The Dead Moor Speaks, and: The City (V), and: The City (XII)

76 wayne miller THE DEAD MOOR SPEAKS The throngs slowed down to look at me. The boys stood still, filling with world. And I was the world they filled with, swinging like the heavy pendulum driving a clock, like the empty noose before I filled it. ——— The men that night were opaque as ______. The water below me never stopped moving. When a fly landed on my tongue, I tried to shoo it with my voice, but I had no voice. ——— The boys were pointing at their world. I swung before them like meat, like the Vote, like an openmouthed bucket plumbing a well. One drop of ink held in mid-fall above that, their river—the City’s dear river— CRSUM09 poetry.indd 76 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 77 ——— and when a boatman passed, knocking me into the water, its clarity remained. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 77 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 78 wayne miller THE CITY (V) This bodie is nothing but detailes, the doctor wrote, having found it in a field and dragged it home, spent his nights bent over it with mirrored candles peering into the pried-open eyes— even there, the body was surface. Yet, he was convinced it must be filled with something other than body, as a ball thrown through the air is filled with something other than ball, and since the body had swallowed the wind of the soul,— and since the body was his. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 78 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM 79 wayne miller THE CITY (XII) And soon airplanes were the new elevators. The frontier beyond the walls became a park, and folks went out to picnic and hand-feed the animals. Who needed the old myths to explain what was out there? Still, the assassinations continued as the motorcades slipped through the barrios and court districts, the garages and wrought iron gates to the countryside. Bombs kept exploding in the subways, leaving bits of the flags they were wrapped in. And people missed the old myths: they had little to tell the kids before bed, when the futureless dark came to scare them. So pictures were pulled from the charnel houses, held up to the flashbulbs for a kiss. And this became contemporary: photos propped beside people in motion, people who ate popcorn and peanuts at their tables, watched time shift the stained glass in their televisions. CRSUM09 poetry.indd 79 5/22/2009 12:37:03 PM ...