Broken-Face Gargoyles

All I can give you is broken-face gargoyles.

It is too early to sing and dance at funerals,

Though I can whisper to you I am looking for an undertaker humming a lullaby and throwing his feet in a swift and mystic buck-and-wing, now you see it and now you don’t.

Fish to swim a pool in your garden flashing a speckled silver,

A basket of wine-saps filling your room with flame-dark for your eyes and the tang of valley orchards for your nose,

Such a beautiful pail of fish, such a beautiful peck of apples, I cannot bring you now.

It is too early and I am not footloose yet.

I shall come in the night when I come with a hammer and saw.

I shall come near your window, where you look out when your eyes open in the morning,

And there I shall slam together bird-houses and bird-baths for wing-loose wrens and hummers to live in, birds with yellow wing tips to blur and buzz soft all summer,

So I shall make little fool homes with doors, always open doors for all and each to run away when they want to.

I shall come just like that even though now it is early and I am not yet footloose,

Even though I am still looking for an undertaker with a raw, wind-bitten face and a dance in his feet.

I make a date with you (put it down) for six o’clock in the evening a thousand years from now.

All I can give you now is broken-face gargoyles.

All I can give you now is a double gorilla head with two fish mouths and four eagle eyes hooked on a street wall, spouting water and looking two ways to the ends of the street for the new people, the young strangers, coming, coming, always coming.

It is early.

I shall yet be footloose.

Aprons of Silence

Many things I might have said today.

And I kept my mouth shut.

So many times I was asked

To come and say the same things

Everybody was saying, no end

To the yes-yes, yes-yes,

me-too, me-too.

The aprons of silence covered me.

A wire and hatch held my tongue.

I spit nails into an abyss and listened.

I shut off the gabble of Jones, Johnson, Smith,

All whose names take pages in the city directory.

I fixed up a padded cell and lugged it around.

I locked myself in and nobody knew it.

Only the keeper and the kept in the hoosegow

Knew it—on the streets, in the post office,

On the cars, into the railroad station

Where the caller was calling, “All a-board,

All a-board for . . . Blaa-blaa . . . Blaa-blaa,

Blaa-blaa . . . and all points northwest . . . all a-board.”

Here I took along my own hoosegow

And did business with my own thoughts.

Do you see? It must be the aprons of silence.

The Road and the End

I shall foot it