Flying At Night Read online

  starlight like beads of dew

  along his tight chain.

  No one is there

  beyond the dark garden,

  nothing to bark at

  except, perhaps, the thoughts

  of some old man

  sending his memories

  out for a midnight walk,

  a rich cape

  woven of many loves

  swept recklessly

  about his shoulders.

  Central

  As fine a piece of furniture

  as any Steinway, all oak

  and nickel and Bakelite,

  her switchboard stood in the kitchen

  stretching the truth. While she sat

  with her ear to the valley,

  rumor reached its red tendrils

  from socket to socket, from farm

  to farm. When the sun went down,

  she sat in the dark. Those voices

  she'd listened to all afternoon,

  clear as the high sharp cries of geese,

  flew over the house and were gone.

  The loose lines buzzed. In the moonlight,

  her hands held the wilted bouquets

  of pink rubber. “Central,” she'd say

  to the darkness, “This is Central.

  Hello? Is there anyone there?”

  The Fan in the Window

  It is September, and a cool breeze

  from somewhere ahead is turning the blades;

  night, and the slow flash of the fan

  the last light between us and the darkness.

  Dust has begun to collect on the blades,

  haymaker's dust from distant fields,

  dust riding to town on the night-black wings

  of the crows, a thin frost of dust

  which clings to the fan in just the way

  we cling to the earth as it spins.

  The fan has brought us through,

  its shiny blades like the screw of a ship

  that has pushed its way through summer—

  cut flowers awash in its wake,

  the stagnant Sargasso Sea of July

  far behind us. For the moment, we rest,

  we lie in the dark hull of the house,

  we rock in the troughs off the shore

  of October, the engine cooling,

  the fan blades so lazily turning, but turning.

  Myrtle

  Wearing her yellow rubber slicker,

  Myrtle, our Journal carrier,

  has come early through rain and darkness

  to bring us the news.

  A woman of thirty or so,

  with three small children at home,

  she's told me she likes

  a long walk by herself in the morning.

  And with pride in her work,

  she's wrapped the news neatly in plastic—

  a bread bag, beaded with rain,

  that reads WONDER.

  From my doorway I watch her

  flicker from porch to porch as she goes,

  a yellow candle flame

  no wind or weather dare extinguish.

  Daddy Longlegs

  Here, on fine long legs springy as steel,

  a life rides, sealed in a small brown pill

  that skims along over the basement floor

  wrapped up in a simple obsession.

  Eight legs reach out like the master ribs

  of a web in which some thought is caught

  dead center in its own small world,

  a thought so far from the touch of things

  that we can only guess at it. If mine,

  it would be the secret dream

  of walking alone across the floor of my life

  with an easy grace, and with love enough

  to live on at the center of myself.

  Good-bye

  You lean with one arm out

  against the porch post,

  your big hand cupping its curve,

  shy of that handshake

  we both know is coming.

  And when we've said enough,

  when the last small promises

  begin to repeat, your eyes

  come to mine, and then

  you offer your hand,

  dusted with chalk from the post,

  and sticky with parting.

  The Giant Slide

  Beside the highway, the Giant Slide

  with its rusty undulations lifts

  out of the weeds. It hasn't been used

  for a generation. The ticket booth

  tilts to that side where the nickels shifted

  over the years. A chain link fence keeps out

  the children and drunks. Blue morning glories

  climb halfway up the stairs, bright clusters

  of laughter. Call it a passing fancy,

  this slide that nobody slides down now.

  Those screams have all gone east

  on a wind that will never stop blowing

  down from the Rockies and over the plains,

  where things catch on for a little while,

  bright leaves in a fence, and then are gone.

  A Roadside Shrine in Kansas

  Sunk into the earth

  end up,

  as if it had fallen

  white as a comet

  from heaven,

  this bathtub,

  clenching its claws

  into fists,

  now shelters

  a Virgin

  of plaster,

  while through

  the rusty drain hole,

  one kneeling there

  can see

  in the shimmering distance,

  God

  walking the bean rows.

  Decoration Day

  It takes the hard work

  of a dozen ants

  to open each bud

  of a peony.

  For weeks, there they are,

  clickety-clack,

  biting the sutures

  and licking the glue.

