It Was So Dark Inside the Wolf
All day with nothing on my mind, the soft old couch,
the heating pad, a book of Tennessee Williams’s letters,
tea, camembert, beer, soup, dozing, speaking in tongues
off in my drowsing mind, invoking this or that god, thinking
of raising my fortunes, thinking of all of this swimming forward
without me someday, this bag of small wishes, the greatest
sorrows indelible and indistinct in the afternoon’s haze: I
cannot remember who said that our salvation must come from
a turn within our own nature and that there are no turns, and
there is no nature. Oh, it was so dark inside the wolf said
the little girl with the basket after the hunters had killed
that beast who had eaten her, after they had cut him open to
let her out, although you don’t hear that version so often anymore.
Surely this is significant. Who hasn’t lodged in the belly
of something, who hasn’t been devoured? Do you remember?
Maybe it is something for you like an old tune that haunts you,
that makes you so suddenly sad when you see a place where
the carpet is coming up or where the screen door is sagging
on a desperate hinge. Unbearable, this material music dissipating
the neighborhood around you into nothing. How does one rise
from this torpor and say, I don’t know what to do anymore?
Outside the trees have sneaked above the line of the neighbor’s
wall. How did I not notice? They make a tiny forest along our
city driveway. They are as dark and deep as it gets here. I
am still trying to rise up from the loveliness of dying objects
into the loveliness of whatever it is they point to. I’m trying
to get at just how things are, to adjust to that, but then I start
shaking. Isn’t that how it is with you? It was so dark inside,
but that’s not the whole story. They are leaving something out.
I can feel it in the sleepless night when I run my hands over
the openings in doorways. I can feel it when my own heart
delivers all my secrets to my enemies. I can feel it when
the poem doesn’t turn, but heads for the bottom with a hook
in its mouth or when the sky runs to the color of tin and the
sparrows disguise themselves as leaves in the hedge waiting
for their moment. Isn’t that how it is with you?
Bright Wings
Then I was walking in the garden looking for the intermediaries
between me and the clear light. Clouds of gauzy gnats flew up
and drifted in the buttery air. I had left the green hose running
much too long, and the earth was quenched and sagging under
the sweet peas. And something had been chewing holes in
the ear-soft leaves of the morning glories. Then I saw for
the first time that the neighbor was growing corn. The yellow
shocks were leaning just above the cinder-block fence, and they
looked so delicate and scruffy, like city corn, like alien corn,
and suddenly there was so much to be done, so much to put
in order-not the ordinary business of living and dying, but
the ordinary business that comes bundled with them. Sunlight
behaved perfectly in every corner. The shadows breathed in their
one direction and told stories. The cat crouched in the flower bed
aching to kill something. What is a man to do in such a moment?
When he knows he’s being fooled by Heraclitean fire and all
those old and hopeful ideas about the moral jewel in beauty?
I mean in this day and age? I mean now when no one can even get
those equations to hold up anymore? And the ants had formed a black
ribbon that led to a dead snail. And the Pipers and Cessnas
and Beechcraft were circling for the airport with so much color
and precision. And the dogs two houses down heard the mail-
carrier’s foot and erupted. But this is not the answer I’m
looking for. And I have been lazy. Tangerines and lemons and
mandarin oranges have swollen and dropped from their impatient
branches. They lie among the fern and the vine, bruised and mushy.
They are being swarmed. They are being devoured.
