This is called-- and I'll just read about three more poems.
This is called "Birthday Star Atlas," and it's a poem about--
well, it's a [INAUDIBLE] receiving for Brazil
a very fancy star atlas with good photographs,
and it's also a poem about Emily Dickinson.
I was reading Emily Dickinson, I suppose, at the time,
and I made a kind of connection between the two, as you'll see.
I mean, I pretty much explain everything in the poem,
the associations.
Wildest dream, Miss Emily.
Then the coldly dawning suspicion--
always at the loss--
come day large black birds overtaking
men who sleep in ditches, a whiff of winter
in the air, sovereign blue, blue that
stands for intellectual clarity over a street deserted
except for a far-off dog.
A police car, a light at the vanishing point
for the children to solve on the blackboard today.
Blind children at the school you and I know
about, their gray nightgowns creased by the north wind,
their fingernails bitten from time immemorial.
We are in a long line outside a dead letter office.
We are dust mice under a conjugal bed covered
with exotic fishes and monkeys.
We are in a slow drifting cold barge huddled
around a television set, which has a wire coat
hanger for an antenna.
A quick view by satellite of the polar regions
maternally tucked in for the long night, then
some sort of interference.
Parallel lines like the ivory bone
needles of your grandmother, knitting our fates together.
All things ambiguous and lovely in their ambiguity,
like the nebula in my new star atlas.
Pale ovals where the ancestral portraits had been taken down,
the gods with their goatees and their faint
smiles in company of their bombshell spouses,
naked and statuesque as if entering a death camp.
They smile too, stroke the Triton wrapped
around the mantel clock, when they're not
showing the whites of their eyes in theatrical ecstasy.
Nostalgia for the theological vaudeville, a false springtime
cleverly painted on the cardboard
for the couple in the last straw to sigh
over while holding hands, which unknown to them
flutter like bird shaped scissors.
Emily, the birthday atlas.
I kept turning its pages, awed and delighted
by the size of the unimaginable, the great nowhere,
the everlasting nothing, pure and serene doggedness
for the hell of it, and love, our nightly
stroll the color of silence and time.