I'm going to read a different poem.
A different kind of poem.
It's in seven short sections.
The title of it is "White Lanterns," and it's an elegy.
"White Lanterns."
"One.
Visiting Accounting, 1960.
The numbers hypnotize.
Beside her desk, the three squat adding machines
confetti the floor with paper strips
in ever widening spirals, and her gaze dances
to ledgers exhaling their breath of dust.
A Dickens scene transplanted to the '60s,
to General Tire or Northwest Bank.
The columns hypnotize.
Released from Dr. Thorson, my molar
wrapped in tissue in my hand.
I peer into her office door.
Lost in her lacemaker's trance--
the figures hypnotize-- she sees numbers constellate
into rows but not her son.
Sixes and zeros comet down relentlessly as sleet.
The addition and subtraction of these moments
that compose a life.
This one to debit, this one to credit.
She looks up.
This one to crimson lipstick, vapor lights.
Two.
Study, 1988.
Her lipstick's crimson in the vapor light.
The funeral home basement and the undertaker's
bent to pry the casket hinges up for us.
No lambent painterly shadowplay, only stark fluorescent clarity.
She's no one anymore.
Only the Christmas-and-New Year's dress tentlike
on the wasted body, only a face half
hers, half a cosmetician's caricature, Jerrybuilt
from photos in a borrowed family album.
Why must my mind so brokenly conjure
this stranger's distracted study of wig and cheekbones,
dental plates, of each bad polaroid of family
dinners, summer cookouts.
His tools fixing the exact shape of her mouth.
Three.
Harlequins, 1962."
This is as in Harlequin romance.
"I remember the exact shape of her mouth,
the dimestore novels on her lap, the lips
working silent incantations, the threadbare couch.
She's in Rio tonight or Pernambuco,
and I'm up past midnight, creeping to the living room
to tell her I can't sleep.
My father is on the road again, the Fargo-Minot-Whitefish run.
And I'm alone with her all week, The Man of the House.
Her gin glass sweating on the table.
I watch her doze.
The book dropped to the floor.
All night she's tangoed with suave pencil-mustached
generalissimos.
A rose in her teeth, absinthe and milky Pernod.
But now she's mine again, waking with a start.
David, fill the glass for me, I've got such a thirst.
Four.
Morphine, 1988.
Johnny, fill the syringe for me.
All the pain's come back.
Perhaps now she can sleep or watch TV or stare
at Midwest winter.
Snow falling vertically from here to Hudson's Bay.
The flakes strike the new picture window,
and he fumbles with the syringe, waits through the game
shows that she hates until she's gentled into sleep.
And when she's still, he dozes too,
fetal on the couch, the sponge he
dabbed her forehead with falling damp from his hand
to the floor.
Refrigerator hum, the clock spitting seconds,
the seething storm, the dog chasing rabbits in dream.
Let them sleep.
Sleep as the spectral evening shadows
come to blur the window, the snowflakes'
numb white lanterns.
Five.
Walking to School, 1964.
Blurring the window, the snowflakes'
numb white lanterns.
She's brewed her coffee.
In the bathroom sprays cologne and sets her lipstick upright
on the sink.
The door ajar, I glimpse the yellow slip,
the rose-colored birthmark on her shoulder.
Then she's dressed-- the pillbox hat and ersatz fur.
And I'm dressed too, mummified in stocking cap and scarves.
And I walk her to the bus stop where
she'll leave me for my own walk to school,
where she'll board the bus that zigzags to St. Paul.
As I watch her in the window, the paperback romance
already open on her lap.
The bus laboring off into snow.
Her goodbye kiss still startling my cheek with lipstick trace.
Six.
Picture Window, 1987.
Spattering the room with the snowy trace of plaster dust,
the carpenters have worked all week,
and the pane they're fitting will be huge,
posed to frame the brown November lawn.
Thanksgiving break and we arrive to stacked lumber, sawhorses,
the living room a stage or excavation.
Wig askew, she slowly rises.
The pain is worse since last month's visit.
But she only complains about the carpenters.
Two of them are Negroes, and you know how they are.
Your father has to watch them all the time.
The chemo's bleached her eyebrows to down,
her voice a rasp from radiation, red burn
etching her throat and face.
Pineboards, hammers, sacks of nails, and now
the stiff embrace."
Last section.
"Writing Desk, 1989.
Frost starred window, rented house,
the stiff embrace we share in photographs above my desk.
Mother and father, mother and son,
faces sharing noses, cheekbones, our immeasurable strangeness
to each other.
Perspective is a lie, a blurred collage.
And where does it carry us, this trio nodding on Christmas
morning from a 30-year-old Chevy, window
spattered with frost, colorless now, outside of history?
How would she tally fragments such as these?
I must be watching from the half-lit hallway
as she bends to the numbers.
Neither of us speaks.
I move to the door, the churn of the adding machines fixing us
here.
The columns hypnotize."