Two Poems

Relief Construction

In the gallery where the artist chose the works,
the maps were drawings, 
the drawings scores for dances,
the dances people doing 
ordinary things, like walking 
around a square of black tape,
or falling, getting up, and stumbling,
laughing. On the monitor, 
a little light fell on the surface of a bowl. 
Then it was water, as we saw.
For that was how to make a film:
time passing, light and water.
We stood on the stairs above the projector
and looked down.
We walked the length of the city in the heat,
had our first drink in a twilit bar. 
A few of the seats in the dining room
filled up with families as we were sitting there.
I looked up from my life for just a moment
and that night 
or else the next, we weren’t alone,
and then we were alone again.
The shadow as it passed left us in tears.
A little light fell on the surface of a bowl.
The rest of the autumn was uncompromising,
and some of the leaves held on, for a while,
deep blues in the grain of the trees.

 
Ardmore, 1994 

I

Each thing loses its use with force.
Windows are for leaning out of,
oceans are for thinking. Houses
are for animals and children.
Cupboards are for caviar and Swiss Miss.
Futons are for fingering the chords
of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness.
Rivers are for taking a shell out
into the winter thaw. The light advances
just too far ahead of the weather
and the water is a medium,
ragged meter, up and down,
perpetuating silence
in between the oarstrokes,
like the afternoon when Robin drove me
through the fragile first week of April,
up to the front of Winchester Cathedral.

II 

The first house had a well.
The second had a goat.
The third house had a baby owl.

The first house had a wall
the garbage trucks collapsed.
The second house had animals

That strayed. The third house
was an abbey, late
twelfth-century facade.

The first house had two doors.
The second had a downbeat
dropping in the chorus.

The third house had a horse
that ate the olive trees.
The first house had a lullaby.

The second had an elegy.
The third house had a little house
across a courtyard:

That was where I stayed.
The limit of the lullaby
was pure distortion and

the limit of the elegy was rage.

III

Whatever form we put them in,
our losses are our own. The night
is private. Under it we lie awake
and wait for love to pass right through us.
Where were you when I was waking up
to see the stars had stayed
into the morning? Many of your poems,
like your marriages, your fame,
your near-death accidents at sea,
from which you were revived,
are goads to the hesitant:
the Hellespont requires
only one friend to keep an eye out
from a dinghy while you weave
among the oil tankers. Have you seen
this power that turns the light into an object,
thrown so hard against the siding?
It reminds me of the summer of 1994, the day that I looked up
to find you leaning from the second story window
of your house in Ardmore, waiting
for the children to arrive.

∩

Walt Hunter is the author of Forms of a World: Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization; Some Flowers; and The American House Poem, 1945-2021. He teaches at Case Western Reserve University and is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.