Tarlton Law Library
Jamail Center for Legal Research

Homecoming

I put an ear to the glowing wall,
listen quietly.
There's action in the pumping chamber
where blood is sent spurting out.
Sixteen years.
Quite a spell to have been
away.
          Looming above: a wrap
-around front and side porch;
yellow shingles. Inside, a confusion
of rooms: some large and airy;
others like collapsed accordions--
secret places.
          A voice, both shriek
and song, drew me across hundreds of miles
to this: Mother, hair chestnut young,
trembling to let me in. Her steps draw near.
Father waits in the soft gemütlich leather
of his chair. The children at play:
Brother and myself.
          On the tongue, words disassemble.
I look over and through the peeling
paint, cracked windows, see the place
as I think it was. Not real, but so bright
the eyes hurt. Like staring at the sun too long.
When the door opens, I can't see to enter.
 

A Visit

He lies in bed like a toadstool uprooted,
tubes everywhere. "It's nice to see my boyala,"
he says. I used to tag along with him to work.
I'd collect spools of thread and sort them
by color--chartreuse, magenta, crimson.

The blood drains into him from a sack,
perched overhead like a bobbin.
"I came because . . ." --he wouldn't talk
on the phone. I juggled plans, caught
the Miami flight. When he needed me,

he'd flush me out from between jacket parts,
pockets, trousers in the upper levels of huge
storage bins. "This is discouraging," he says;
and I want to unhook him, drive him away . . .
"Son! How about a ride in the pushcart?"

I roll past whirring sewers down a steep incline
into the basement where cutters slice through
layers of cloth. I dismount to watch them.
"Come here, fella!" It's Carmen, the presser,
face sopping, huge stains on his undershirt.

"Your father's quite a man. He's the boss!"
"Yes, I know," I say, as if I know everything.
The nurses hover with their charts and needles.
"Give me your arm!" one of them orders.
"Show him how the boss does it!" Carmen urges.

Dad lifts the big hot iron with a facile
gesture, plunks it smartly across the seat
of a skirt, sizzling away the creases.
The drawing of blood. Puffs of steam rise
to the ceiling. The tube fills up crimson.
 

The Rogue Swans That Like Classical Music

They flew onto the woman's lawn,
ten, twenty, forty . . ., grabbed their spots
on the grassy embankment even as the last
movement of Beethoven's Ninth--Freude, schöner
Götterfunken . . . blaring from the speakers--
started to lift off. Transfixed,
something in their avian brains
had caught: not the words themselves,
but the spell, "Joy, bright spark of divinity . . ."
This is the mute swan, Cygnus olor,
with roots, old world Eurasian,
under attack now by environmentalists,
who complain how it over-consumes,
pollutes, proliferates.
They've had their eggs shaken
to scramble embryos. Wings pinioned.
Guns aimed at . . . And though they may look
immaculate in form, a feathery white to bring snow
to summer, they are not (is this not the swan
that ravished poor Leda?) pure
as all that downy show.
And yet having gathered now,
as if by right,
as if patrician and with season tickets,
they are like the ethereal
rush of this music, ageless,
 in the morning light,
the old world rising, its great wing beats.
 

When All The Doors Of The World Are Shut

Into the turning lane,
past the beggar with a scrawled sign
"lost my wife and job," up the ramp
to the mall, where he parks
the car, leaves his key--closing
the door--in the ignition
behind. O my God! He calls

AAA. No answer: "What the hell
are they doing there?" He hails a cab
home. Alas, when he arrives,
the Condo Office has just closed, no chance
to get their backup key (his home key
is on the chain in the car) to open
his apartment where lying in a drawer
is a second car key. But wait!

If he hails a cab to take him to work,
there's a key to his apartment
there . . . And then doing just that,
he remembers he doesn't have his work ID,
or the key to the door of his office, feels
in that instant what it must be like, the unraveling,
when all the doors of the world

are shut. Soon, though, he will persuade
security to help him get the key
that gets the key that gets
the key . . . And oh, the bliss of finally
driving his car out of the mall--
there's the beggar, still out in the heat;
he'll stare past him--onto the main
drag, step on the gas and forget.
 

