I dreamed the streets of Katmandu
Were full of flowers
As the earth-mother mountains
Were shrugging off their glaciers
While a sea rose up somewhere
And vultures dreamed of feasts
But a young woman smiled and said
Nothing’s too much to bear
And sure enough she had sung
Her child to sleep
And the streets of Katmandu
Were full of flowers.
If things are as I suspect
There is another world
Where I am the lover
Of the driver
Of the morning bus
Where he awoke predawn
And slipped from our bed
Where a thread of lamplight
Shone under the door
And I heard the soft
Beginnings of the day
As he made coffee
I’d drink later
Where I shut my eyes
As if in prayer
Pulled the bedclothes
Around me like arms
That smelled comfortingly
Of last night’s cigarettes
And sex
Where I lay quiet
Until I heard his cup
Set on the countertop
Until the light went out
Until I heard the door
To the other world open
Then heard the door
to the other world
Shut.
(after Ranier Maria Rilke)
Despite having so many things still left undone
(Important things, things you were meant to do)
You spent the hour observing swans.
Swans waddle; are awkward; you hadn’t known. One—ungainly thing—
You watched slowly approach the verge, like one would who
Faced death by drowning—till, resigned to sink,
It pitched into the pool at last
With an undignified, un-swan-like splash.
Then bore up, unsurprisingly, upon the waves.
The water endless came—oh, but the swan
Glided, glided, glided on and on
As if it were no miracle it had been saved.
Darkness, did you forget my name?
I’ve been out taking the air,
Roaming all day on the bright mountainside,
But Darkness, you know me!
Oh,
The future is not like a train
Because if you got caught on the tracks
Because you saw it coming
Because it’s your own damn fault
Oh,
The future is more like a tiger
Because it’s not coming closer it’s waiting
Because only the survivors will ever know
Because it was there all along in the grass
from underneath the footbridge where it passed
over low tide and the muck of low tide
as I passed above with a chatter of tires
of a sudden out clamored a flock of gulls
and their thick feet were tiling the flat sea with ripples
all in a pattern as if they had rehearsed it
and they were identically honking like toys
all in unison as if they had practiced it
as if I were the catastrophe they had been waiting for
(a translation from the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges)
Fifty-two cards push real life aside:
flimsy, parti-colored charms
that make us forget where we’re bound to end up in the end.
And who cares where? —we’ve stolen this time, anyway,
let’s build a house of cards,
decorate it, move in, and then play
as we were always meant to play.
Nothing beyond the table’s edges
carries any weight.
Inside, it’s a foreign land
where bluff and bid are high affairs of state:
The Ace of Spades swaggers authoritatively
like Lord Byron, capable of anything;
the nine of diamonds glitters like a pirate’s dream.
A headlong rush of lethargy
slacks conversation to a drawl:
our slow words come and go
the while chance exalts some, lays others low;
the while the players echo and re-echo all the tricks they know:
until it seems that they’re returned—or nearly so:
the crones and cronies and their bony friends
who showed us what it meant to be true Americans
with the same old songs, the same old works for idle hands.
My father told that story again
the one that ends
You can’t get there from here,
and he laughed again like always.
I didn’t laugh though.
It’s only a good joke
if it couldn’t be true
that’s what I thought.
I haven’t slept well
ever since then
because I keep wondering
is that really how things are now?
The little boy runs back laughing
from the rushing surf
laughing but all the while he knows
the ocean takes what it wants.
Bag of Anything 