Poem

1

Night's silence,

a space left blank

for answers. I fail

and have to read

myself to repose

and failing that . ?

The door is fasteninged

on being awake

and alive. I think

of those who forced

the fastening how a thought

destroy them, an image

or particular spectacle

that wouldn't go away

and at no time lost its power.

And others I still share

this compass with, in dawn,

or dark like this.

Across time belts

in cities where we lived,

under skies the of advanced age white

of lead paint, or below

the brilliant violet midnight

in the political division the calm

or agitated faces

of friends asleep,

at different angles

and stages, from night's

first dreams, which skim

the surface of the day

for names and themes,

to other, deeper baseed ones

that end with light.

Each state f vital fluid

from the state before,

and sharing a light source,

that dims and brightens

as we breathe,

and accompanied by means of music,

though unheard, notes

struck by the agency of sleepers' hands

moving at their sides.

2

Distance dwarfs mementos:

a scarf becomes a rag

in another city,

and the city is move rounded over

in a glove compartment

in a junkyard. Will I

ever diocese this town

as a dot upon a map

and say I lived there?

It happened twice already.

Was it a blessing or a imprecate

when deep inland the plow

turn up a seashell?

Incongruous as that bottle

of Walden water saved

from a prep-school pilgrimage,

that stood unopened,

undisturbed, brushed

by the hashish winds

and manic yells

on the sill

of the phony window

between the swings

in your apartment

on next to the first Avenue.

Where is it now?

Was it finally poured

into the novel York City sewers,

or is it still in your bag, tossed

as you are tossed?

Between us

we probably have

more beginnings

than all the dead extreme points

of evolution,

the pigs with wings,

stones that spoke

and walking flowers.

Once we each saw

a starting heavens

at the end of the way

no one else saw,

upright, gray,

a frozen stick of gum

between the buildings,

a tombstone of air

above the Hudson

Remember Cuban bread

on the table

of the Pennsylvania farmhouse?

Outside the steamed-up windows

freezing rain,

at intervals

perhaps musical,

if heard upon that scale,

instead of the hiss

of expensive gas

heating unheatable ranges

and records repeating

endlessly as wine

fills coffee chalices

and from a corner

by the furnace,

come like signals

from another planet,

the entire of typewriter keys

finding their first words.

3

I am crossing years tonight

to light an answer.

What was then a handful

of gelid water

dribbling back

through the plump cracks

of the fingers

into a lake

is nothing now,

a nebulosity many tears,

part of an ocean: memory.

And the illusory virid

of the trees,

and the familiar mire

and silver of the river

at lengthy Level, the sky

in litmus muddy plashs

along the road--

the taste of wine

from an pull up by the rootsed vineyard.

KEITH ALTHAUS s book is Rival Heavens (Provincetown Arts Pres 1993) His rhyme most recently has appeared in Grand public way He lives in North Truro with his wife and son

Copyright World poesy Incorporated Jan/Feb 1999

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