Players

I'm getting spooked waiting for Sunday.
A babble of voices contend.
The Jew rises up, invokes Hitler.
She's Catholic, he accuses.
The lawyer intercedes. It's not hopeless,
though negotiations would be needed
over the children. Who's talking
marriage? snarls the hedonist. I hardly
know her. The spiritualist crunches
into a half-lotus, meditates, only
to have the poet shoulder the mantra
aside. He wonders if there's a poem
in the ginkgo trees she's talked about, still
sporting fan-shaped yellow leaves in December.
Interesting, says the nascent botanist.
The neurotic worries. So many things
can go wrong, like bumping into someone,
dropping a dish, stumbling for everyone
to laugh, oh boy, tears streaming from the eyes:
there goes that fella who can't find love. He's
a loner. He is: pouring over dusty tomes,
writing his heart out, the sap, just to see
 the words on paper, 'cause no one else gives
a damn. The little boy, rejected by his
brother, wants a friend, reaches for the child
whose parents divorced, her punishment, she thinks,
for unknown sins. Let's go and play, he says.
Then there are the lovers, macho man
and the sensitive male. Her earth mother
and feminist sidekicks pace the sidelines.
I'm getting spooked waiting for Sunday.
Our players troop forward, coachless. The trees
drop their leaves, reach out with naked arms.
 

Webs

Like wisps of morning fog
not burnt off, or festive
bunting on buttonbush,
lizard's tail. An odd patchwork
of directions in these spider
webs: slanted diagonal
vertical athwart in
meadow wetlands. We, who
have been stuck, hand here,
heart there, weave our lives beside
the like of these, spinning out
the fabric too, sometimes
invisible, not sure
if any of it can be
undone. Salvador Dali--
his limp clocks folded over
branches like slices
of cheese or linen to dry--
would've loved to paint all
of this. He, who understood
the timelessness in perfervid
phenomena, would've reached
for his palette, but now
instead of blood and maggot,
the fine silken strand.
 

This Snow That Doesn't Stop

I trudge up to Washington Circle
    and over toward Georgetown: the airport
        closed, offices shut, cars abandoned;
and even as mind leaps
    at the oddity
        of cross-country skiers on Pennsylvania Avenue,
my feet
        sink with each step. If the cleansing
    of mind involves a forgetting,
what then to say of hedges, fences, sidewalks, streets
    that have disappeared?
        And even if one cannot forget
    (the topography of self, more relentless,
constraining than the city's),

                                       I feel light
as I slog along (or is it delight?)
    in a gust of wind that whips a frenzy
        of powder off the eaves
of a row of townhouses. And suddenly,
   though all the boughs
    of all the trees are snow-heavy,
        it's as if I were
                      bodiless
        amidst a deler-
ium of flakes,
    an elemental shifting, swirl-
        ing St. Vitus' dance
    as they fall. Let them
            press, narrow,
        hem me in: I am unbounded!
    Who cannot laugh
then at what's . . . (call it
        presumption, this city)
            man-made?
    A minimalist
            sense of infinite space . . .
 

Ways To Describe Snow

What to think of the Eskimos?
They have so many ways
to describe snow, from Labradoran Inuit

to West Greenlandic:
there is pukak (snow like salt),
mauja (soft deep snow),

massak (soft snow),
mangokpok (watery snow),
qaniit (snow in air,

falling),
quanipalaat (feathery clumps
of falling

snow), and on
and on . . .
And in some aftermath

as from a blizzard's blowing, swirling . . .
what to think of us,
(who have but one

word,
over-extended, adulter-
ated, for love)?

 In Inuit, there are ten words
for ice and snow, in West Greenlandic
forty-nine. Though visions

of igloos may please, add ice to love,
it can die: I want to hug you, unfreeze
what we've become.
 

