Four Poems

To Nicholas From My Absence

You are now you have been     you are now seventeenWhen I was seventeen I had theYear before met my fatherWhom I had known before     but I had been

Kidnapped for thirteen years and thousandsOf miles away     in nowhere he would think to look for meBut I know where you are and weKnow where we are I send you     texts and you send

Texts back from fewer thousands ofMiles from it's Maps I just     checked says it's fifteen hundred milesAway     from fifteen hundred miles away When I was seventeen I couldn't loveMy father like his childWhom I had been when I was three     I am a blank where I should be

The Professor

The air is colder than the light in the airNo fog     no smoke     but the light hangs on the airLike fog     like smoke     I'm walking to the bakeryOn Amsterdam     across from the cathedral

A middle-aged     man wearing a tweed cap andA limp blue Members Only jacket passes meAnd a black face mask with a white skullPrinted on it     but death is a professor everywhere

What have you learned he asksWhat do you knowI turn the corner and the sidewalk's full of stu-dents     everybody's parents sent them hoping

Back     elsewhere     the professor hangs his jacket on his chairSighs off his cap     tightens his mask

Arm in the Excavator's Shovel

The excavation ripples through the bodyThe skeleton in dirt the     dirt at certainDepths relative     to the skeleton corre-    sponds to the shape     of the living person

Thus anyone     with the right coordinatesCould dig the shape of the person from the dirtBut made of dirt     but with his skeleton    Inside it would it     be an it

When cradled     in the living arms of the workerBecause no     excavator has yet beenDesigned to fear the thing it rips from the dirt    No excavator     would be gen-

tle enough not to break the simulac-rum from its bone original and frame Or would the crumbling shape     become a him    The excavator tears an arm

Off     and it dangles from the shovel asClumps of dirt fall through the shovel's teeth meat     cookedFrom the bone     the shovel raised to the sky     a mouth    Gaping forever     and a sac-

rificial altar if     one's it the otherMust be him     a worker waves her armsThe skull at her feet     but who does not praise    The mouth to whom the body comes

That Time is a Refining Fire

being a recapitulation of the "Fresh Eyes for a Fresh World" sections of Sometimes I Never Suffered

As Earth began with first each fewTen million years then hundred thousand thenTen thousand     thousand     hundred ten and nowEach week     almost each day began

To seem like Heaven more     like Heaven in his eyesThe hastily assembled angel moreSlowly as time moved forward seemed at leastTo move     things changed and time     seemed to be there

Somewhere between the insides of and out-side changing things     and each new generationOf human beings saw most familiar     things replaced and mostHow else     could they survive the angel Wondered most thought     Obsolete things return improved in timeAnd time connects     them to the versions ofThemselves that were once themAnd are not now     as we will be ourselves

In better lives     but still ourselves     in the futureAnd we will feel a happiness then weDon't feel we can't     feel now ourAnticipation is     its echo and sustains us     the hastily

Assembled angel struggled not to butForgot what Heaven was like     and only slowedBy struggling forgetting whatHe best remembers he's     not sure he knows

The colors he remembers all the colorsOf Heaven but in Heaven     he hadn't learned The differences between     colors and all theColors were one     color like one fire...