Sweet Will

A Poem With No Ending

A POEM WITH NO ENDING So many poems begin where they should end, and never end. Mine never end, they run on book after book, complaining to the moon that heaven is wrong or dull, no place at all to be. I believe all this. I believe that ducks take wing only in stories and then to return the gift of flight to the winds. H you knew how I came to be seven years old and how thick and blond my hair was, falling about my shoulders like the leaves of the slender eucalyptus that now blesses my driveway and shades my pale blue Falcon, if you could see me pulling wagon loads of stones across the tufted fields and placing them to build myself and my brother a humped mound of earth where flowers might rise as from a grave, you might understand the last spring before war turned toward our house and entered before dawn, a pale stranger that hovered over each bed and touched the soft, unguarded faces leaving bruises so faint years would pass before they darkened and finally burned. Now I can sit calmly over coffee and recover each season, how the rains swelled the streets, how at night I mumbled a prayer because the weight of snow was too great to bear as I heard it softly packing 21 A Poem With No Ending 22 down the roof, how I waited for hours for some small breeze to rise from the river dreaming beside me, and none came, and morning was so much mist rising and the long moaning of the ore boats returning the way they'd come, only now freighted with the earth someone would carve and cook. That is the poem I called ''Boyhood'' and placed between the smeared pages of your morning paper. White itself, it fell on the white tablecloth and meant so little you turned it over and wrote a column of figures you never added up. You capped your gold fountain pen and snapped your fingers to remind yourself of some small, lost event. My poem remained long after you'd gone, face down, unread, not even misunderstood, until it passed, like its subject, into the literatures of silence, though hardly first among them, for there have always been the tales the water told the cup and the words the wind sang to the windows in those houses we abandoned after the roads whispered all night in our ears. I passed the old house and saw even from the front that four trees were gone, and beside the drive a wire cage held nothing. Once A Poem With No Ending I stopped and rang the bell. A woman said, No! before I asked, and I heard a child say, Who is he? and I turned away from so many years and drove off. Tomorrow my train will leave the tunnel and rise above this town and slowly clatter beside block after block of buildings that fall open like so many stunned faces with nothing to hide. The cold odor of smoke rises and the steeped smell of wood that will not hold our words. Once I saw the back of a closet that burst into sky, and I imagined opening a familiar door and stepping into a little room without limits. I rose into a blue sky as undefined as winter and as cold. I said, Oh my! and held myself together with a wish. No, that wasn't childhood, that was something else, something that ended in a single day and left no residue of happiness I could reach again if I took the first turn to the left and eyes closed walked a hundred and one steps and spoke the right words. * I sit for days staring at the dusty window and no word comes to tell me what I left behind. Still, I regret nothing, not the little speeches I wrote to the moon on the warm spring nights 23 A Poem With No Ending 24 I searched for someone other than myself and came home empty at sunup among bird calls and the faint prattle of rain. I do not regret my hands changing before me, mottling like the first eggs I found in the fields of junked cars, nor my breath that still comes and comes no matter what I command and the words that go out and fall...