Ballistics Read Online Free

for the first time the works
    of Agricola, the father of modern mineralogy himself.
    Out the windows of the gallery,
    a jumble of raincoats and black umbrellas,
    and so my afternoon education continues
    with the discovery in a vitrine of Vegetarius,
    who in the 4th century came up
    with the idea of underwater warfare,
    hand-to-hand combat beneath the lily pads
    as if bloodying one another on the ground were not enough.
    And if his illustration of an armed soldier
    standing on the bottom of a lake
    and breathing through a snake-like tube
    comes at me tonight and shakes me out of sleep,
    I will not coax an oval pill from its bottle
    nor put on a robe and stand by the stove
    looking at the ads in a magazine
    while some milk is heating in a pan.
    I only need to slide into place
    the image of Leonardo at a table by a window,
    his marvelling head resting in his hands,
    as he wonders if water could exist on the moon.

New Year’s Day
    Everyone has two birthdays
    according to the English essayist Charles Lamb,
    the day you were born and New Year’s Day—
    a droll observation to mull over
    as I wait for the tea water to boil in a kitchen
    that is being transformed by the morning light
    into one of those brilliant rooms of Matisse.
    “No one ever regarded the First of January
    with indifference,” writes Lamb,
    for unlike Groundhog Day or the feast of the Annunciation,
    this one marks nothing but the passage of time,
    I realized, as I lowered a tin diving bell
    of tea leaves into a little body of roiling water.
    I admit to regarding my own birthday
    as the joyous anniversary of my existence
    probably because I was, and remain
    to this day in late December, an only child.
    And as an only child—
    a tea-sipping, toast-nibbling only child
    in a colorful room this morning—
    I would welcome an extra birthday,
    one more opportunity to stop what we are doing
    for a moment and reflect on my being here on earth.
    And one more might be a small consolation
    to us all for having to face a death-day, too,
    an X in a square
    on some kitchen calendar of the future,
    the day when each of us is thrown off the train of time
    by a burly, heartless conductor
    as it roars through the months and years,
    party hats, candles, confetti, and horoscopes
    billowing up in the turbulent storm of its wake.

The Day Lassie Died
    It is 5:40 in Sawyer County, Wisconsin, a Tuesday
    a few days before the birthday of Martin Luther, yes
    it is 1959 and I need to do my chores
    which include milking the ten cows—
    did I mention it was 5:40 in the morning?—
    and driving them with a stick into the pasture.
    After breakfast (I am thinking oatmeal
    with brown sugar and some raisins)
    I will drive the twelve miles into town
    and pick up a few things,
    a tin of hoof softener for the horse,
    some batteries, shells, a pair of rubber gloves,
    and something for my wife but I don’t know what.
    Maybe this cotton apron
    with little pictures of the Eiffel Tower on it,
    or she might like some hairpins, a box of tissues,
    yet I am tempted by this anthology
    of the Cavalier poets edited by Thomas Crofts
    or maybe
The Pictorial History of Eton College
by B.J.W. Hill,
    but after pacing up and down the aisles
    of Olsen’s Emporium, I finally settle on
    The Zen Teaching of Huang Po
    translated from the Chinese (obviously)
    by John Blofeld and published
    recently by the infamous Grove Press,
    and when I take everything up to Henry
    at the big bronze cash register,
    he asks have you seen today’s
Sentinel
    and there’s her face, the dark eyes,
    the long near-smile, and the flowing golden coat
    and I’m leaning on the barn door back home
    while my own collie, who looks a lot like her,
    lies curled outside in a sunny patch
    and all you can hear as the morning warms up
    is the sound of the cows’ heavy breathing.

   
three
     

Tension
    Never use the word
suddenly
just to create
tension.
    —
Writing Fiction
    Suddenly, you were planting some yellow petunias
    outside in the