source of income.

  For a few islands can be reached by swimming,

  others, still, by boat only,

  and even then, many make landings hard.

  For some islands send winds of mango

  and lime, inviting and accepting visitors.

  The first monkey arrived on a monkeyless island

  on a mash of sea wrack, she and a few crabs.

  Another monkey got there just in time.

  Soon, three or four more drifted over.

  Paeans to islands which,

  to be official islands, need to remain only two square feet

  (and therefore exclude most humans)

  above water all year, in all tides,

  and to support the life

  of one—of any genus—tree.

  Ode to Peep Tubes and Their Makers

  Let’s say peep tubes

  are a pair of lenses ground and polished

  and attached at each end of a tube

  in a manner that brings forth

  the heretofore unseen,

  from the so tiny as to not be

  to the nude eye, to the so massive

  but so far away no unaided eye can see it either.

  To discover the nearer, tiny world! What’s that wormy

  blur writhing in a drop of water?

  In a dollop of sperm—are those tiny animalcules

  baby boys or baby girls?

  The better the peep tubes,

  the more they see, the invisible visible,

  the distant close. I like best

  the collapsible peep tube

  the captain snaps open to read a far ship’s flag.

  Time to haul out the powder kegs

  or pull alongside for plum cakes and canary wine?

  To see things no other eye has seen, I have relied

  on peanuts. When I split open

  these curvy (similar to early fertility symbols) legumes

  I’m Anton van Leeuwenhoek,

  I’m Galileo Galilei, I’m the captain on the dec
k

  of a thirsty ship, a hungry ship,

  and I see land through my peep tube, I see

  freshwater falls, mild humans,

  and I turn to my shipmates and say,

  however a sailor says it: Heave to, or Ho, boys,

  this way, over there, I see land!

  Ode to Chronic Insolvency

  I lived in an apartment

  where, when it rained, my fire escape

  served as dishwasher and, in winter,

  less reliably, as refrigerator: one morning I peeled

  and ate two frozen eggs.

  Now I am ashamed of my ingratitude.

  I was healthy, except for a lung

  that hurt sometimes.

  I had experience: I’d washed dishes,

  driven a school bus, been a night watchman.

  If I could drive a bus,

  I could deliver things from a truck.

  Instead, I stayed in that grim apartment

  as winter began to rage across an ocean,

  which locals called a lake. Once a week,

  I’d teach a class, after which the students

  bought me a sandwich—they, too, necessitous,

  though less ungrateful than me.

  They weren’t much younger—I was

  twenty-six—but they were in college

  and I only worked, marginally, for one.

  For which I was ungrateful.

  My mother sent me $15 for my birthday,

  and after the check-cashing store took $1.00

  and 25¢ for the el ride home: $13.75,

  a windfall, I’m flush,

  for which I was ungrateful

  (because she was my mother),

  shamefully ungrateful.

  Ode to the Pig Rolled from the Castle down a Hill to Where the Peasants Wait with Axes

  Of the King’s fat swine, you were the least

  fat, and last to reach the King’s sow’s teats.

  Later, your brothers and sisters

  climbed over your back to feed

  on slop, the King’s table slop, but slop.

  So it’s you they’ve tied in a ball

  and kicked down the hill

  to feed and appease the peasants.

  Since you are of the swine family,

  if you were fatter, you might have graced

  the King’s table. Since

  you are of the swine family,

  you are oblivious re the difference.

  We worship you for that.

  As do the peasants with axes.

  Ode to Gandhi, Who Wrote a Letter to Hitler Asking Him Not to Start a War

  I like to think the stamp got it

  to Hitler’s desk, perhaps a whiff

  of curry, Gandhi’s handwriting? Hitler got thousands

  of letters every day during the heady years.

  They began to tail off after Stalingrad.

  Three staff members culled them to a handful,

  which Bormann screened further. I doubt Gandhi

  wrote the letter in English,

  which he wrote and spoke well.

  Hitler didn’t read or write Gujarati.

  Gandhi didn’t speak or write German.

  This mystery, however, interests me not enough.

  I can, if I cared to, find that letter in the machine

  on which I type this, but I know what he said:

  he asked him not to start a war, he was polite,

  he said something about the power of nonviolence.

  He wrote the letter. For that, I hope the bullet

  that later ripped into his bony chest

  did not hurt too much, or for too long.

  Ode to Pain in the Absence of an Obvious Cause of Pain

  Will you show me the tiny white scar

  where the tip of a blade

  broke off and migrated to a spot

  below your left lung? I thought not.

  And neither will you run a magnet across my chest.

  Nor an electroscan, nor wand.

  Pain gets to live where it wants

  and doesn’t answer the door,

  even for the men with warrants.

  Pain’s private, and seeks its preferable place

  to rent, or buy, or occupy, inside

  a body. It builds a little house, whose shades,

  every hour, every day, are drawn.

  Pain maintains a tidy lawn.

  But when pain, like an extended metaphor,

  imposes itself upon a body,

  it’s time to take up a knife

  and ring the buzzer.

  Ode to the Fat Child Who Went First onto the Thin Ice

  to test it for three of us about a dozen feet

  behind. He was a big boy

  and could have broken

  each of us, had he chosen to.

  Instead, he was a good big boy,

  whose mother loved him and called him Pumpkin.

  We were at a pond, once a local source

  for the frozen-water trade, and, at this part,

  Ice House Beach, the thickest, the last to thin,

  everyone said. Early spring of a hard winter.

  On the opposite shore, there were some woods

  we wanted to enter, a shortcut home.

  He disdained a rope we’d brought.

  He went forward about ten feet.

  We went back about ten feet.

  At midpond he said: Come on,

  one at a time, it’s plenty . . .

  We’d retreated up the beach ten more feet by now.

  He crossed to the other side

  and called again, but while his back was turned,

  we took the longer, the meeker way, home.

  Ode to the Moment Between Dust and Dust

  A Dr. I once hired to assess my psyche

  asked me why I liked rivers.

  I wrote him a check and left.

  I like the way a certain window in the house

  next to my house catches light

  between the leaves of a white oak

  that shades both our houses.

  I had a childhood.

  I had fields to roam, and woods,

  a brook, a small mountain.

  I looked closely into a handful of oats,

  molasses, and bran,

  and fed it to my horse.

  At least eleven times in my life

  when I was standing in one spot,

  restlessness moved me to another spot

  a minute before damage was done

  unto me: gunfire, pitchfork, javelin,

  that flung hatchet, three