For The Teenage Boy Buying Roses For His Girlfriend On Christmas Eve With His Father

Your father kept asking:
"Are you sure you don't want the long stems?"
Dressed in work pants and a sweatshirt, boots with laces dragging on the florist's floor,
unshaven and uncombed, he hardly looked the long stem type.

In line behind you I waited,
taking pleasure in your smooth face and shy smile
and your knowing that those sweethearts were just fine, despite your father's doubts.

You knew he was trying to help
and smiled at him as he paced to the cooler of flowers and back,
coming to grips with your decision.

But he, who looked like he'd be more comfortable under a car, knew his likes when it came to roses.

I was glad of that. And his love for you.

And you gathered in that package and smiled again so innocently it didn't seem possible that tonight those roses might
win you a kiss.

Greenwood School, October, 1962

From the school yard tarmac
decorated in hopscotch, white circles, basepaths, we search the gray skies of October morning, threatening in the way of tornado warnings, for planes, not really understanding
our excitement as fear.

Leaning against caged windows, we wonder could it really be, this day the last day.

Later, inside, for the hundreth time,
the air raid drill.

File, keep to the wall,
descend to shelter
and wait. Mr. Murphy telling us
we were too noisy.

Too noisy for what?

To hear bombs whistle,
our mothers calling?

Back in the classroom
we returned to fractions or SRA,
or art, drawing flowers in vases,
pumpkins with their hollow eyes.

Next week another drill;
next year, on trolleys heading home, we will hear of Dallas
and soon be served Vietnam for supper.

But that October morning
remains clear and unordinary,
the first day of a mania
that has crept around us
like an ocean of fog,
like a tornado
we've grown used to.

Knowing My Students Will Attend The Reading

For weeks I searched
myself for a happy poem,
one that might resemble the me
they know, full of hope,
carefree advice and a laugh,
but it was not there.

Maybe while I watched Vietnam over supper
it left for Aruba or
is starving now overseas,
its bloated stanzas soon to call to me from Newsweek, tiny lines outstretched,
metaphor open wide.

I just don't know.

I hope it is only sitting too long
in some café and doesn't live
in a city, strung out on
despair and chewing lead.

Maybe it is in Tibet and will come back wise.
I'd thought it was teaching
in New Hampshire, making friends
and discussing sentence structure,
its students strewn about the room
like rafts on an ocean of reflection,
waiting for the words to pull themselves up
and offer something in return.

Probably it is in some old jacket,
walking all night to greet
milky dawns, listening for the breeze
that might speak even a small truth,
and will show up looking tired,
sad in the way the moon seems lonely
behind bare branches.

If that's true we'll meet,
and next time I'll bring it along,
dressed in spring.

Listen

Speak in whispers, then,
if that's how you hear the world,
loneliness and loss
your companions in the night.

If others meet
by tv's dim light,
bold and sure, content to die early as they jog in circles,
passing extended time,
gathering nuts for feasts
they're too busy to attend,
let them.

But you,
sit up and listen
for the dawn,
the leaves perfect
random rhythms
calling softly.

After Hearing A Woman Say She Wouldn't By A Painting That Clashed With Her Rugs 
 
 

The paintings I've bought clash
with the furniture and rugs.
I hear them squabbling at night.
You are stupid, say the curtains, look at you- so full of yourself.

For their part, the paintings begin by stroking their goatees and smiling
small smiles, superior in every way.

Get off me, murmurs the wallpaper, you do nothing
for my color scheme. You look ridiculousperched on my perfect patterns.

The paintings remain silent, amused.

Hey listen, the couch intones,
if you think for a minute
I'll be replaced for you
you are useless, hanging there. Useless.

It is then the smallest doubt
creeps over the paintings. We areindividuals- one of a kind. Art!

Oh big deal, from the rug. Get downhere where I am- they'd wear you out in a day.

We, say the paintings, have no day.

Timeless and eternal are we.
Horseshit, say the lamps.
I worry about this.
And the paintings worry.

I see it in the morning.

There is a heaviness in their frames not there before. My
body is tired, from listening,
but there is only silence now,
except in dreams, where everything opens wide, and the burglars, repulsed, 
carry nothing away.