CIVIL TWILIGHT

Drowsy bees, loathe to sting,
Buzz querulous inquiry as I pass
Grass gods cease and then resume
Interminable wars against fate
A quiet door swings shut
A small hand moves a candle
From one window to another.

ENEMIES

Despite my strict instructions that I was not to be admitted
The housekeeper let me in through the kitchen door,
The butler fed me the remains of his own dinner
And the chambermaid loaned me her bed and her savings.
Every morning the gardener's cat would bring flowers
Or, if it was Thursday, some apricots or cowcumbers.
Only I was hostile, looking daggers when we passed.

AT ONCE

You are on a road but at every point

Simultaneously. You are singing

Beneath a clear sky while sheltering

Under insufficient trees from sleety rain

You are being robbed. You have become

A robber, the newest member of the band

And their aged captain as well. You are eating

At dozens of inns, at farmhouses, in fields.

You’re hungry and the next meal

Is days away. Your dreams are all happening

Right now and vagrants have set up shelters

In their bright alleys and ruined courts.

POWER

In the beginning, it’s about power;

You say Space; it’s off in every direction

Booming and exuberant

Set on its joyous unmaking

On the way back

Unless you send Time

To hiss and whisper and ribbon out

Making Space hurtle past itself.

ANSHE MULLER

The poet Mikael Anshe Muller
Was invented ten minutes ago;
He immediately set to work
On his memoirs. The agency
Sent round a muse. She was
A bit rusty, having last worked
In 1898 as staffage in paintings
By John Atkinson Grimshaw.
She's in at least seventy pictures
A woman in a long dark dress
Holding an umbrella and usually seen
From the rear or in three quarter view.
In those paintings it's always sunset
Or twilight or full night. Shoplights
Make the wet street glimmer.
As staffage she knows her place --
Vital but secondary. She pauses
Thinking her own thoughts. Dark masts
Rise in the background. Anshe Muller,
If he'll listen, will know what wares
The night shops sell, what ports
The night ships have called home.

YAHRZEIT

My mother could never resist treating waiters
And checkout clerks and deliverymen
As if they were people. How embarrassed I was
When she asked the waiter with an accent
What town had seen his birth, how long
He'd been here, did he like being a waiter.
He had such a nice voice! Did he sing?
By the end of the meal, the waiter -- his name
Was Pyan Soo -- was showing her pictures
And inviting us to the kitchen to meet his brother.

Because she liked their looks, my mother
Bought herbs from a Sicilian market.
An old man stopped her as she left,
Acting out the best ways to cook with them.

When my mother was in the hospital
For the minor procedure from which she died
She struck up a conversation with a nurse
Who had many problems. My mother
Promised to think them over.

(If I asked it of them, pronouns would do more work
But I enjoy the words "my mother.")

YELLOW DOG

Abraham Lincoln, said my father, knew of a tonic

That could make you a new man, with enough left over

To make a little yellow dog. The first part is only sense;

Who does not make a new man each time he wakes

Choosing among those pieces of him that lie to hand?

This memory but not that one; this vice but

Not – never again! – that virtue too dearly bought.

From suchlike things I have conjured myself

At least ten thousand times, without a tonic.

What concerns me now is that yellow dog
Making itself impudently of the parts left over

Bad enough when he barks at me when we pass,

I on my way to work and he off to chase sticks and cats

And other dogs, but worse- far, far worse! –

Those days he grins at me or offers a sympathetic paw.