Linnets

4.

Whales dry up on beaches by themselves.

The large bones in their heads, their silence,

is a way of turning inward.

Elephants die in exile.

Their tusks begin curling, begin growing

into their skulls.

My father once stopped a stray dog

with a 12-gauge, a blast in the spine.

But you see them on the roads, trotting through rain.

Cattle are slaughtered routinely.

But pigs are intelligent and vicious to the end.

Their squeals burn circles.

Mice are running over the freezing snow.

Wolverines will destroy kitchens for pleasure.

Wolverines are so terrible you must give in.

The waist of a weasel is also lovely. It slips away.

The skies under the turtle’s shells are birdless.

*

These shadows become carp rising slowly. The black

Trees are green again. The creeks are full

And the wooden bridge trembles.

The suicides slip beneath you, shining.

You think if you watched them long enough

You would become fluent in their ten foreign tongues

Of light and drummed fingers and inbreedings.

5.

Snakes swallow birds, mice, anything warm.

Beaten to death with a length of pipe,

A snake will move for hours afterward, digesting.

In fact their death takes too long.

In their stillness it may be they outlast death.

They are like stones the moment after

A wind passes over.

The tough skin around a snake’s eyes

Is ignorant and eternal.

They are made into belts and wallets.

Their delicate meat can be eaten.

But you can’t be sure.

In the morning another snake lies curled

On the branch just over your head.

*

Under the saint’s heel in the painting,

A gopher snake sleeps.

The saint’s eyes are syphilitic with vision.

He looks the Lord in the face.

He is like the bridge the laborers shrug at

As they wade across the water at night.

*

6.

You can’t be sure. Your whole family

May be wiped out by cholera. As the plums

Blossom, you may hang yourself.

Or you may love a woman whose low laugh

Makes her belly shake softly.

She wants you to stay, and you should have.

*

Or like your brother, you may go

Into the almond orchard to kill

Whatever moves. You may want to go

Against the little psalms and clear gazings

Of birds, against yourself, a 12-gauge

Crooked negligently over your shoulder.

You’re tired of summer.

You want to stop all the singing.

And everything is singing.

At close range you blow a linnet

Into nothing at all, into the silence

Of stumps, where everyone sits and whittles.

*

You brother grows into a stranger.

He walks into town in the rain.

Two gold feathers behind his ear.

He is too indifferent to wave.

He buys all the rain ahead of him,

And sells all the silence behind him.

7. Linnet Taxidermy

I thought when finished

it would break into flight, its beak

a Chinese trumpet over the deepest lakes.

But with each feather it grows colder to the touch.

I attach wings which wait for the glacier

to slide under them. The viewpoint of ice

is birdless. I close my eyes,

I give up.

*

I meet my brother in Los Angeles.

I offer him rain

but he clears his throat.

He offers me

the freeway and the sullen huts;

the ring fingers stiffening;

the bitten words.

There are no birds he remembers.

He does not remember owning a gun.

He remembers nothing of the past.

He is whistling “Kansas City”

on Hollywood Boulevard, a bird

with half its skull eaten away

in the shoebox tucked under his arm.

*

When the matinee ends, the lights come on

and we blink slowly

and we walk out. It is the hour

when the bald usher

falls in love.

*

When we are the night and the rain,

the leper on his crutch will spit once,

and go on singing.

8. Matinee

Your family stands over your bed

like Auks of estrangement.

You ask them to look you in the eye,

in the flaming aviary.

But they float over in dirigibles:

in one of them

a girl is undressing; in another

you are waking your father.

Your wife lies hurt on the roadside

and you must find her.

You drive slowly, looking.

They lift higher and higher

over the snow on the Great Plains.

Goodbye, tender blimps.

9. 1973

At the end of winter

the hogs are eating abandoned cars.

We must choose between Jesus and the seconal

as we walk under the big, casual spiders whitening

in ice, in tree tops. These great elms rooted in hell

hum so calmly.

My brother marching through Prussia

wears a chrome tie and sings.

Girls smoothing their dresses

become mothers. Trees grow more deeply

into the still farms.

The war ends.

A widow cradles her husband’s

acetylene torch,

the flame turns blue,

a sparrow flies out of the bare elm

and it begins again.

I’m no one’s father.

I whittle a linnet out of wood until

the bus goes completely dark around me.

The farms in their white patients’ smocks join hands.

Only the blind can smell water,

the streams moving a little,

freezing and thawing.

*

In Illinois one bridge is made entirely

of dead linnets. When the river sings under them,

their ruffled feathers turn large and black.

Ants have already taken over

the eyes of the house finch

on the sill.

So you think someone

is coming,

someone already passing the burned mill,

someone with news of a city

built on snow.

But over the bare table

in the morning

a glass of water goes blind

from staring upward.

For you

it’s not so easy.

You begin the long witnessing:

Table. Glass of water. Lone crow

circling.

You witness the rain for weeks

and there are only two of you.

You divide yourself in two and witness yourself,

and it makes no difference.

*

You think of God dying of anthrax

in a little shed, of a matinee

in which three people sit

with their hands folded and a fourth

coughs. You come down the mountain.

12.

This is a good page.

It is blank,

and getting blanker.

My mother and father

are falling asleep over it.

My brother is finishing a cigarette;

he looks at the blank moon.

My sisters walk gravely in circles.

My wife sees through it, through blankness.

My friends stop laughing, they listen

to the wind in a room in Fresno, to the wind

of this page, which is theirs,

which is blank.

They are tired of reading,

they want to go home,

they won’t be waving goodbye.

When they are gone,

the page will be crumpled,

thrown into the street.

Around it, sparrows will be feeding

on bits of garbage.

The linnet will be singing.

A man will awaken on his death bed,

not yet cured.