Flying At Night Read online

into an earlier life, holding a thread

  of the old world's noises, and feeling his way

  through the bones. The scratch of my pen

  keeps the thread taut. When I finish

  the poem, and the sound in the room goes slack,

  the cat will come scampering back

  into the blinding, bright rooms of his eyes.

  North of Alliance

  This is an empty house; not a stick

  of furniture left, not even

  a newspaper sodden with rain

  under a broken window; nothing

  to tell us the style of the people

  who lived here, but that

  they took it along. But wait:

  here, penciled in inches

  up a doorframe, these little marks

  mark the growth of a child

  impatient to get on with it,

  a child stretching his neck

  in a hurry to leave nothing here

  but an absence grown tall in a doorway.

  Late September

  Behind each garage a ladder

  sleeps in the leaves, its hands

  folded across its lean belly.

  There are hundreds of them

  in each town, and more

  sleeping by haystacks and barns

  out in the country—tough old

  day laborers, seasoned and wheezy,

  drunk on the weather,

  sleeping outside with the crickets.

  Carrie

  “There's never an end to dust

  and dusting,” my aunt would say

  as her rag, like a thunderhead,

  scudded across the yellow oak

  of her little house. There she lived

  seventy years with a ball

  of compulsion closed in her fist,

  and an elbow that creaked and popped

  like a branch in a storm. Now dust

  is her hands and dust her heart.

  There's never an end to it.

  For a Friend

  Late November, driving to Wichita.

  A black veil of starlings

  snags on a thicket and falls.

  Shadows of wings skitter over

  the highway, like leaves, like ashes.

  You have been dead for six months;

  though summer and fall

  were lighter by one life,

  they didn't seem to show it.

  The seasons, those steady horses,

  are used to the fickle weight

  of our shifting load.

  I'll guess how it was; on the road

  through the wood, you stood up

  in the back of the hangman's cart,

  reached a low-hanging branch,

  and swung up into the green leaves

  of our memories.

  Old friend,

  the stars were shattered windshield glass

  for weeks; we all were sorry.

  They never found that part of you

  that made you drink, that made you cruel.

  You knew we loved you anyway.

  Black streak across the centerline,

  all highways make me think of you.

  Grandfather

  Driving the team, he came up over

  the hill and looked down. In the white bowl

  of the snow-covered valley, his house

  was aflame like a wick, drawing up

  into itself all that he'd worked for.

  Once, forty years later, we passed.

  It was October. The cellar

  was filled by a flame of young trees.

  I got out, but he sat in the back

  and stared straight ahead, this old, old man,

  still tight on the reins of his years.

  Looking for You, Barbara

  I have been out looking for you,

  Barbara, and as I drove around,

  the steering wheel turned through my hands

  like a clock. The moon

  rolled over the rooftops and was gone.

  I was dead tired; in my arms

  they were rolling the tires inside;

  in my legs they were locking the pumps.

  Yet what was in me for you

  flapped as red in my veins

  as banners strung over a car lot.

  Then I came home and got drunk.

  Where were you? 2 A.M.

  is full of slim manikins

  waving their furs from black windows.

  My bed goes once more around the block,

  and my heart keeps on honking its horn.

  Pocket Poem

  If this comes creased and creased again and soiled

  as if I'd opened it a thousand times

  to see if what I'd written here was right,

  it's all because I looked for you too long

  to put it in your pocket. Midnight says

  the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped

  by nervous fingers. What I wanted this

  to say was that I want to be so close

  that when you find it, it is warm from me.

  Moles

  The young of the mole

  are born in the skull of a mayor.

  They learn footfall

  and rain. In the Season

  of Falling Pinecones, they gather

  in churches of ribs,

  whining and puking.

  When one of the old moles dies,

  the young push him out of his tunnel

  and set him afloat on the light.

  This is the way we find them

  out in the garden,

  their little oars

  pulled up and drying.

  Notes on the Death of Nels Paulssen, Farmer, at the Ripe Old Age of 93

  A harvest

  of nail parings,

  a wagonload

  of hair—

  over his ashen

  fields,

  no dust

  in the air.

  Advice

  We go out of our way to get home,

  getting lost in a rack of old clothing,

  fainting in stairwells,

  our pulses fluttering like moths.

