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.
