Two more poems.
This one's called Disguise, and partly it was--
[AIRPLANE FLYING OVERHEAD]
It was written out of the kind of humanness
that children give to stuffed animals, to stuffed toys,
and John's son Bodi had two stuffed animals,
and they were named for the people who
had given him the animals.
So one is Henry Bear and the other one is Marvin Lion.
That's all.
Disguise.
At the window in autumn, when the leaves fall down,
Mama calls to her boy.
Little Mouse, Mouselet.
Nothing is farther away than this clamor of leaves falling,
and a voice rising, and the mouse, frail, hopeful,
trying to escape gives in to every crumb of his mother's
calling voice.
He will lie in bed tonight with lamp light on his forehead,
locked up in his marble dream.
But now he creeps to the window, lifts the corner of the shade.
The first light comes out from the first hope.
Henry Bear and Marvin Lion are the stars propped up
on the immense ceiling.
Papa put them there.
Mama puts them out.
Stars of the distant future, or was it the distant past?
Anyway, the light comes down and stifles everything that grows.
Soon snow will pack around the tree,
and Henry Bear will smile down.
He's charming and he's real.
God has the names of animals and stars written
beside each other in a book.
What did Mama say?
God is exquisite.
God can never quite come to his decision about the world.
Mama takes off her dress by the fire.
Papa whistles.
What's a whistle but a music you can see through?
The boy is mad because the leaves are gone.
The trees are black.
Everything outdoors is disguised as something else.
"That's the first snow," his mother said.
"That's not snow," said Father, "but sleep."
Sleep.
"Go to sleep anyhow," said Father.
He kisses his father's wrist and tries to sleep.
God, who's made of snow and light,
sighs, but never, never sleeps.