POEMS
The train moves silently. The faces are vacant.
Have none of them found the cost extravagant?
How could they? They gave what they possessed.
Here all the purses are vacant.
And what else could satisfy the extravagant
Tears and wish of the child but this?
Impose its cancelling terrible mask
On the days and faces and lives they waste?
What else are their lives but a journey to the vacant
Satisfaction of death? And the mask
They wear tonight through their waste
Is death's rehearsal. Is it really extravagant
To read in their faces: What is there that we possessed
That we were unwilling to trade for this?
Gordon Sylander
21
SONG: YOUNG OEDIPUS AND THE SCARECROW
For Nicolas Calas
Proud eyes that like horses watch
The son play with the hunting-knife,
It
was in your grey-walled room
That a scarecrow had his wife.
Proud nose that :find ancestor in
The grand dame's portrait on the wall,
A bird caught in her hair and slept
Until there was no hair at all.
Proud ears that hear a thread unwind
And women listen at the door,
An insect leaves your labyrinth:
You have housed a minotaur.
