Removing my clack, I'm going to do that too.
So this poem is called Calm.
And it's in two parts.
And if I were a calm person, it would
have been written in one part.
And it comes out of those--
it actually came-- you know one of those ways
when you discover the two levels of feeling
when somebody says to you how are you feeling,
and you say great.
And then 15 minutes later, you realize
you're feeling horrible.
Yeah, I wish I was calm.
One.
September sun, a little fog in the mornings,
no sanctified terror.
At night Luke says, how do you connect a B to an A in cursive?
He is bent to the task with such absorption
that he doesn't notice the Scarlatti
on the stereo which he would, in other circumstances, turn off.
He said that chamber music sounds to him worried.
I go out and look at the early stars.
They glow faintly.
Faintly the mountain, I'm sorry.
Faintly the mountain is washed in the color of sunset,
at this season of faded scarlet like the petals
of the bougainvillea which is also fading.
A power saw somewhere in the neighborhood
is enacting someone's idea of more
pleasure, or an extra room, or a redwood tub.
It hums and stops, hums and stops.
Two.
In the dream there was a face saying no.
Not with words.
Brow furrow, crow's foot, lip curl, no.
It is forbidden to you, no.
But it was featureless.
You could put your hand through it
and feel cold on the other side.
It was not the father face saying
no among the torsos and pillars of aluminum, or the mother face
weeping no, no, no at the gate that guards rage.
It was not even the idiot face of the obedient brother
attacking his list of 175 reasons why not
on the greenhouse door.
This face spits on archetypes, spits on caves, rainbows,
the little human luxury of historical explanation.
The meadow, you remember the meadow,
and the air in June, which held the scent of it
as the woman in religious icons holds the broken son?
You can go into that meadow, the light routed
by a brilliant tenderness of green,
a cool V carved by a muskrat in the blue great distance
of the pond, black eyed Susans everywhere.
You can go there.