The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Free Page B

the streetlights on the wet
    street are like regurgitated lights,
    but the ambulance’s ruby element
    can move among our rooms without a care,
    so that we who generally sleep
    where it is black awaken in a red
    light of other lives, saying I
    can see every article,
    I can see every article in its fame.
    Saying How long do I stay here in the jail
    of times like this, where the clear
    water has the flavor of thirst
    and the meat tastes like it is eating me
    and the day’s bread changes into a face?
    Where sometimes you see the sorrow of a whole life
    open away from you white as an invitation
    on the blue of night, and the moon is a monster?
    All the night long I can betray myself in the honky-tonk
    of terror and delight, I can throw away my faith,
    go loose in the spectacular fandango
    of emergencies that strum the heart
    with neon, but I can’t
    understand anything. It is coming:
    the curtains of rain and light the arc lamps
    let down on First Avenue will be parted,
    and from behind them, the people we really are will step out
    with abandon, as if asked to dance—
    the myriad tickets will fall away from the face
    and the visions of the heart be delivered up naked
    and lucid as teeth, and each
    of the things that catch up with this robber
    will fall on God: now You must follow
    the spoor of Your own blood among
    edifices, among monuments, until the police
    have You in their arms
    and make You say Your name.
    I want to be there when the little pool of light
    falls on the identification,
    I swear I will never tell the others if You whisper
    to me what this moment is before the ambulances,
    and what these moments are
    when all that was impending
    begins, when the whole
    downtown, arrested like a lung
    between intake and expulsion, erupts
    into genuineness—as if many
    bells have been struck and what
    the world is, is that I can touch
    their ringing. It is unbreakable.
    It is the examiner before whom the emptiness
    inside me perjures itself.
    It is the examiner who is a fist.

For Jane
    At left, with a net, in a light
    like whiskey, you skim flotsam
    from the water.
    I can’t tell you how vivid
    this undertaking is—
    you are as unsettling
    and as naked as that yellow
    flower admiring you as it rests
    along the surface of the pool.
    I am just going to listen
    to the sound of liquid,
    the sound of oleanders.
    If ever
    I was about to speak I
    forget. I can see
    that the single flower goes
    aloft on the water of
    the pool because it is something
    that everything has addressed
    to my darling, while I stand
    here like some ashes
    that used to be a clown,
    looking out quietly
    from my face to watch the failure
    of these words to be those things.

Sway
    Since I find you will no longer love,
    from bar to bar in terror I shall move
    past Forty-third and Halsted, Twenty-fourth
    and Roosevelt where fire-gutted cars,
    their bones the bones of coyote and hyena,
    suffer the light from the wrestling arena
    to fall all over them. And what they say
    blends in the tarantellasmic sway
    of all of us between the two of these:
    harmony and divergence,
    their sad story of harmony and divergence,
    the story that begins
    I did not know who she was
    and ends I did not know who she was .

The Circle
    for Jane, after a dream
    I passed a helicopter
    crashed in the street today,
    where stunned and suddenly grief-torn
    passers-by tried to explain
    over and over, a hundred ways, what
    had happened. Some cried over the pilot,
    others stole money from his wallet—
    I heard the one responsible for his death
    claiming the pilot didn’t need it any more,
    and whether he spoke of the pilot’s
    money or his life wasn’t clear.
    The scene had a subaqueous timbre
    that I recognize now as a light
    that shines in the dreams I have when I sleep
    on my back and wake up half-drowned.
    However I tried to circumnavigate
    this circus of fire and mourning—
    the machine burst ajar like a bug,
    the corpse a lunch pail
    left open and