  We will always be

  leaving our loves like old stoves

  in abandoned apartments. Early in life

  there are signals of how it will be—

  we throw up the window one spring

  and the window weights break from their ropes

  and fall deep in the wall.

  After My Grandmother's Funeral

  After my grandmother's funeral,

  as the dark river of mourners

  murmured beneath me, I lay

  on the floor of her attic,

  watching the afternoon light

  fade from the vault of old rafters

  and dim to a film of gray dust

  on her dresses and shoes.

  I closed my eyes and slept,

  but no dream came to me;

  the coffin of that attic

  was not to be borne aloft

  on the good shoulders of cousins;

  nor was it to roll on chrome wheels

  to an altar with candles;

  nor was I to awaken to find

  my fingers laced loosely

  over my heart. No dream came then

  to help me leap over

  the years to my death.

  I awakened still young,

  still sad, no longer welcome

  in that darkening house.

  A Hot Night in Wheat Country

  One doctor in a Piper Cub

  can wake up everyone in North Dakota.

  At the level of an open upstairs window,

  a great white plain stretches away—

  the naked Methodists

  lying on top of their bedding.

  The moon covers her eyes with a cloud.

  Five P.M.

  The pigeon flies to her resting place

  on a window led
ge above the traffic,

  and her shadow, which cannot fly, climbs

  swiftly over the bricks to meet her there.

  Just so are you and I gathered at 5:00,

  your bicycle left by the porch, the wind

  still ringing in it, and my shoes by the bed,

  still warm from walking home to you.

  Abandoned Farmhouse

  He was a big man, says the size of his shoes

  on a pile of broken dishes by the house;

  a tall man too, says the length of the bed

  in an upstairs room; and a good, God-fearing man,

  says the Bible with a broken back

  on the floor below the window, dusty with sun;

  but not a man for farming, say the fields

  cluttered with boulders and the leaky barn.

  A woman lived with him, says the bedroom wall

  papered with lilacs and the kitchen shelves

  covered with oilcloth, and they had a child,

  says the sandbox made from a tractor tire.

  Money was scarce, say the jars of plum preserves

  and canned tomatoes sealed in the cellar hole.

  And the winters cold, say the rags in the window frames.

  It was lonely here, says the narrow country road.

  Something went wrong, says the empty house

  in the weed-choked yard. Stones in the fields

  say he was not a farmer; the still-sealed jars

  in the cellar say she left in a nervous haste.

  And the child? Its toys are strewn in the yard

  like branches after a storm—a rubber cow,

  a rusty tractor with a broken plow,

  a doll in overalls. Something went wrong, they say.

  The Blind Always Come as Such a Surprise

  The blind always come as such a surprise,

  suddenly filling an elevator

  with a great white porcupine of canes,

  or coming down upon us in a noisy crowd

  like the eye of a hurricane.

  The dashboards of cars stopped at crosswalks

  and the shoes of commuters on trains

  are covered with sentences

  struck down in mid-flight by the canes of the blind.

  Each of them changes our lives,

  tapping across the bright circles of our ambitions

  like cracks traversing the favorite china.

  Furnace

  There's a click like a piece of chalk

  tapping a blackboard, and the furnace

  starts thinking: Now, just where was I?

  It's always the same stale thought

  turned over and over: Got to

  get something to eat. Nothing else

  ever enters its mind. After all,

  it's a very old furnace,

  and all of its friends have moved on.

  West Window

  An owl

  washes his claws

  in the wind,

  sets down

  in light

  no brighter

  than a candle makes,

  to eat. The days

  draw back their warmth

  from us

  like cooling lamps.

  We grow

  to be alone

  with table and cup.

  Boarding House

  The blind man draws his curtains for the night

  and goes to bed, leaving a burning light

  above the bathroom mirror. Through the wall,

  he hears the deaf man walking down the hall

  in his squeaky shoes to see if there's a light

  under the blind man's door, and all is right.

  A Letter from Aunt Belle

  You couldn't have heard about it there—

  I'll send the clippings later on.

  The afternoon that the neighbors' stove exploded—

  how it reminded me of…Sarah's garden wedding!

  Do you remember? It was beautiful.

  As I was watering those slips

  I promised you—the violets—

  there was an awful thud, and Samson's wall

  puffed up and blew the windows out.

