Answering Machine
A flashing light
will mean I'm not alone.
A moment later maybe I'll hear your voice,
or that of a stranger, or the sound
of someone somewhere having second thoughts,
and hanging up.
But at least I'll know it means
that someone thinks about me, now and then,
and whoever they prove or do not prove to be,
at least there is a sort of consolation
in the fact that
they send a gift of light,
a sign to welcome me on my return.
You are not alone, it will say, first thing,
the green light of the answering machine.
Or else: how desperate
you've become
for love, the glimmer of surprise,
alone there in the doorway of your room
like a man before an endless, starless sky.
For
My Goldfish, Valentine
Such enormous sadness
in such a tiny world.
And, looking down at you
in the water clouded
by your flaking scales,
I wonder if my impulse
to take you home
last Valentine's Day
(following a goldfish dream)
was not just the desire
to share my tenancy
of these dusk-facing rooms
under winter's hold.
That dream of gold.
You can imagine
how it took me
into my own smaller body
and bigger, child's imagination
when I found you too incarnate
in an earlier form.
As the lama recognises
his master in a child,
entering the pet shop,
I knew you then at once--
the golden fish who swam
in the lens of my parents' house,
in the lens of my childhood,
before floating up one day
to leave that world as I too
left that world, as you
soon again must leave.
Today in the meantime
you look out at me
with the same bewildered eyes,
mouthing the same mute syllable,
the eternal Om that says
nothing changes.
Lead becomes
gold and gold lead.
A child will be god when god is dead.
Soon I will recognise your replacement.
Listening
Wind
He crashed the car
through the fence,
got out, calmly, picked up the fence,
turned it on its side, then climbed it,
a ladder into sky.
His parents were there before him,
Marie aged 7, Arthur 5.
Still calm, he took
their hands.
A man in sandals and a dinner suit
led them through a door
into a wheat field.
The words listening wind
came to him for a moment -- words!--
then they were gone.
He was led to a
garden swing
where he knew he was missing something --
his taunted, earth-bound shadow.
And then he awoke,
with a start,
horn blowing, wheels spinning
in mud, wheels spinning in his heart.