I've been on the road too much, and one of the things about that
is that you-- well actually, one of the pleasures of it
is a certain taste you develop for the different signs
of towns.
And I love signs anyway, it's one of the reasons
it's in the title here.
And for example, I never even really realized,
even though my brother was a Mason for years,
I had no idea what that meant.
You're not supposed to know what it means.
I mean, I started thinking about it,
I knew he didn't build walls, that I was sure of.
But I didn't know what it was all about, I still don't know.
But now I realize that these signs outside of towns,
they say these three adjectives that
make me feel as though I could live there.
It says, "Ancient, free, and accepted."
I think, I've earned at least two out of three of those.
But I mean, in Iowa City, I arrived in Iowa City
the first thing I went to this diner place,
and there were two ministers there.
There were like actually four or five ministers,
but only two of them were talking.
The others were thinking, which is good.
And it seemed that they were talking
about how hard it was to be a minister, or a pastor today,
how many different duties they had, and the parishioners never
realized, and how quick they had to be to get everything done.
And then one guy turned to the other and he said,
there's nothing worse than arriving for your wedding
and seeing a body being carried out.
That prepared me for the Writers' Workshop.
So this is the poem that got written in Iowa
and has rain, and flus, and things in it.
Preparatory for marriage, it's not death.
"Window: Thing as Participle."
For a long time I had this idea that "thing"
was a great word because it looks like a present participle,
but there was a verb, to fu-.
I sort of love the idea that "thing"
could be animated that way that could make your skin crawl.
But I was sick that year.
"Window: Thing as Participle."
"Welling, and flowing, and fastening to the window itself
became the fever.
Faces waved and surfed across its surface.
Stop that, she rebuked herself, people are only
passing on the sidewalk, people are simply
walking on the side paths.
Yes, that's all you're seeing, so much water in an eye.
But then the sneezes rose from somewhere
to attack whole buildings, schools and churches,
massive stonework, City Hall, whatever stood to be racked.
Did no one notice?
They were all at risk.
Whatever the window held could tremble.
Mortified, she sat in the eye of the storm with steam
from cups of cure to drape or dramatize her time away.
But still the window went on streaming all these bundled half
lives by in one continuous unraveling of differences
of higher, lower, light, or darker faces framed in fur,
or bared of head.
Blown blond, or blasted black, each one
appointed in a halo's freeze burn, or an aura's sun chill
each, one with its hunch of forehead
over only two hot coals per person.
Humankind was understandable in this unending sentence of an EEG
she witnessed scrolling by.
It was, at each new moment, modeled into spikes
of single mindedness.
But every bobbing of discreteness
in the flow, each block or chunk, each head,
she knew, she knew, had its own helixing
and coils of orienting endlessness,
its moving windows of reflective flux,
and its own someone in a fix.
That figure underlying everything,
that glimpse in brown, or blue, with fringe of lash,
a holy icon cries of self, and image irrecoverably,
shimmeringly still, it is so deeply
plunged into the nominative.