The Faerie Queene
I sleep while reading, and sleep
while writing a poem, and I sleep
while I’m talking or walking toward
the concrete spires and pylons
of the Fish Hatchery or Nimbus Dam —
so why can’t I sleep while sleeping? Why
must I count how many houses have
a locust in them or scan the columns
of the Textile Manufacture’s Monthly
for the price of bolts of silk from Shān dōng shěng?
I was reading The Faerie Queene for hours:
and the changeling of a virgin conjured from snow
became the cold protagonist
while her flesh and blood twin, a real girl,
stepped into an open boat, pushed from shore
and floated toward the sea, perhaps towing
the honored form of the great red fish
behind the flotilla. On the riverside
the hordes flow silently over the land:
the army ants and the carpenter ants.
What relevance to me and the rain that I half-listened to,
the 21st century rain? Perhaps
you can point the way toward the seawall
of our childhood, where the only governing force
is the fresh gale blowing in over waves
to dwell in vine-draped caves in cliff-sides;
and all things of August appear
then disappear in turn, only
to become September.
(The child opens — then closes — the textbook:
the ornate veil of remembrance is lifted
revealing a row of saplings, each a yearling
filled with green sap: In the North they tell
of a fish three thousand miles long.
It leaps from the water, and between its leap
and the splash as if falls back into the sea,
you will have grown into adulthood.)
Life, according to the Dictionary
of the Underworld, is called ‘the Book’;
but it is also called ‘From now on …’.
* * * * *
Anthropomorphic Landscape
One day, in order to have a more perfect
Union, they will rebuild the United States
on the surface of the moon. Its buildings
and its farms, its lakes and canyons,
its offices, the dendriform columns
of the Johnson Wax Administration Building
and the Cigarette Growers’ League —
all of its great destinations, natural
and man-made, and the entire populace
will be scattered among the lunar craters,
the landforms and the water features, and close
beside the ancient sea called the Sea That Has Become
Known or the Lake of Summer or the mountain
range called Albrecht Penck. Or further
and more glorious, the Great Red Spot
on Jupiter, its methane storms crackling
above the Great Plains. Tractors
and combines work amid pink grains
of salt the size of houses. Or it could be
on Everest, for instance (the highest place
on earth where, surely, it can do no harm).
Or even the deepest under the sea, in the Mariana Trench,
or divided amongst rose-colored rooms of mushroom houses,
or the mirrored caverns of a fernery. It could
be there. Might the states of the union, rather,
be wrapped across the face of a grass-covered ball?
If on an artichoke, plum-purple, will it tumble
in the sea? Or a grass-covered head?
If on the head with the boulder-strewn forests,
then the mountain is a man-like land-form.
It is a place where statues are used as habitations.
And the people live in the head of one gigantic
statue — a colossus. And the rural landscape,
the hills, the windmills and the yellowing pastures,
come together to form the features of a man:
and the man’s cat is a calico cat,
its whiskers as long as pine needles — indeed
they are pine needles. The cat, called Evergreen,
is curled up beside the rowboats:
it wakes up and stretches, digging its claws into larkspur.
It is handled gently by a girl
who puts her book down,
open with its pages lying flat on the table, day-dreams,
as the “distant eccentric perturbers” (as the astronomers
have taken to calling the planets) shine above her.
The marjoram leans down to touch her, or the ferns
nod down toward her then quickly spring away.
Not far away, warm loaves of bread are taken
straight from the ovens and placed in baskets,
brought to the valley, and set beside
bottles of golden wine.