Half-Life Study #2
She lies in bed in a strange city, watching
her lover while he sleeps, someone else's
Books on the shelves, strangers' snapshots
framed on the bureau: a coal train
on its track along the river fixed in black
acid against limestone – a Toyota
At curbside, fading, releasing its ghostly odor
of bromide – anatomy of branches
Through a window, smudged against pale sky.
She is living in an old photograph,
A fin-de-siècle tintype, brown-edged, slightly
out of focus. When the sunlight
Makes its way across the comforter to touch her,
she feels her self begin to disappear.
Her palms go first, clarifying like lenses. Then
her legs – daguerreotype of a wartime amputee.
Chemistry is merciless, her aura helpless
in this light. When the man wakes,
There is nothing beside him but a face, oddly
faded, familiar in a distant way –
An ancestor maybe, distorted behind old glass
in a gold-foil frame – or nobody,
A child in a porch swing who never had a name,
never had a life, not even forgotten, regarding him
With a crudely fixed gaze, colorless but certain.
Half-Life Study # 5
Just as the rain begins, a man dressed as a priest
steps out of a café doorway onto the sidewalk, moving
As if there were no such thing as weather, down the avenue
where shop windows display all the worldly goods
We are told we must give up. A priest, or a man
dressed as a priest? Rain, or chemistry dressed as rain?
Hands invisible in his cassock sleeves, he walks without looking
left or right or even before him, head down
In an attitude of brooding or meditation or constant prayer.
He passes the boy with no legs singing for coins
In the shadow of a shoeshop's sign, the woman in mink hiding
her face indignantly from the rain in her priceless collar.
Emblems are everywhere, and he makes his way among them
respectfully but with determination, as if his lifelong training
were in techniques of proper relation to surfaces and their meanings.
Suppose he carries a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing wrapped
in bookshop paper hidden in an inner pocket? Suppose
he carries a copy of Das Kapital? The café waiter
Deferred to him, brought him an extra serving
of excellent bouillabaisse with honest peasant bread.
The soul of a priest is nothing to a waiter, as long
as the food is free. The waiter's mother was a beauty
In her youth, took many lovers, died embittered and faithless,
broken by loss of face. No one to blame, no one to forgive.
Memento mori are worth whatever price. Now the waiter clears
the table, lifting saucer and soup bowl, brushing crumbs away.
No tip. His reward will be beyond the surgeon's shop, the brothel,
the Temple of Apollo, in the fogbank at the avenue's end.