can they call them bridges,
yesterday Smithy, before that Hebden,
and now Sowerby and purple foxgloves
on the embankment. And still
I haven’t figured out who
I’m saying this to, or even who
would care that through the leaves
you can see Halifax
and someone’s life, June being so transparent,
though yesterday it rained and clouds came out.
Municipal Services
On the second anniversary, oddly, there wasn’t time,
just snow, which amounts to the same thing.
I was moving in water up to my mouth,
though the streets were cleared faster
than the snow could fall.
I was waving my arms about, I was gathering air,
I went back to my rented home
but I couldn’t concentrate on sleeping.
I got the order confused, and the new one
seemed to me more beautiful.
If you have any plans of coming back,
at most I’ll miss my stop, I’ll overshoot
a continent, I’ll open my mouth and won’t reply
to the question I have no answer for.
Continued
Nothing will be the same as it was,
even enjoying the same things
won’t be the same. Our sorrows
will differ one from the other and we
will differ one from the other in our worries.
And nothing will be the same as it was,
nothing at all. Simple thoughts will sound
different, newer, since they’ll be more simply, more newly
spoken. The heart will know how to open up and love
won’t be love anymore. Everything will change.
Nothing will be the same as it was
and that too will be new somehow, since after all,
before, things could be similar: morning,
the rest of the day, evening and night, but not now.
i.m. Milton Hindus 1916–1998
And later just to look into their papers,
half-read in their lifetime, letters —
if there were a place to keep them
and they hadn’t been chewed up by mice in the attic
or soiled by the marten
which no one ever saw but everyone
suspected of subletting—or even
to enter them by hand into hard memory
since that might be the way to treat them
to a new time, another round —
not that we have more of it now,
but, older for a moment, we can almost see them
the way they wanted to be seen,
“With a New Preface by the Author,” in which
with us in mind, who else,
they still managed to correct this or that.
Short Version
I couldn’t be with you when you died.
Sorry, I was toiling day and night
on the title of a poem I didn’t have time to show you.
You really would have liked it.
Even if the poem itself
wasn’t the strongest, I was counting on the title
to prop it up from above,
to set it right even, and to sanction it
as sometimes happens, I don’t know
if the nurse ever had time
to give you the news
because when I called it was
already late, though finally
she took the whole message.
Tomorrow
Whoever lives on will tell us how it was; whoever survives the rest will tell it more precisely.
Shepherd’s Song
Read these few sentences as if I were
some stranger, some other
language, which I may still be
(though I speak with your words, make use
of your words);
which I was, speaking
your language,
standing behind you and listening
wordlessly,
singing
in your tongue
my tune.
Read as if you were to listen,
not to understand.
Sometimes, Yes
After reading certain young authors
I too would like to be an author
and turn out works.
Right now I’m thinking of J.G. —
his happy rhymes, cinematic sentences and
the heroes in his poems, the real ones
and those made up. Because of course
poems have their heroes as well,
some not even all that
likeable. Of the real ones
for instance, I recall
Ezra Pound, whose name
appears in one of the titles,
or that Mid-November Snow
which, before it melted, the author thinks
had blanketed all the evil.
Of the unreal ones Kirillov, a suicide
and yet a builder, or that
professor, what’s his name,
a scholar of seventy now.
And I, what would I write poems about?
I’d have to think,
because in fact I’m fed up with them.
I ask my wife but she just repeats
“What about?” as if she weren’t