Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003

The Torn-down Building

but his arms are missing from the shoulders down, his right side’s gone, his mouth’s flaking like a mirror, still photograph of your childhood, your son. No one should be so unhappy, should lie still in that bending room where all the atoms fly off their hooks, animals and children and friends kill, it was a delusion, we were not living, the hotel floor wasn’t coming and going and coming at that great head hurled radiant, flat at the new world. The Torn-down Building Slowly, slowly our exploding time gives off its lives: a lens, an eyelash rub under the new ground broken, under the new primary-colored paint put up for someone to come to to start off from to cherish but dear one this December the walls walk off, we sit mother-naked smiling on our boxes of books: slowly the first snowfall pilgrims 95 curls around its own faint fall each dot different we thought we could turn back and back to learn, with all this light everywhere. The snow falls around as we walk talking war, books, the times, our friends’ funny business. Lens, eyelash whisper against the flat stairs outlined in old paint on the open air: the light draws a thousand thousand window sills, bottles, our shadows on the floor, all backs, our piles of books, our toys, our boxes of letters. Slowly over the newspaper this quarter century takes in its infant deaths, gives off its smiling kouroi and we will meet their eyes in the air The January light’s stock still a second from your face to mine, mine to the child’s, her words a flare, a fountain lighter than air. Moon Man ‘Here too we dare to hope.’ —Romano Guardini Swimming down to us light years not always a straight line that was his joke, his night fears, his pilgrim’s climb. About half way throwing his silver 96 door in the mountain ...