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AT FOUR A.M.
in a loud ringing voice,
a voice completely untouched by personality,
a voice straight
from the heart of the universe,
a coyote lets out two cries
through the pre-dawn mist.
The neighborhood dogs
respond with woofs, growls and howls,
the familiar voices
of disgruntled pets,
almost human
in their overlay of bravado,
their undertone of fear.
FOUR A.M. ON A FARM
No cars have gone by for hours.
Our white cat wears the fog
easily. In the barn eggs grow
into chickens, chickens into eggs.
Everywhere green fields slowly turn
to milk. From five miles up
the sound of a jet floats down
softly . . . inside,
men from Tokyo
dream of the strange farms below.
For them it is noon. They sleep
against the quiet argument of their bodies.
In two hours they will land
in New York with the sun. For myself,
I wish them well. I will be
in bed soon. A box-elder bug
walks into the house through an entrance
that has nothing to do with me.
EARLY SPRING MORNING
I sit in the backyard,
my hand around a cup of coffee,
the morning with its hand
around my shoulder.
Above me in the pine tree,
the blackbirds don't know
it's Sunday; their knees bend
the wrong way.
I sit on my land-
lady's garden chair
by her wooden picnic table.
The morning is a waitress who
wipes the dew away.
"ScrambIe two, honey,
and I'll take
a side order of bliss."
Easier done than said.
To my left
the alley tries to shock
me with its shamefaced
garbage. Just down
the street I can hear
the turkey plant boasting:
"I change turkeys into T.V. dinners:
I employ a thousand townswomen."
As always, I am impressed.
But not overly so, for here
it is the miracle
of backyard, the lost
garden found, the rare
benediction of being
where you want to be.
I look down at my feet.
My toes have split
my slippers and are growing
into the ground.
There are leaves sprouting on my knuckles.
A blackbird lands on my nose
(now a branch), its emerald head
cocked expectantly.
Just before my eyes turn
to knots, they catch
the pale moon rising
like a spirit face
in the fathomless well
of my coffee cup.
RESPITE
In the middle of February in Minnesota,
unaccountably, the Bahamas show up
making fools of the rich
who have flown winter seeking them.
Throughout the city
the unemployed sit on their porches
in deck-chairs like retired fat-cats
on a luxury liner.
Steam rises out of warped planks;
cars chase each other down
the street like dolphins.
No matter a blizzard up north
is quietly mustering his men.
Today the sun is for the poor.
Somewhere, the first insect shows up,
proud and penitent
like a prodigal son, home
too early for his inheritance.
PASTORALE
FOR SPRING
The new grass, the new lambs
eating the grass, the new calves
butting heads under the slow gaze
of bull-fathers beyond wire fences,
the sparrows flying with pieces of straw
in their beaks, the seagulls a thousand
miles from salt water eating worms
turned up by the plow,
the earth itself. . . .
It is not enough.
I go into the house and put on
Beethoven's 6th symphony,
The
Pastorale.
I listen to violins and oboes,
former trees, pretending to be winds,
birds and brooks. I listen to drums,
the hides of animals, trying to be
thunder.
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It all works, somehow:
the thunder, controllable--a living
room
thunder, and yet the living room a world, too.
Outside, the earth is being lifted
by the music, it is rising
out of itself, trees wave their arms
like mad conductors, the sky is breaking
into applause.
DOODLES
We find them around
the leavings of telephone
conversations clinging
to addresses, appointments;
around the notes
of committee members,
judges; in the margins
of grocery lists and aborted
poems. They are always
on the edges, sliding
away like vitreous floaters
when we try to see
them clearly. For all their ubiquity,
they are humble and basic:
flowers, stars, stick-men,
uncomplicated by the rules of
perspective and modeling.
They leave the loud shout
of the third dimension to Art.
They are content to whisper.
A POLITICAL POEM
At the corner cafe
where I sometimes eat
I ordered a raw egg
broken into a cup
no toast no coffee.
I tossed that egg down
my throat like a Cossack
taking vodka.
I did it for shock
value, for the value of the shock.
I did it for the waitress
for my mother for the sunny siders
and hard boilers the over easys.
I did it for those hopelessly
scrambled by America.
THE MAP OF THE HAND
What territory is this?
What rivers, what boundaries?
Whose bones beneath the ancient mounds?
Life, head, heart, fate--
the lines that hold us up,
that cradle us in the deep,
rocking wind of our lives.
I stare down at my own hand
like a man awake in a dream,
flying above the earth.
OPENING DAY. DEER HUNTING SEASON
The lead bullets
From the steel barrels
Attached to the wooden stocks
Of the rifles
Kicking against the shoulders
Of the hunters
Return
(Slightly diverted
By the buck's head)
To the mountain.
WAXING THE CAR
Seeing yourself suddenly
in the convex, flying-away-world
of the polished
hubcap, your hand
the largest part of you,
you stretched behind it, diminished
like the past--
like History itself
moving this huge appendage
back and forth against itself
across the invisible, chrome present.
[UNTITLED]
I picked up some seaweed
and felt the despair
of its collapse on the sand,
the change in its being, how
it lacked feathers for its new life
in the air, how it shrank
from its sudden acquaintance with dust.
I watch you comb your hair,
the part down the middle.
I grow small. I climb
onto your head and lie
down in the part.
Your hair becomes water,
the Pacific Ocean. I lie
on the invisible seam, the waves
rising under me, parting
and flowing off to America and Asia.
They fall on the ears of those places
like hair.
I am happy
lying on my back in my hair-ocean.
IT MAY BE SOMETHING LIKE THIS
inside my head
a bird.
Inside the bird's head
an elephant.
Inside the head of the elephant
the vast Serengeti Plain stretches for miles.
Perhaps it is noon.
The heat vibrates the trees
and the worms dig a few inches deeper.
Around the world
the sun is always rising always setting.
Perhaps the distant stars
are white holes inside my head.
©A.Zolynas
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