Love's Last Number. Christopher Howell

looks in all his leafy cupboards

      for testimonials and diplomas.

      Finding none, he says, perhaps

      I am an hawk, and he can feel

      his beak bend down and a pleasurable

      bloodlust fill his mind like gasoline.

      Oh, I’m a killer now, I am,

      he says to his glinting talons,

      but it’s night, I really ought to be

      sleeping. So he sleeps. In his dream

      he is a melon and a huge blade

      severs one half of him from the other.

      When he wakes, falling, he is two

      blackbirds with one wing each.

      THE BODY IN MOTION

      Is it true that things return

      when they are not the same,

      that they wait

      till recognition bends

      like water around a rock

      and we say, oh, it is almost you

      whom I touched in the blades

      of forest light

      naked as you were and have been

      always in that room in me where you live

      like clear water in a bowl.

      And you are not the same, yet

      here you are. Clearly the beautiful

      spirit clothed in time

      persists

      and I bow to that, smoothing

      its bright leaves and surrender,

      its wanting to be known.

      KANSAS

      A man is standing in a field

      at the edge of a town so small

      it sometimes forgets itself and goes home

      to its pale, lopsided houses and dry, leaf-filled

      fishponds in the weedy corners

      of its yards. If it’s almost dark

      someone might suppose

      he has come to lift his arms and ask

      for a life that would remember him

      or for a vision of horses wading toward the moon

      just rising to signal that all’s well. But

      as to that, who knows; so far

      it might as well mean his mother

      is calling her old dog in

      from the barn, the barn that burned

      and the dog that has been dead for fifty years.

      He might as well be anyone come to that edge

      that says things end

      at the beginning of something else, that even wind

      fingering the grass

      knows this, teasing his mother’s mad white hair

      in another life, where the fields continue to begin,

      where the path that brought him ends and doesn’t care

      how large or far or bright the rising moon, or if the dog

      comes a last time when she calls.

      THIS MORTAL COIL

1. On the Nature of Things

      Lucretius believed that contentment could not be

      contained, since soul is its definitive essence,

      and since the particular shade of its formality

      insists soul be experienced as a long, empty

      stretch of beach. Evening reminds me of this.

      Windows brighten with darkness and lilac leaves

      brush their shadows into place. The daylilies fall

      to their knees. One by one the moments become

      themselves as Lucretius, in a golf shirt and slacks,

      examines their unassuming surprise. He is not

      surprised, on this street of bungalows and modest

      swank. From one of the interstices between worlds,

      he looks back at the future that’s eyeing him

      and scratches under his left arm. In a while he will

      join me on my porch. Four hundred miles inland,

      we will contemplate the sea and he will remind me

      again that death is nothing to us.

2. The After Hours Afterlife

      The drummer sets down his tools

      and the lights come up.

      Four men hop in circles to describe their joy.

      The hostess is secretly aflame with a grapelike fullness

      I can’t bear to watch. Perhaps the sky is not, as we have been told,

      the province of gods, but of spaniels.

      I think of Henry Ford and the Pyramid Society

      as the drummer lights a foot-long cigarette and places his wig on

      a stand.

      Tolstoy is the barman and refuses all payment

      in the name of virtue.

      Usual women slide between the chairs.

      When someone shouts “Fire,” everyone laughs

      but Tolstoy

      who is busy pouring crème de menthe into a whiskey bottle

      as I tell him I’m a big fan, that I’ve read Crime and Peace six times.

      He says, “The butler did it,

      or the drummer.” He hasn’t decided.

      The four men are now hopping in squares

      and their barking falls like a dark blue snow of sound.

      The cigarette girl wants to have the drummer’s baby.

      Tolstoy hands me money and a horrible drink

      and says, “I died in a train station. I’ll bet you didn’t know that.”

      Then he throws back his head and screams, “Last call!

      All aboard!”

3. The Parable as Originally Told

      It was a story nobody knew,

      a nobody-could-possibly-know-it story

      more or less untold: a man with no arms

      finds a railroad spike and a hunk of cheese

      beside a dying cat. To the man

      with no arms the cat says, “When I must shed

      this mortal