POEMS
THE ARCHEOLOGY
My first god was a tenement:
Warty red bricks, a cast iron ladder
Slanting down a wall.
It
looms in the before-dawn sweat,
Offered through the window as a covenant
That we survive each night;
That days float out of the stale darkness,
Busy with miracles.
II
We are married to each other's nights;
The sky a grey slice over a brush of trees.
It
is Parmenides' world, the temptation of stone,
Where all lives are the same:
A dog whimpering is a heart, a butcher's rack is a hug,
A blind man is a mirror, a pistol is a gulp of blue wine.
III
My anxious lies will be discovered by archeologists
In the tenth layer, under burnt ships
And the broken bones of horses.
They will have the apologetic look of hearth-stones
Singed by the ordinary sadness of living.
That was before the virus of heroes had ruined our minds.
I grew up with no biography
As stones grow up, or the weather.
It was like fishing without a hook.
In
the city of the tenth layer
The son had not ripped fire from his father's loins,
Wisdom was not a virgin born out of an ear,
The soldier did not stink from secret wounds,
The poet had not invented silence,
His wife had not yet learned to love death.