  Then, one by one

  on Decoration Day,

  the blossoms explode,

  tossing the ants

  all over the yard.

  Early that morning,

  we find these flowers

  opened, pink and white,

  and in the wet grass,

  hundreds of ants

  with the staggers, all

  watching the sky.

  A Monday in May

  It rained all weekend,

  but today the peaked roofs

  are as dusty and warm

  as the backs of old donkeys

  tied in the sun.

  So much alike are our houses,

  our lives. Under every eave—

  leaf, cobweb, and feather;

  and for each front yard

  one sentimental maple,

  who after a shower has passed,

  weeps into her shadow

  for hours.

  A Buffalo Skull

  No fine white bone-sheen now;

  a hundred hard years

  have worn it away, this stump

  washed up on a bar

  in the river, its horns

  like broken roots,

  its muzzle filled with sand

  and the thin gray breath

  of spider webs. Once,

  they covered the grasslands

  like the shadows of clouds,

  and now the river gives up

  just one skull, a hive of bone

  like a fallen wasp's nest,

  heavy, empty, and

  full of the whine of the wind

  and old thunder.

  Laundry

  A pink house trailer,

  scuffed and rusted, sunken

  in weeds. On the line,

  five pale blue workshirts

  up to their elbows

  in raspberry canes—

  a good, clean crew

  of pickers,
out early,

  sleeves wet with dew,

  and near them, a pair

  of bright yellow panties

  urging them on.

  The Mouse

  On the floor of a parking garage

  I found a dead mouse. It was winter,

  the world gone gray outside and in,

  and the mouse a part of all that drabness—

  the smallest part. He stood

  like a windup mouse run down at last

  but still on its wheels, a fast run

  just behind him, and he'd pulled

  his paws up tightly under his chin

  as if he'd stopped to sniff at the edge

  of something important—a mousehole maybe,

  right under his nose and opening

  out of the world. His back was arched

  against entering there, and every muscle

  had frozen in place like a spring.

  Ladder

  Against the low roof of a house

  in the suburbs, someone has left

  a ladder leaning, an old wooden ladder

  too heavy to take down at night

  and put up in the morning, the kind

  that reaches beyond such a roof

  by a good six feet, punching up

  into the sky. The kind with paint

  from another world on its rungs,

  the cream and butter colored spots

  from another time, the kind that

  before you get up in the morning

  knocks hard at the front of your house

  like a sheriff, that stands there

  in front of your door with a smile;

  a ladder with solid authority,

  with its pantlegs pressed, a ladder

  that if it could whistle would whistle.

  Walking at Noon Near the Burlington Depot in Lincoln, Nebraska

  —to the memory of James Wright

  On the rat-gray dock

  of the candy factory,

  workers in caps and aprons

  as white as divinity

  sit on their heels and smoke

  in the warm spring sunlight

  thick with butterscotch.

  In the next block down,

  outside a warehouse,

  its big doors rolled and bolted

  over the dusty hush

  of pyramids of cartons,

  two pickets in lettered vests

  call back and forth, their voices

  a clatter of echoes.

  A girl sits in her car,

  an old tan Oldsmobile

  broken down over its tires,

  and plays the radio.

  On the grill of a semi

  smelling of heat and distance,

  one tattered butterfly.

  And an empty grocery cart

  from Safeway, miles from here,

  leans into its reflection

  in a blackened window, a little

  piano recital of chrome

  for someone to whom all things

  were full of sadness.

  A Patch of Sunlight

  Over the old dog's eye,

  the blue cloud

  of a cataract.

  Along one leg, a tremor—

  some tiny animal

  running in long brown grass.

  Carp

  On the river bottom,

  the carp have blown out

  all the candles.

  They whisper along

  over the closed, black

  bibles of clams.

  Water-monks these,

  with mouths like those

  of angels singing,

  but not angelic,

  so very naked now

  in darkness,

  their cool, hard bodies

  touching, among

  the tapestries of weed.

  At the Center

  In Kansas, on top

  of an old piano,

  a starfish, dry

  as a fancy pastry

  left sitting there

  during a wedding,

  spreads its brown arms

  over the foam

  of a white lace doily,

  reaching for water

  in five directions.

