Absentee Indians and Other Poems

Night Tremors

Nisht Tremors You call late and early. All night long I hear the sound of your confusion. My own waking now in the silence that you left on the line. A confusion no cheery a.m. D.]. chatter can dispel. We orchestrate our own pain. Find the places that hurt most, test our tolerance new ways each passing year. Probe each safe nest of belief, hold to science each trembling new born intuition, test the strength of love. Your voice like Fernando's wanting that profession that would keep him alive, like my own betraying whimper seeking assurances which no other soul can give, like each lost voice waking alone still calling out at night for a glass of water a lullaby, a story for someone to turn on the light to check under the bed for monsters. How safe? we wonder and must know. How real, long, firm, good, truehow safe? will you make my life or keep it. That we must each safeguard our own destiny I resist. And so I will still call out and will listen to each cricket voice confess 99 100 his longing all night in the moist dark. Waking again sore and stiff from the pain that I have borne inside. Perhaps it is true and finally I must learn. There are limits to all things to safety and to pain. A phone ringing in the dark is no more than any night sound and must be left alone like the sounds of wolves howling coyotes yipping frogs croaking or humans weeping. ...