The Great Fires: Poems, 1982-1992

Measuring the Tyger Barrels of chains. Sides of beef stacked in vans.Water buffalo dragging logs of teak in the river mudoutside Mandalay. Pantocrater in the Byzantium dome.The mammoth overhead crane bringing slabs of steelthrough the dingy light and roar to the giant shearthat cuts the adamantine three-quarter-inch platesand they flop down. The weight of the mind fracturesthe girders and piers of the spirit, spilling outthe heart's melt. Incandescent ingots big as carstrundling out of titanic mills, red slag scaling offthe brighter metal in the dark. The Monongahela Riverbelow, night's sheen its belly. Silence exceptfor the machinery clanging deeper in us. You willlove again, people say. Give it time. Me with timerunning out. Day after day of the everyday.What they call real life, made of eighth-inch gauge.Newness strutting around as if it were significant.Irony, neatness and rhyme pretending to be poetry.I want to go back to that time after Michiko's deathwhen I cried every day among the trees. To the real.To the magnitude of pain, of being that much alive. To See If Something Comes Next There is nothing here at the top of the valley.Sky and morning, silence and the dry smellof heavy sunlight on the stone everywhere.Goats occasionally, and the sound of roostersin the bright heat where he lives with the deadwoman and purity. Trying to see if somethingcomes next. Wondering whether he has stalled.Maybe, he thinks, it is like the Noh: wheneverthe script says dances, whatever the actor does nextis a dance. If he stands still, he is dancing. Scheming in the Snow There is a time after what comes afterbeing young, and a time after that, he thinkshappily as he walks through the winter woods,hearing in silence a woodpecker far off.Remembering his Chinese friendwhose brother gave her a jade ring fromthe Han Dynasty when she turned eighteen.Two weeks later, when she was hurrying upthe steps of a Hong Kong bridge, she fell,and the thousand-year-old ring shatteredon the concrete. When she told him, stunnedand tears running down her face, he said,"Don't cry. I'll get you something better."