Map Read Free Page B

there’s awful darkness, in the darkness a small boy.
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God of humor, do something about him, OK?
God of humor, do something about him today.

Report from the Hospital
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We used matches to draw lots: who would visit him.
And I lost. I got up from our table.
Visiting hours were just about to start.
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When I said hello he didn’t say a word.
I tried to take his hand—he pulled it back
like a hungry dog that won’t give up his bone.
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He seemed embarrassed about dying.
What do you say to someone like that?
Our eyes never met, like in a faked photograph.
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He didn’t care if I stayed or left.
He didn’t ask about anyone from our table.
Not you, Barry. Or you, Larry. Or you, Harry.
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My head started aching. Who’s dying on whom?
I went on about modern medicine and the three violets in a jar.
I talked about the sun and faded out.
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It’s a good thing they have stairs to run down.
It’s a good thing they have gates to let you out.
It’s a good thing you’re all waiting at our table.
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The hospital smell makes me sick.

Returning Birds
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This spring the birds came back again too early.
Rejoice, O reason: instinct can err, too.
It gathers wool, it dozes off—and down they fall
into the snow, into a foolish fate, a death
that doesn’t suit their well-wrought throats and splendid claws,
their honest cartilage and conscientious webbing,
the heart’s sensible sluice, the entrails’ maze,
the nave of ribs, the vertebrae in stunning enfilades,
feathers deserving their own wing in any crafts museum,
the Benedictine patience of the beak.
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This is not a dirge—no, it’s only indignation.
An angel made of earthbound protein,
a living kite with glands straight from the Song of Songs,
singular in air, without number in the hand,
its tissues tied into a common knot
of place and time, as in an Aristotelian drama
unfolding to the wings’ applause,
falls down and lies beside a stone,
which in its own archaic, simpleminded way
sees life as a chain of failed attempts.

Thomas Mann
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Dear mermaids, it was bound to happen.
Beloved fauns and honorable angels,
evolution has emphatically cast you out.
Not that it lacks imagination, but
you with your Devonian tail fins and alluvial breasts,
your fingered hands and cloven feet,
your arms alongside, not instead of, wings,
your, heaven help us, diphyletic skeletons,
your ill-timed tails, horns sprouted out of spite,
illegitimate beaks, this morphogenetic potpourri, those
finned or furry frills and furbelows, the couplets
pairing human/heron with such cunning
that their offspring knows all, is immortal, and can fly,
you must admit that it would be a nasty joke,
excessive, everlasting, and no end of bother,
one that mother nature wouldn’t like and won’t allow.
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And after all she does permit a fish to fly,
deft and defiant. Each such ascent
consoles our rule-bound world, reprieves it
from necessity’s confines—more
than enough for the world to be a world.
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And after all she does permit us baroque gems
like this: a platypus that feeds its chicks on milk.
She might have said no—and which of us would know
that we’d been robbed?
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               But the best is that
she somehow missed the moment when a mammal turned up
with its hand miraculously feathered by a fountain pen.

Tarsier
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I am a tarsier and a tarsier’s son,
the grandson and great-grandson of tarsiers,
a tiny creature, made up of two pupils
and whatever simply could not be left out;
miraculously saved from further alterations—
since I’m no one’s idea of a treat,
my coat’s too small for a fur collar,
my glands provide no bliss,
and concerts go on without my gut—
I, a tarsier,
sit living on a human fingertip.
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Good morning, lord and master,
what will you give me
for not taking anything from