Ballistics Read Online Free Page A

garden,
    and suddenly I was in the study
    looking up the word
oligarchy
for the thirty-seventh time.
    When suddenly, without warning,
    you planted the last petunia in the flat,
    and I suddenly closed the dictionary
    now that I was reminded of that vile form of governance.
    A moment later, we found ourselves
    standing suddenly in the kitchen
    where you suddenly opened a can of cat food
    and I just as suddenly watched you doing that.
    I observed a window of leafy activity
    and beyond that, a bird perched on the edge
    of the stone birdbath
    when suddenly you announced you were leaving
    to pick up a few things at the market
    and I stunned you by impulsively
    pointing out that we were getting low on butter
    and another case of wine would not be a bad idea.
    Who could tell what the next moment would hold?
    another drip from the faucet?
    another little spasm of the second hand?
    Would the painting of a bowl of pears continue
    to hang on the wall from that nail?
    Would the heavy anthologies remain on their shelves?
    Would the stove hold its position?
    Suddenly, it was anyone’s guess.
    The sun rose ever higher in the sky.
    The state capitals remained motionless on the wall map
    when suddenly I found myself lying on a couch
    where I closed my eyes and without any warning
    began to picture the Andes, of all places,
    and a path that led over the mountains to another country
    with strange customs and eye-catching hats,
    each one suddenly fringed with colorful little tassels.

The Golden Years
    All I do these drawn-out days
    is sit in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge
    where there are no pheasants to be seen
    and, last time I looked, no ridge.
    I could drive over to Quail Falls
    and spend the day there playing bridge,
    but the lack of a falls and the absence of quail
    would only remind me of Pheasant Ridge.
    I know a widow at Fox Run
    and another with a condo at Smokey Ledge.
    One of them smokes, and neither can run,
    so I’ll stick to the pledge I made to Midge.
    Who frightened the fox and bulldozed the ledge?
    I ask in my kitchen at Pheasant Ridge.

Vermont, Early November
    It was in between seasons,
    after the thin twitter of late autumn
    but before the icy authority of winter,
    and I took in the scene from a porch,
    a tableau of silo and weathervane
    and a crowd of ferns on the edge of the woods—
    nothing worth writing about really,
    but it is too late to stop now
    that the ferns and the silo have been mentioned.
    I drank my warm coffee
    and took note of the disused tractor
    and the lopsided sign to the cheese factory.
    Not one of those mornings
    that makes you want to seize the day,
    not even enough glory in it to make you want
    to grasp every other day,
    yet after staring for a while
    at the plowed-under fields and the sky,
    I turned back to the order of the kitchen
    determined to seize firmly
    the second Wednesday of every month that lay ahead.

The Effort
    Would anyone care to join me
    in flicking a few pebbles in the direction
    of teachers who are fond of asking the question:
    “What is the poet trying to say?”
    as if Thomas Hardy and Emily Dickinson
    had struggled but ultimately failed in their efforts—
    inarticulate wretches that they were,
    biting their pens and staring out the window for a clue.
    Yes, it seems that Whitman, Amy Lowell
    and the rest could only try and fail,
    but we in Mrs. Parker’s third-period English class
    here at Springfield High will succeed
    with the help of these study questions
    in saying what the poor poet could not,
    and we will get all this done before
    that orgy of egg salad and tuna fish known as lunch.
    Tonight, however, I am the one trying
    to say what it is this absence means,
    the two of us sleeping and waking under different roofs.
    The image of this vase of cut flowers,
    not from our garden, is no help.
    And the same goes for the single plate,
    the solitary lamp, and the weather that presses its face
    against these new windows—the drizzle and the morning frost.
    So I will leave it up