In Defense of Nothing: Selected Poems, 1987–2011

New Picnic Time

N E W P I C N I C T I M E Unless the giddy heaven fall —andrew marvell 1. Out of this close horizon there are animals breathing unlike a child’s drawing of a nativity. Orbiting circles with brown x’s. Farther off pedestrians make parallel lines and collapse into distance. Or becoming one of several skylines in charcoal or finger-paint. 2. At zero hour an earth unwrites itself. Becomes an indelible number line counting backward to embrace its new horizon, indefatigable zero. The high lit window. A person tethered to a desk. This city and its outline its rivers, its cemeteries. 37 3. Invisible, the orchard keeper’s mansion is everywhere. The heart becomes one, last stone of an existing grove and a squatter’s earth. Thus in persons and in plants also stone. And the brilliant element of fire and to the helix and throughout the electrics: salt. 4. Beyond this image decomposing: desire. And as always with the mouth there is earth. Because it calls, fear is redundant. And that animal sound in late night is only its own. Speech becoming one, becoming air, books outlasting buildings outlast sweat and the broken human form a body labors. Whose face is the same as another? 5. Nothing spoke for itself. Every action implied a rhetoric so it may recognize itself. To teach, to celebrate virtue, to persuade by example, to lead the court to its ideal self 38 through wonder. Same page same fable trajectory. A window. The young father dreaming. A hand a face a feeling. It was a sound he heard. 6. The way of earthworms and coffins of dead infants, cobwebs and deformity, of windows and the children they expose, the signs they carry (shame), of sibilants and crossroads. Herein lie the broken, the sturdy, the well-intentioned policeman. The smiles they bear across a portal. 7. When will they say hear me. It was a dream. It was a tin can. It was a funny thing to feel. And the children. Or beyond this for posture, a simple garden, evergreen, a green car out front, the picket fence is white, what color are the flowers unwritten in a day. There is no space. Only sky and water. Uncanny earth. A funny thing to feel. 39 ...