And these two are--
I mean, it's addressed to my wife.
And these are over--
these are clearly, to me, addressed to my wife.
This is called "The Yes."
"Each day for years, it gets up at first light,
lets the dove out, and stands in the doorway
looking at the soft blue Arkansas sky without waking.
But never you mind, it will be packing its small suitcase
soon.
It will leave the keys dangling from the lock
and set out across the ravens brook
and barefoot through the pathless wood of books.
Already, it is traveling toward me.
Somehow, I know this.
Though, blinded as I leave the outer brilliance,
though the stench of urine hit me like a blow, and, once more,
in the blink of an eye, I am back at my watch,
pretty mauled by a vicious cycle, right
in the middle of raising a 20 pound shot
glass toward the general vicinity of my lips the way
a long ruined jeweler might gradually guide from long habit
the loop to an empty eye socket.
But the suicides you always have with you.
Maybe I'm just cruising around late at night
and waiting at what is already the longest
red light in Western history.
No other car in sight, there never
will be, not in my private city--
scared, sick.
I'm the Very Last Person, the VLP,
abandoned to man by himself.
This glass-bottomed space station,
one more ragged meat bone we'll always have haunting us,
floating in a gray soup of its own filth and misery.
What are you going to do?
Let's say, later on, I happen to hang a sharp left
for no reason I can think of at an unfamiliar corner just
in time to glimpse a small three-legged dog making
his way down the dark sidewalk.
And, finally, I asked to be given a new name which
nobody knows and a new heart.
In ascending progressions, the first dawn
waves, traversing that universe where the more you disappear,
the more vividly present you become,
where the slower the velocity, the sooner
the time of the arrival.
The answer is on its way.