from Lullaby of Cape Cod
1
The eastern tip of the Empire dives into night;
cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
on classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
as a final cross darkens and then is gone
like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street’s patrol car a refrain
of Ray Charles’s keyboard tinkles away like rain.
Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea lather
and sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The streetlamps glisten in the stifling weather,
formally spaced,
like white shirt buttons open to the waist.
It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stoplight
in its journey to the whiskey across the room
on the nightstand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom
goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
rolled-up road map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.
It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
and so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
but rather to those now disappeared from sight.
It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound
is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
could only be one thing – a star. On the deserted ground
of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s raveled net.
There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.
cicadas fall silent over some empty lawn;
on classic pediments inscriptions dim from the sight
as a final cross darkens and then is gone
like the nearly empty bottle on the table.
From the empty street’s patrol car a refrain
of Ray Charles’s keyboard tinkles away like rain.
Crawling to a vacant beach from the vast wet
of ocean, a crab digs into sand laced with sea lather
and sleeps. A giant clock on a brick tower
rattles its scissors. The face is drenched with sweat.
The streetlamps glisten in the stifling weather,
formally spaced,
like white shirt buttons open to the waist.
It’s stifling. The eye’s guided by a blinking stoplight
in its journey to the whiskey across the room
on the nightstand. The heart stops dead a moment, but its dull boom
goes on, and the blood, on pilgrimage gone forth,
comes back to a crossroad. The body, like an upright,
rolled-up road map, lifts an eyebrow in the North.
It’s strange to think of surviving, but that’s what happened.
Dust settles on furnishings, and a car bends length
around corners in spite of Euclid. And the deepened
darkness makes up for the absence of people, of voices,
and so forth, and alters them, by its cunning and strength,
not to deserters, to ones who have taken flight,
but rather to those now disappeared from sight.
It’s stifling. And the thick leaves’ rasping sound
is enough all by itself to make you sweat.
What seems to be a small dot in the dark
could only be one thing – a star. On the deserted ground
of a basketball court a vagrant bird has set
its fragile egg in the steel hoop’s raveled net.
There’s a smell of mint now, and of mignonette.
