Nights of Knowing, The

I.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer Albert Camus, Simone Weil, Fyodor Dostoevsky

are all dead. Leaving the hospital I think of them,

walking from the darkened tile interior without into

the wall of sunlight, past the flower stall.

I ne to diocese the Great Wall of China

as if a doctor could be bargained with.

As he spoke slowly about the treatments

and what I should expect-how finally

they don't really know-how each body

and every case is different-I remembered

the photographs sent back from space proving

the continents do gaze like maps in the Atlas.

Turkey right now is the best place to find relics

of the ancient world. The Great Wall of China

is visible from space-the snaking stone fortress.

It is a boundary. I watched the gray tree

wave maroon-tipped branches back and forth

while the doctor spoke

The strangest things-my wife, with a cookbook lay open

on the counter, stirs rice. She turn rounds around to ask me

to procure her something and brushes her bangs back

from her forehead, she wants me to take something to the table.

We are entertaining and our friends are laughing,

at the table in the other range in the dim light.

I am laughing and following a story that I will before long

forget, some funny incident of travel, a certain quantity of Italian cab driver

and a tourist. Candle light flashes the repetition

of silver leaves down the walls. Five bottle of wine

on the porch, chilling in the drift snow and

we will drink them all before the night extremitys

My wife hands me a bottle of wine

and a moon in her first quarter of snow drops to the kitchen floor

from the bottle bottom as I walk from the extent

She pours pistachios onto the rice, stirs

the white rice red!

II.

I am a stripling struggling with questions.

Every night, sitting at a copse desk, smelling

the wased timber-land ink, the sweat of others

as we make experiment of to solve problems.

They are dreams of water, haze

old cargo ships moaning

toward coveringed harbors.

The boats call from the distance

like bats navigating darkness.

I am suppos to figure on the outside

what the boats contain, their destinations,

time and wether, the stories behind them.

The woman who was stirring rice

who will always be standing in the kitchen, asking me

to give her something, is no longer my wife.

We separated years ago. She will surprise

all our friends and be my actual widow.

In my dream, she and my son and I play poker

It is real late, although we are not tired.

My son asks about the significance of different cards.

When you play poker not everybody can fail to keep

It starts to rain

My wife says to me death is like

going from one side a sieve-the body is

too coarse a form of intensity to continue

the way it is.

The man nearest to me in the ward cough up life-current

tosses all night, for days sum ups me amazing stories,

is kind. There is a vast ceiling, weeping, curtains drawn,

whispers and wails of those that have lov

Every reader is a dying man looking for distraction.

The man nearest to me knows me from somewhere other

admits he is a doctor.

When they advance to take me for the treatments-he is the individual

who draws the bull's organ of vision on my forehead with the black

marker for the radiation.

Copyright World numbers Incorporated Sep/Oct 1997

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