Chinese Whispers: Poems Read Online Free

somebody’s pleasure. Pleasures that don’t go away
    but don’t exactly stay,
    stay the way they were meant to be.
    I caught a winged one,
    looked it firmly in the eyes:
    What is your surmise? Oh, I only like living on,
    the rest isn’t so important to me,
    not at all, if you wish.
    But I do, I said. Then, well, it’s like a clearing
    in the darkness that you can’t see. Darkness is meant for all of us.
    We grow used to it. Then daylight comes again.
    That’s what I mean when I say about living
    it could be going on, going somewhere else,
    but it’s not, it’s here, more or less.
    You have to champion it, then it fights for you,
    but that isn’t necessary. It will go on living anyway.
    I say do you mind I’m getting tired.
    But there is one last thing I must know about you.
    Do you remember a midnight forge
    around which crept the ghosts of lepers, who were blacksmiths
    in a time persistently unidentifiable, and then you went like this?
    You remember how the hammer fell slowly
    taking all that song with you.
    You remember the music of the draft horses
    they could only make against a wall.
    All right, how little does it all cost you then?
    You were a schoolchild, now you are past middle age,
    and the great drawing hasn’t occurred.
    I see I must be going.
    I just like living,
    only like living.
    Sometime you must tell me of your intentions,
    but now I have to stay here on this fast track
    in case the provisions come along
    which I won’t need, being a living, breathing creature.
    But I asked you about your hat.
    Oh yes well it is important to have a hat.

THE LIGHTNING CONDUCTOR
    The general was always particular about his withers,
    lived in a newspaper tent
    someone had let fall beside an easy chair.
    Telling the man with no fingers what it was like to smoke a cigarette
    in the Twenties, we proceeded naturally to your cousin Junius.
    His plan was to overtake the now speeding tortoise
    by digging some kind of a fire trench in its path,
    which would cause it to wonder,
    fatally, for a second,
    after which we could all go back to channeling the news.
    There’s a story here about a kind of grass that grows in the Amazon
    valley that is too tall for birds to fly over—
    they fly past it instead—
    yet leeches have no trouble navigating its circuitous heaps
    and are wont to throw celebratory banquets afterward,
    at which awards are given out—best costume in a period piece
    too distracted by the rapids to notice what period it is, and so on.
    Before retiring the general liked to play a game of all-white dominoes,
    after which he would place his nightcap distractedly on the other man’s crocheted chamber-pot lid.
    Subsiding into fitful slumber, warily he dreams
    of the giant hand descended from heaven
    like the slope of a moraine, whose fingers were bedizened with rings
    in which every event that had ever happened in the universe could sometimes be discerned.
    Sometimes you end up in a slough no matter what happens,
    no matter how many precautions have been taken, threads picked from the tapestry
    that was to have provided us with underwear, and now is bare as any
    grassless season, on whatever coast you choose to engage.
    It’s sad that many were left behind,
    but a good thing for the bluebirds in their beige houses.
    They never saw any reason to join the vast, confused migration,
    fucking like minks as far as the spotty horizon.
    It doesn’t get desperately cold any more, and that’s certainly a lucky anomaly too.

I ASKED MR. DITHERS WHETHER IT WAS TIME YET HE SAID NO TO WAIT
    Time, you old miscreant! Slain any brontosauruses lately? You—
    Sixty wondering days I watched him navigate the alkali lick,
    always a little power ebbing, streaming from high windowsills.
    Down here the tetched are lonely. There’s nothing they can do
    except spit.
    We felt better about answering the business letter
    once the resulting hubris had been grandfathered in,
    slowly, by a withered sage in clogs
    and a poncho vast as a