And the last poem I'll read from this book,
it's a poem that was written in New Haven, Connecticut
when I taught there for a year.
And I like that year because I rented a little room.
I think it's something we should do every so often, have
a little room to ourselves.
And I wrote a lot of poems in that room,
and this is one of them.
It's called "Poem Approaching Truth."
And it's in eight short parts.
"One, I rent a room.
The twisted limbs of the radiator
are still a little warm, blood turning back to water,
cast iron that once possessed the inner light of bone.
What life still lingers in the flow that keeps the cold away?
Two, why did I do it?
Leaving my wife behind for a few months for a few thousand bucks
to teach at a college where somewhere
between the flipped page and the computer's hum,
there is a constant reappraisal of the human hand, which,
at any other moment, might be forming clay or turning
a key in a lock.
The wrist and the doorknob turn, a little darkness escapes,
a breath we have all taken.
If this is silence, I am its continuous echo.
Three, I overhear someone speaking
of a hometown, one waterfall.
In his voice, I hear that waterfall.
In his eyes, endless, constant, the long fall,
the first rush of electrical power,
a light going on, going off.
Four, I teach two courses, poetry both of them.
My wife lies in a bed tonight 600 miles away.
My blood circles slowly around her absence within me.
It clings to the breath where her name
is hidden in the anonymous flesh of oxygen, a breath that
will rise, escape, and settle like new snow
over the distance between loss surveyors.
I turn, oddly, the dial on the radio,
picking up stations from places far off.
A voice turns into a melody of static.
Five, in my neighborhood, at the luncheonette,
in the black leotards, the waitress Paulette
looks over my shoulder, pleased to see her name on a napkin set
to verse.
In the delicatessen, no one discovers the bagel missing,
as I slip away.
And no one discovers that I have slipped away.
Late at night in the laundromat, my clothes
afloat in the wretched heat of a 10-cent dryer,
I swear to end this life as poet whatever.
And later in bed, piece together the broken
accent of my landlady, who wants her rent, as if it would
buy her the other half of the puzzle,
her Romanian landscape described in eloquent English.
Six, if I could once bypass spring, making no sacrifice,
opening no book, worrying about no harvest, I would, I would.
Just before morning, after a night
spent believing fully in wisdom, my hands
began sweating because before them, nakedness
appeared by itself, with neither man nor beast taking its form.
And I could neither touch nor write.
And my eyes, compasses without needles,
looked everywhere, everywhere I turned.
Seven, it is time to leave.
It is 600 miles to my wife, 20 minutes to my girlfriend.
I look back at the room, as if somewhere in it,
I have left a clue or even an answer.
The shadow of the curtain blows like wild hair
over the half blank, abandoned pages of a new manuscript.
The bedspread pushes slowly my imprint back to the air.
And in the dry, dry water of a mirror,
two eyes float, as if somewhere a body, unsure of its buoyancy,
were to see itself as clearly under the sea as in the air
and long for neither.
I close the door.
Eight, I buy a local newspaper.
Every day, my horoscope warns me to abstain from business.
My life is not for sale.
I know that.
And yet, I bargain with it until it is all I have left to offer.
I offer it.
Someone always accepts."