1.
Even when we finally had to burn them, the gray, stately
Trunks of malagas, the tough, already yellowing limbs
Of muscats—acres of them in those years, hacked, stacked
In piles, then doused with kerosene—even their fires
Flaring all night in what were suddenly bare fields—
Looked older than the city dressed in its distant light.
Of course after the fires passed it was all for sale.
Some vacant lots were leased to milkweed & black-eyed Susans
For a few months; then pavement, billboards, the treeless yards,
And at the end of each street a sky that looked painted in.


What’s gone is moon’s silk; what’s gone has rotted the circles from
        Luna Moth & Shasta Daisy.
Beyond the flies on the sills, beyond the stained glass with its sheep
Accumulating like curious tourists, you could hear the sound of
        hammering grow louder each week
In Leisure Villa& Sierra Madre. The walls of our ridiculous, rural parish,
Lined with poor reproductions of paintings meant to instruct us,
Seemed only a setting for the veiled women addicted to prayer.
What floats back now is the Virgin, a Mary holding out an apronful
        of bread,
A cold sea behind her & a distracted look on her face. I thought it meant
She was remembering a girlhood, the faint odor, garlic & mint, of a man
Asleep beside a tree-lined road. It was instructive, they said,
If it made you sad. It was a complete waste of time, & childhood, & so,
I suppose now it was instructive: the way the body woke alone,
The way the vineyards vanished into patterns of lime & yellow dolphins
Rising in pairs to the surface of a Formica countertop, the way
The sky began to take up residence in a few, cramped words
As I sat reading them there. The naked human body is the grave in blossom;
        it is both
Sad & instructive. And which withered cane from which withered vine
        of malagas
Would you choose to carry into Hell if you left now? 


2.
For James Wright

Today, hearing the empty clang of a rope against
A flagpole, the children in school, the slow squeal of swings
In the playground, a day of rain & gusts
Of wind, I noticed the overleaf of his book—
How someone had tried hard to make
The illustration look like snow that had fallen in the shape
Of a horse; it looked, instead, like someone wrapped in bandages.
Someone alone & wrapped in bandages who could not see out.
Who could never be permitted to see out
As a gust of rain swept over the swimming pool, over
The thin walls of my apartment, twenty years ago.
If I look in the window I can see the book open on the counter;
I am reading it there; I am alone.
Everyone else in the world is in bed with someone else.
If they sleep, they sleep with a lock of the other’s hair
In their lips, but the world is one short,
An odd number, & so God has given me a book of poems.
And suddenly the boy sitting there isn’t funny anymore.
And in that moment the one
Wrapped in bandages wants only to look out once,
Even at a gust of rain blemishing the pool,
Even at a scuffed shoe passing.
Poor shoe, poor rain, poor sprawl of stucco & plywood.
And death, poorest of cousins, back turned
In all the photographs,
Wanting his mouth for a souvenir.


3.
In 1965, if anything was worth worshipping in that city,
It was in the old neighborhood rife with eucalyptus & a few,
        brooding mulberries,
It was the lions asleep in the zoo, unmoved by the taunts
Of children or the trash they threw, sometimes on fire for a moment,
        into her cage.
It was the way she endured it: heat, rain, misfortune; turning on her
        heels always
Away from you as if there were two worlds, as if you were lost
In this one. She could have killed a man with one swipe
Of her paw, but she did not. And that is why, in the next world,
She has come back as a poem already written for her, & hidden
In this one. This one which fills us with longing. Which bores her.
In 1965 in that city, no one knew less than a boy of nineteen, still a virgin,
Still brimming over with extinct love;
His face shining with acne he’d rubbed raw with a hand towel
To make it disappear; instead, it blistered, & later,
Looking in the mirror, he thought such blisters might be
The visible evidence of the soul. Laugh, if you want to;
After all, the next world is a lioness & she moves without history,
        like a lioness,
And without mistakes. Besides, it’s twenty years later.
By now that boy’s already poured his first drink of the evening;
So have you, & no tense is as sad as the future’s.
If I’m not laughing with you it’s because I’m talking to myself again.


It should be one of those nights when you were wise & singular after
The rush & an almost virginal swirling in the veins;
Outside the motel on the outskirts, I waited.
And later I glanced out at the passing cypresses festooned in spiderwebs,
        or ice, & I drove.
The night you disappeared into the wholesale dark—whiskey & a cold wind
        & never coming home—
I sat reading on the steadfast lamplight; the story darkened,
And when you wouldn’t come back,
I watched the autumn light fall across a photograph.
I watched the world take off its dress;
I saw the world’s gooseflesh.
Later I saw you laughing with the others in the garden;
There was the smell of someone’s  cigarette,
And then the smell of crushed gravel on a driveway after a rain. 

Once, there was a kind of beauty, like a sail.
It was white, like a sail, &…
Once under way, you could watch even the people you worked with
        grow distant, until they seemed perfectly composed,
The way a shoreline falls into place behind you. The way it appears so
        untroubled when you are at sea.
At sea I woke in chills, I shivered in the wake of your pleasure.
They will say all this is sad & instructive, but it isn’t.
Nor is there any scent of grief in such a story.

And afterward only the ordinary, slowly closing white ocean of the arm—
        something to witness—
Because it is not a miracle to be here, sweeping up before dawn, &
        because these windowsills
Do not open onto a New World but only onto the flat dark gleaming
        of rails:
You can hear the scoring of steel on steel,
And through a boxcar’s open door, you can see a matted swath of straw
        or snow for a moment in the first light;
And then the world in its one dress, the park drowsing in mist.
If only we could have held hands, as the straitjacketed mad appear to do?
But remember in that apartment twenty years ago, how—just by looking
        at it carefully—
It took nothing more than a scuffed shoe to get you high,
Or a dry leaf blown into a bedroom where you sat reading late at night,
Or the remembered, twisted shape of a yellowing vine you once threw—
        steaming suddenly in the first, warm sunlight—
Onto a pile for burning.
And later, staring into those fires, how the sleepless shape of each flame
Held your attention like someone’s nakedness, a nakedness
The world clothes in light until it’s a city. This city.
I leave you here, with the next world already beginning to stir, & you wide
        awake in this one.
This one with the first traffic beginning just beyond your doorstep in the
        slow gauze of dawn—
And the trees & hedges lining your street in the oldest neighborhood?
So thick now, so overgrown, they look as if they had always been there?
And the first frost?
Anything is enough if you know how poor you are.
You could step out now in wonder.


 = Terry Lucas