Sailing Alone Around the Room Read Free

future,
    immune from the cares of the present,
    safely harbored a quarter of an hour
    beyond the woes of the contemporary scene.
    No wonder such thoughtless pleasure derives
    from tending the small fire of a cigarette,
    from observing this glass of whiskey and ice,
    the cold rust I am sipping,
    or from having an eye on the street outside
    when Ordinary Time slouches past in a topcoat,
    rain running off the brim of his hat,
    the late edition like a flag in his pocket.

My Number
    Is Death miles away from this house,
    reaching for a widow in Cincinnati
    or breathing down the neck of a lost hiker
    in British Columbia?
    Is he too busy making arrangements,
    tampering with air brakes,
    scattering cancer cells like seeds,
    loosening the wooden beams of roller coasters
    to bother with my hidden cottage
    that visitors find so hard to find?
    Or is he stepping from a black car
    parked at the dark end of the lane,
    shaking open the familiar cloak,
    its hood raised like the head of a crow,
    and removing the scythe from the trunk?
    Did you have any trouble with the directions?
    I will ask, as I start talking my way out of this.

Introduction to Poetry
    I ask them to take a poem
    and hold it up to the light
    like a color slide
    or press an ear against its hive.
    I say drop a mouse into a poem
    and watch him probe his way out,
    or walk inside the poem’s room
    and feel the walls for a light switch.
    I want them to water-ski
    across the surface of a poem
    waving at the author’s name on the shore.
    But all they want to do
    is tie the poem to a chair with rope
    and torture a confession out of it.
    They begin beating it with a hose
    to find out what it really means.

The Brooklyn Museum of Art
    I will now step over the soft velvet rope
    and walk directly into this massive Hudson River
    painting and pick my way along the Palisades
    with this stick I snapped off a dead tree.
    I will skirt the smoky, nestled towns
    and seek the path that leads always outward
    until I become lost, without a hope
    of ever finding the way back to the museum.
    I will stand on the bluffs in nineteenth-century clothes,
    a dwarf among rock, hills, and flowing water,
    and I will fish from the banks in a straw hat
    which will feel like a brush stroke on my head.
    And I will hide in the green covers of forests
    so no appreciator of Frederick Edwin Church,
    leaning over the soft velvet rope,
    will spot my tiny figure moving in the stillness
    and cry out, pointing for the others to see,
    and be thought mad and led away to a cell
    where there is no vaulting landscape to explore,
    none of this birdsong that halts me in my tracks,
    and no wide curving of this river that draws
    my steps toward the misty vanishing point.

Schoolsville
    Glancing over my shoulder at the past,
    I realize the number of students I have taught
    is enough to populate a small town.
    I can see it nestled in a paper landscape,
    chalk dust flurrying down in winter,
    nights dark as a blackboard.
    The population ages but never graduates.
    On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park
    and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves
    reading disorganized essays out loud.
    A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags
    into the streets with their books.
    I forgot all their last names first and their
    first names last in alphabetical order.
    But the boy who always had his hand up
    is an alderman and owns the haberdashery.
    The girl who signed her papers in lipstick
    leans against the drugstore, smoking,
    brushing her hair like a machine.
    Their grades are sewn into their clothes
    like references to Hawthorne.
    The A’s stroll along with other A’s.
    The D’s honk whenever they pass another D.
    All the creative-writing students recline
    on the courthouse lawn and play the lute.
    Wherever they go, they form a big circle.
    Needless to say, I am the mayor.
    I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main.
    I rarely leave the house. The car deflates
    in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing.
    Once