Your Name Here: Poems Read Free Page A

of chiming
    explained what we had needed to know years ago:
    that a step in the wrong direction is the keyhole
    to today’s busy horizon, like hay, that seems to know where it’s moving when it’s moving.

WHAT IS WRITTEN
    What is written on the paper
    on the table by the bed? Is there something there
    or was that from another last night?
    Why is that bird ignoring us,
    pausing in mid-flight, to take another direction?
    Is it feelings of guilt about the spool
    it dropped on the bank of a stream,
    into which it eventually rolled? Dark spool,
    moving oceanward now—what other fate could have been yours?
    You could have lived in a drawer
    for many years, imprisoned, a ward of the state. Now you are free
    to call the shots pretty much as they come.
    Poor, bald thing.

CARAVAGGIO AND HIS FOLLOWERS
    You are my most favorite artist. Though I know
    very little about your work. Some of your followers I know:
    Mattia Preti, who toiled so hard to so little
    effect (though it was enough). Luca Giordano, involved
    with some of the darkest reds ever painted, and lucent greens,
    thought he had discovered the secret of the foxgloves.
    But it was too late. They had already disappeared
    because they had been planted in some other place.
    Someone sent some bread up
    along with a flask of wine, to cheer him up,
    but the old, old secret of the foxgloves, never
    to be divined, won’t ever go away.
    I say, if you were toting hay up the side of a stack
    of it, that might be Italian. Or then again, not.
    We have these things in Iowa,
    too, and in the untrained reaches of the eyelid
    hung out, at evening, over next to nothing. What was it she had said,
    back there, at the beginning? “The flowers
    of the lady next door are beginning to take flight,
    and what will poor Robin do then?” It’s true, they were blasting off
    every two seconds like missiles from a launching pad, and nobody wept, or even cared.
    Look out of the window, sometime, though, and you’ll see
    where the difference has been made. The song of the shrubbery
    can’t drown out the mystery of what we are made of,
    of how we go along, first interested by one thing and then another
    until we come to a wide avenue whose median
    is crowded with trees whose madly peeling bark is the color of a roan,
    perhaps, or an Irish setter. One can wait on the curb for the rest
    of one’s life, for all anyone cares, or one can cross
    when the light changes to green, as in the sapphire folds
    of a shot-silk bodice Luca Giordano might have bothered with.
    Now it’s life. But, as Henny Penny said to Turkey Lurkey, something
    is hovering over us, wanting to destroy us, but waiting,
    though for what, nobody knows.
    In the night of the museum, though, some whisper like stars
    when the guards have gone home, talking freely to one another.
    “Why did that man stare, and stare? All afternoon it seemed he stared
    at me, though he obviously saw nothing. Only a fragment of a vision
    of a lost love, next to a pool. I couldn’t deal with it
    much longer, but luckily I didn’t have to. The experience
    is ending. The time for standing to one side is near
    now, very near.”

INDUSTRIAL COLLAGE
    We are constantly running checks.
    Quantity control is our concern here, you see.
    No batch is allowed to leave the premises
    without at least a superficial glance along the tops
    of the crates. For who knows how much magic
    may be imprisoned there?
    Likewise, when the product reaches the market
    we like to kind of keep an eye on things there too.
    Complaints about the magic
    have dwindled to a mere trickle in recent years.
    Still you never know if some guy’s going to get funny
    and tamper with the equation, causing
    apocalyptic sighs to break out in the streets,
    barking dogs, skidding vehicles, and the whole consignment
    of ruthless consequences. That is why we keep a team of experts
    on hand, always awake, alert for the slightest thread of disorder
    on someone’s pants. In spring these incidents can double,