  A Sunset

  The steeple so carefully

  swings its long shadow

  over the grass that the bell's

  small shadow does not ring,

  nor do the soft gray shadows

  of its pigeons fly. Light

  rises into the treetops

  like the bubbles in beer.

  A man walks home alone,

  his shadow, shambling ahead,

  some dark old woman

  who rents out rooms.

  She's wrapped in a shawl

  that hides her face

  in folds of blackness,

  and closed in her fist

  is the evening star.

  The Ride

  —to the memory of John Gardner

  High in the night, we rock, we rock in the stars

  while the Ferris wheel stops to let someone off

  in the darkness below, someone we saw there

  a half turn ahead of us, riding alone,

  a man with white hair who threw up his hands

  going down. We were too frightened for that.

  We held on with both hands as we followed him,

  climbing and falling, around and around,

  while the world turned beneath us, rolled under

  the wheel with its music, its flickering lights.

  Now we rock in the starlight. Beneath us,

  the music has stopped, the motor pops at idle.

  The midway goes dark, booth to booth, as he passes.

  At Nightfall

  In feathers the color of dusk, a swallow,

  up under the shadowy eaves of the barn,

  weaves now, with skillful beak and chitter,

  one bright white feather into her nest

  to guide her flight home in the darkness.

  It has taken a hundred thousand years

  for a bird to learn this one trick with a feather,

  a simple thing. And the world is alive

  with such innocent progress. But to what

  safe place shall any of us return

  in the last smoky nightfall,

  when we in our madness have put the torch

  to the hope in every nest and feather?

  At the Office Early

  Rain has beaded the panes

  of my office windows,

  and in each little lens

  the bank at the corner

  hangs upside down.

  What wonderful music

  this rain must have made

  in the night, a thousand banks

  turned over, the change

  crashing out of the drawers

  and bouncing upstairs

  to the roof, the soft

  percussion of ferns

  dropping out of their pots,

  the ball-point pens

  popping out of their sockets

  in a fluffy snow

  of deposit slips.

  Now all day long,

  as the sun dries the glass,

  I'll hear the soft piano

  of banks righting themselves,

  the underpaid tellers

  counting their nickels and dimes.

  Cleaning a Bass

  She put it on the chopping block

  and it flopped a little, the red rick-rack

  of its sharp gills sawing the evening air

  into lengths, its yellow eyes like glass,

  like the eyes of a long-forgotten doll

  in the light of an attic. “They feel no pain,”

  she told me, setting the fish upright,

  and with a chunk of stovewood

  she drove an ice pick through its skull

  and into the block. The big fish curled

  on its pin
like a silver pennant

  and then relaxed, but I could see life

  in those eyes, which stared at the darkening

  world of the air with a terrible wonder.

  “It's true,” she said, looking over at me

  through the gathering shadows, “they feel no pain,”

  and she took her Swedish filleting knife

  with its beautiful blade that leaped and flashed

  like a fish itself, and with one stroke

  laid the bass bare to its shivering spine.

  An Empty Shotgun Shell

  It's a handsome thing

  in its uniform—

  all crimson and brass—

  standing guard

  at the gate to the field,

  but something

  is wrong at its heart.

  It's dark in there,

  so dark a whole night

  could squeeze in,

  could shrink back up in there

  like a spider,

  a black one

  with smoke in its hair.

  A Quarter Moon Just Before Dawn

  There's sun on the moon's back

  as she stoops to pick up

  a star that she's dropped in her garden.

  And stars keep falling,

  through little holes in the bottoms

  of her sweater pockets.

  She's stretched them out

  by hiding her hands all these years—

  big peasant's hands

  with night under their nails.

  A Letter

  I have tried a dozen ways

  to say those things

  and have failed: how the moon

  with its bruises

  climbs branch over branch

  through the empty tree;

  how the cool November dusk,

  like a wind, has blown

  these old gray houses up

  against the darkness;

  and what these things

  have come to mean to me

  without you. I raked the yard

  this morning, and it rained

  this afternoon. Tonight,

  along the shiny street,

  the bags of leaves—

  wet-shouldered

  but warm in their skins—

  are huddled together, close

  so close to life.

  Latvian Neighborhood

  Along this street,