  It turned some pictures in the living room,

  and that lovely vase you children gave to me

  Christmas of ’56 fell down, but I can glue it.

  That Franklin boy you knew in school—

  the one who got that girl in trouble—

  ran in the Samsons' house, but she was dead;

  the blast collapsed her lungs, poor thing.

  She always made me think of you,

  but on the stretcher with her hair pinned up

  and one old sandal off, she looked as old

  as poor old me.

  I have to go—

  I've baked a little coffee cake

  for Mr. Samson and the boys.

  The violet slips are ready—

  Write.

  At the Bait Stand

  Part barn, part boxcar, part of a chicken shed,

  part leaking water, something partly dead,

  part pop machine, part gas pump, part a chair

  leaned back against the wall, and sleeping there,

  part-owner Herman Runner, mostly fat,

  hip-waders, undershirt, tattoos and hat.

  The Tattooed Lady

  Around the smallpox vaccination scar

  I'd hated since I was a little girl

  I had him put this daisy, then its stem

  because the flower looked too spidery

  without a stem, and then these little leaves.

  He said to think of it as just a gift

  for a pretty girl. I went to him that night

  because my arm was swollen, and I stayed

  for twenty years. Around the daisy's stem

  he slowly wound a snake that circled me

  with swirls of trailer camps and cheap hotels

  and sideshows, yet I loved the masterpiece

  that I became to him. His touch had touched

  me everywhere. His love is here to see.

  A Death at the Office

  The news goes desk to desk

  like a memo: Initial

  and pass on. Each of us marks

  Surprised or Sorry.

  The management came early

  and buried her nameplate

  deep in her desk. They have boxed up

  the Midol and Lip-Ice,

  the snapshots from home,

  wherever it was—nephews

  and nieces, a strange, blurred cat

  with fiery, flashbulb eyes

  as if it grieved. But who grieves here?

  We have her ballpoints back,

  her bud vase. One of us tears

  the scribbles from her calendar.

  There Is Always a Little Wind

  There is always a little wind

  in a country cemetery,

  even on days when the air stands

  still as a barn in the fields.

  You can see the old cedars,

  stringy and tough as maiden aunts,

  taking the little gusts of wind

  in their aprons like sheaves of wheat,

  and hear above you the warm

  and regular sweep of wheat being cut

  and gathered, the wagons creaking,

  the young men breathing at their work.

  The Widow Lester

  I was too old to be married,

  but nobody told me.

  I guess they didn't care enough.

  How it had hurt, though, catching bouquets

  all those years!

  Then I met Ivan, and kept him,

  and never knew love.

  How his feet stunk in the bed sheets!

  I could have told him to wash,

  but I wanted to hold that stink against him.

  The day he dropped dead in the field,

  I was watching.

  I was hanging up sheets
in the yard,

  and I finished.

  Houses at the Edge of Town

  These are the houses of farmers

  retired from their fields;

  white houses, freshly folded

  and springing open again

  like legal papers. These are houses

  drawn up on the shore of the fields,

  their nets still wet,

  the fishermen sleeping curled in the bows.

  See how the gardens

  wade into the edge of the hayfield,

  the cucumbers crawling out under the lilacs

  to lie in the sun.

  The Old Woman

  The old woman, asleep on her back,

  pulls up her knees and gives birth

  to an empty house. She kicks off

  the quilt and sheet and rakes her shift

  up over her hips, showing her sex

  to the photos of children

  arranged on the opposite wall

  who, years before, turned their

  moonlit faces away.

  A Place in Kansas

  —for Jon Gierlich

  Somewhere in Kansas, a friend found

  an empty stone house alone in a wheatfield.

  Over the door was incised a ship's anchor.

  There was no one to ask

  what that anchor was doing in Kansas,

  no water for miles.

  Not a single white sail of a meaning

  broke the horizon, though he stood there for hours.

  It's like that in Kansas, forever.

  Tom Ball's Barn

  —for Bill Kloefkorn

  The loan that built the barn

  just wasn't big enough

  to buy the paint, so the barn

  went bare and fell apart

  at the mortgaged end of twelve

  nail-popping, splintering winters.

  Besides the Januaries,

  the barber says it was

  five-and-a-half percent,

  three dry years, seven wet,

  and two indifferent,

  the banker (dead five years),

  and the bank (still open

  but deaf, or deef as it were), and