Though The Bombs Are Smarter

A pilot in a plane sees a bridge.
He zeroes in on it, lets go
with a bomb, laser-guided,
not noticing the train beyond the edge
of his vision
          where men and women,
think of homes they're coming
back to, children to be tucked
into bed, a friend,
a love . . . Not one of them knows
how in fifteen seconds, no more,
no less--
          there's a mathematical precision
to annihilation--
               as if God above
had chosen them,
and them alone . . .

   ‡   ‡

‡   ‡

          The high priests
of the war murmur, "una-
voidable, re-
grettable," but want to draw us

                                      away
from the still smoldering
detritus of steel and flesh (if no one
looks, maybe it isn't,
wasn't),
         back to the mantra of bombs!
A hospital is hit,

                      the Chinese embassy
in Belgrade, too,
(the United States deeply
regrets . . .),
               how it explodes in horrific
flames this night.

                       Even Bulgaria, our ally,
struck five times; once its capital,
Sofia, which name
means the female side
of . . . Deum de Deo, lumen
de lumine . . .
(God of God,
light
of light . . .). The days are cloudy;
it's that damn Balkans weather;
and we're really only one
                                          country off.
 

The Day The World Changed

At the dentist being drilled . . .
it's 8:46 AM,
when a plane crashes into the 110-story north tower
of the World Trade Center.
                                              Fifteen minutes later,
inside a favorite
bookstore haunt, I'm reading
in French from Saint-Exupery about a lonely
Prince who lives on a tiny
asteroid, warns of the baobabs
with roots and tendrils that begin
to grow . . . That's the time
(because he says they will spread to destroy
an entire world unless
rooted out, early)
                                when suddenly a second plane
thumps
into the equally high south tower.
And through fireballs
of such suffering and death, it seems almost
surreal because not aware of any
of this, I'm moving still, 9:43 AM now,
with pleasure--secure at a table in Firehook
bakery--from book, to dark
coffee, to dictionary. . . as plane
number three and its all-too flammable
                                                        lives plows into
the Pentagon!
A fourth, hijacked like the others, circles
back . . . Oh how the brave men, hopeless,
will fight and die!
While I sit amused at baobabs.
                                              Smiling at the baobabs!
 

On the Co-Existence of Different Worlds

After midnight, through a blind passage
in New York's Penn Station,
and I, comfortable
and middle-class, maybe twenty,
on the way home from College,
ran into a thief, who grabbed
hold of my suitcase . . . Instinctively,
I wouldn't let go . . .
                                And then, a gaunt man,
one whom I'd given a dollar to
five minutes before
when I'd been panhandled, turned up,
suddenly implored: "no, not him!"
The first paused an instant, released
his grip, and the two of them
raced off . . .
                   Tonight, decades later, a serial sniper,
who left behind at one crime scene
the Death tarot card with a message,
"Dear policeman: I am God,"
randomly shoots a woman at a mall
I go to routinely. And though I'm not
the same as before--
more travel-worn, less the dreamer--
he'd kill what I once was . . .
                                            or me now if he could,
without thought or regret . . .
 

Noah And Dove Revisited

"And lo, in her mouth an olive-leaf
freshly plucked . . . ." Genesis 8:11 

Everyone wanted in--from aardvark
to zebra. Noah waved away
that bird, bedraggled, near his ark.
It was filling fast, in disarray.

She drew closer . . . He shooed her away.
On the upper deck already
the aviaries had filled; and, oy vay,
the downpour now was steady,

his whole menagerie already
afloat, drifting, when there fell a tear
of blood. And suddenly, voice steady,
he called the dove in, let matter

as against the Flood, that one tear!
Later, she'd leave the ark that had become
home. And with will enough to matter.
Because out of flight, this poem--

or rather how to leave what's become
home, through conditions adverse . . .
Circle hard, wings beating. Find a poem
for the world drowning in prose!