On and on conferring immortality while it lasts while the suburb's leawl
Hold still enough while whatever dog he has with him holds its breath
Yet seems
to
thick-pant impatient as he with the indifferent men
Drifting in and out of the rooms or staying on, too tired to move
Reading the sports page dozing plainly unworthy for what women
want
Dwells in bushes and trees: what they want is to look outward,
To look with the light streaming into the April limbs to stand straighter
While their husbands' lips dry out feeling that something is there
That could dweII in no earthly house: that in poplar trees or beneath
The warped roundabout of the clothesline in the sordid disorder
Of communal backyards
some being is there in the shrubs
Sitting comfortably on a child's striped rubber ball filled with rainwater
Muffling his glasses with a small studious hand against a sudden
Flash of houselight from within or flash from himself a needle's eye
Uncontrollable blaze of uncompromised being. Ah, the lingerie
Hung in the bathroom! The domestic motions of single girls living together
A plump girl girding her loins against her moon-summoned blood:
In that moon he stands the only male lit by it, covered with leaf-shapes.
He coughs, and the smallest root responds and in his lust he is set
By the wind in motion. That movement can restore the green eyes
Of middle age looking renewed through the qualified light
Not quite reaching him where he stands again on the usual branch
Of his oldest love his tie not loosened a plastic shield
In his breast pocket fulI of pencils and ballpoint pens given him by saleSIIIJ
His hat correctly placed to shade his eyes a natural gambler's tilt
And in summer wears an eyeshade a straw hat Caribbean style.
In some guise or other he is near them when they are weeping without 50I11III
When the teen-age son has quit school when the girl has broken up
With the basketball star when the banker walks out on his wife.
He sees mothers counsel desperately with pulsing girls face down
On beds full of overstuffed beasts sees men dress as women
In ante-bellum costumes with bonnets sees doctors come, looking oddly
Like himself though inside the houses worming a medical arm
Up under the cringing covers sees children put angrily to bed
Sees one told an invisible fairy story with lips moving silently as his
Are also moving the book's few pages bright. It will take years
But at last he will shed his leaves burn his roots give up
Invisibility will step out
will
make himself known to the one
He cannot see loosen her blouse take off luxuriously with lips
