Whenever I Am in the Vicinity

Whenever I am in the vicinity
of an opaque Levolor window blind
I know I am far from home
I’d never blot the light like this
if I owned the white walls
or gray floor I’ve skidded
the coffee table across
black marks for future moving day
caulking knife to wall
where I’ve just now hung
the Singer Sargent print
El Jaleo too big for the museum’s thieves
or not enough of a landscape
dim scene empty chair
a few guitars and music
in this room I read about
the wind
about long nights of unsleeping
if you’ve studied the great non-sleepers
you’ll have sighed into
Neruda’s ni mi casa es ya mi casa
and you’ll know the wind
moves everywhere
decides what to destroy or preserve
of our coastal dwellings
salt-lashed marsh shacks
and driftwood castles
it’s said at the end
the whale is winner
but really
water
takes the parking lot
takes the beach where children
buried themselves
like clams for the bake
in cold sand saltwater seeps
from an imperceptible source
tonight I could have and then did
make dinner and watch a movie
about a father who wants
to sit down for a meal
with his wife and daughter
but always finds himself
choking out the bad guys
with a broomstick
like weather
these fictions
find a way in
the blessing gentle breeze
the blue room’s violence
always streaming
our good knights can’t
resist breaking the idyll
even Wordsworth
noted he lived in a time
of the oppressed and among
the oppressing
yes see how the breeze can cradle
a tyranny
how wind coos against the surface
of artificial lives and whatever
you’d call this poem
at the beginning in the end
it can’t avoid imparting some half-
consciousness to what we know
is unfeeling
Nature
we’ve seen rage having escaped the city
and thought it was a tad dramatic
to name our trip an escape
when it’s a wanna-get-away
when it’s only right with winter en route
to turn to wandering clouds
some floating things though
high deep thoughts are there
liberty and abstruse
mornings
you wake
determined to walk the whole jetty
and bring a scrap of Lispector
the terrible duty is to go to the end
but that’s a little vivid
so you check on the old bar
fashioned from street signs
in the beach town
where you lived and learned
how weather could be
memory
tonight I’m walking
the harbor to watch boats
snuggle in their moorings
I hear a noise behind me
on the empty street
but it’s only music
an accordionist on a bicycle
I take her tune with me
I used to borrow
freely
would simply float another’s vessel
from the dock at night
in fourteen lines Wordsworth
makes the boat his own
slight sonnet of dispossession
poor Shepherd
I’m sorry
it’s just the stars and their multiples
we can’t spend all night
making crises from
whatever is knocking
in the home beautiful gas lines
gables or the quiet insulation
keeping the wind outside
while the hero in the kitchen
scrolls financial records
conclusions drawn but unexplained
this ovular
rod taps
the sill
some old custom to leave
the window cracked in storms
before the house explodes
though it’s not pressure that does it
it’s the lift of the roof the carapace
aloft
in the movie now
a drone strike leaves
its black mark on the desert
once I thought no war could start
if we stood out here at the edge of things
but then I drove home through
the states that elected the bomber
found a dreary winter basement
to watch two wars on television
green flashes from the embassy roof
the other panning black and white
walking across the graves
a historian speaking of trees
as witness
to violence
suppose
I send my daughter from here
toward the year 2100 but can’t
by fiat grant her a moral life
it’s her birthday and each red dot
is where a bomb fell
not enough viscera in the color
on a map in a bar graph in the street
a pneumatic tube counts
cars leaving the zoo concert
a plane makes its banking turn
high above IKEA should we skip
all that’s obvious
for the action sequence
another evening
whiled away
writing
an email “I just resent it”
but I don’t begrudge a thing
what I meant was “sent again”
“see you soon” to many people
I’ve come to see only the back of
they drift in the middle of the lake
they drift
in unsent correspondence
we might meet again on the seacoast
taffy stores and t-shirt shops
it really could be anywhere
but it’s more specific than that
colder like a world
without Bach or Belize
or a friend you learned was really
just a circumstance
the light that
lights the switch
that lights the
lamp flickers
in its plastic shell a flame in ice
a way to make the darkness warm
while even now on planet Earth
someone fashions a bell against
despair someone paints a mural
or fires hot air into the lifting
balloon and the film was from
a damp unfeeling place
yet there was allegory to its ferity
two types
of weather
the kind you run from
and the kind where it’s best
to stay put
on Main St. a man hears the call
to prayer and lays a purple t-shirt
in the parking lot another man
is shouting something about Waco
sidestepping them into the gallery
I fall from the canvas into
the whiteness of the wall I duck
beneath hanging caterpillars
I mark the occasional dark glance
among us not that anything
bad would happen until
it does I would never believe
in a bike-by stabbing
but then it happened to me
a yellow bike a street hung with Spanish moss
and then the muscle visible
letting in
the wind
like something of our politics
has me back on Tolstoy’s digression
on bees which was no digression
at all simply the city captive
to the death of its queen
while the baby sleeps
in the next room with Tylenol
with traffic revving
at the four-way stop
one slight wheezing cough
as soldiers approach the hideaway
my father at the fringe
of the march smoking
or not smoking that mist
on the lake lifts
there’s Wordsworth
in the boat he stole
the camera drifts
gray walls of the Pentagon
the lens shifts
among hippies and then
among cops but this
isn’t even one fiftieth
of our story we must
digress
again
but smaller
a single bee in the frame
its fuzzy thorax two glass wings
flying into this room which
is now fully mine and soon
will lack one wall
I’m on the set
I’ve made I
repair and fix
I repair and
fix and then
I take the blue tarpaulin away