Though there's plenty of space they crowd together:
Four women, one man, all wearing hats.
The youngest woman has a muff too.
The oldest rests the tip of her folded umbrella
On the bare ground. The next to youngest woman
Speaks for them. They've come to take up the job,
Subject to approval, of being your ancestors.
Their demands are reasonable; the woman all are gloved
The man wears a well-kept derby. Go ahead; hire them!
Maybe it's all about my shadow and my role
Is simply to get him where he's supposed to be
Or -- would this be worse or better? -- my point
Is to do things his shadow can note down
In the notebook she always carries.
So far no one has mentioned
That my shadow has an apprentice
Trailing behind him. I'm not sure
She's really cut out to be a shadow
She seems to take many rest breaks
Also, she climbs trees and then
Has to be helped down from them.
There's a scissors hanging from her belt
And a pencil and a notebook and --
I find these last disturbing --
A curved knife and a powderhorn.
I heard that the head of one of Ursula's virgins
Wrapped in green silk and in a wooden box
Listed in an inventory as belonging to the Duc de Berry
Had been found and was on exhibit in the Municipal Museum
All eleven thousand of us had to go see it, of course
If you're a saint -- all of us are, though suspected
Of being fictional -- they let you in after hours;
They even open the box and very carefully unwrap the skull
None of us notice that Ursula was there until she speaks
In that decisive "I am a beautiful English princess
And a saint of God" voice, asking "Well? Which are you?"
The skull opens and shuts its jaws a few times perhaps wondering
How it could talk without lips or tongue and says
"Wouldn't you like to know!" Then I know it was mine.
I may not be the old man I think I am
(It would not be the first time
I’ve made this sort of mistake)
But an entirely other one,
Quieter, shorter, with eyes
Of a quite different but still
Indeterminate shade and attended
By different regrets – not tall gentlemen
With good manners and iron pincers
But rough harridans with clubs
And flint-bladed knives. It may be
That, after a few years in what
I’ll think my grave I’ll hear voices saying
“Good Lord! What’s he doing here?
Move on, you! And be quick about it.”
The regrets who used to attend me
Stayed for many years – good natured
And gentlemanly when off duty
I’d see them strolling arm and arm
On their regular days off; we’d nod
Or exchange a few words. I never asked
What they did when not holding my heart
In red-hot tongs or making me relive
Days I wanted to forget but they have
One by one grown old or moved on
So I make do with itinerant regrets –
Enthusiastic but without manners or training;
Ask them for references and they laugh.
I am a measuring spoon but I
Have never been happy in this drawer
With the other spoons and cups
And funnels and the small kitchen scales.
Help me, twenty month old child!
Only you know how I long to hide
Behind the jars of rice or perch
Defiant on a tower of cat food.
My mother read every poem Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote
And some she didn't but my mother thought she did
And a few my mother knew she hadn't
But would have if she'd thought of them
Just back from a trip Li Po
Empties his bag of stray lines
And thoughts for poems. Near the bottom
My father's curled shadow sleeps
On some bales of loose-woven moonlight.
Astley's Spanish Horse lived
Forty-two years. It knew how
To set plates and cups on a table,
Bring a boiling kettle from the fire
And make tea. It could also
Unsaddle itself, wink at pretty girls,
Perform small bits of magic
And wash its feet in a bucket.
In toothless old age it lived on bread;
When it died, Astley had its hide
Made into a drum.
The shadows had been sent to forage so when
They returned at dusk there is no one
To greet them. They consider the evidence:
A torn newspaper; a broken violin;
A tight-corked bottle, a slosh of light trapped inside.
Cats emerge; the shadows feed them
And then draw lots to determine
Who must start pretending to be people
I wake up early because many years ago
An orange cat would bite my elbows
Wanting to be fed. Once dressed,
I open the shade so a tortoiseshell ghost
Can read the future in the scutterings
Of birds and squirrels. At breakfast,
A black and white ghost reminds me
To never leave a milk pitcher unattended.
I've known a cat who could levitate and one
Who walked on her hind legs, startling my mother.
One cat spent her whole life trying to be
In any room where I wasn't. Another
Followed me everywhere.
I was walking downtown and noticed God
Was leaning against a building looking serious;
There was a patch on His jacket – not the decoration sort
But the “there's a hole I mean to cover” sort.
I asked what He was up to and He said
“Remembering all the people who’d died today;
There were an awful lot of them, though.”
I asked if I could help and He said sure
And scootched over to make room for me;
We leaned on the wall together, thinking dead folk.
It was hard work at first but got easier and faster
At last I said “God, I’m pretty sure I’ve remembered,
Some dead folk who never were alive.” He said it was okay;
We were too far along to turn back and He would mark
Anyone I’d invented by teaching them a secret handshake
So they could recognize each other and be able
To get extra servings of mush in Heaven.
(I was surprised to find out there’d be mush in Heaven
God said what sort of Heaven wouldn’t serve mush?)
