This Wall
I have looked at this wall
for months, bricks
faded, chipped, edge of roof
fixed with icicles
like teeth,
arch of window
above my own with
curtain, blistered
white paint, trim of
grey blue. Specific limit—
of what? A shell
of house, no one’s home,
wherein emptiness
feels damp and tenuous
under the leaky roof.
Careless of what else,
wall so close,
insistently
present to my own—
can push
with eye, thinking
where one can’t go,
those crushed
to blackness, despair.
This comfortable
acceptance of death
is no place
wall can echo,
either real or unreal.
They stand between
an inside and out.
So in school years ago
I saw Wall, heard
Wall speak, “Thus have I,
Wall, my part discharged so;
And, being done,
thus Wall away doth go …”
Clouds above, patch of shifting
blue sky. Faint sun.
Eats
Self-shrinking focus
mode of deployment
of people met in casual
engagement, social—
Not the man I am
or even was, have constructed
some pattern, place
will be as all.
Bored, shrink into
isolated fading
out of gross, comfortable
contact. Hence out to lunch.
Heaven Knows
Seemingly never until one’s dead
is there possible measure—
but of what then or what for
other than the same plagues attended
one living with misunderstanding
and wanted a compromise as pledge
one could care for any of them,
heaven knows, if that’s where one goes.
For the New Year
Rid forever of them and us,
the ridiculous small places
of patient hates, the meager
agreement of unequal peoples
all at last subject to
hunger, despair, a common death.