The Pleasant Grove Home for Men
(Tom Witherspoon, Nurse’s Aide, b. 1975)
Fallen in the hole of summer,
dumb as a pear, I am
sick of the smell of disinfectant, green hallways.
Papery old men
propped in gleaming chariots
cough like exhausted wells,
the resident cat steals
clean socks.
A broken king, the mailman
wears the death of air:
what news? what news?
Another coup somewhere, another speech
praising freedom
as small brown birds sing
small brown songs
and bees tap the windows, sluggish gold bullets.
Opera
(Chester Kerwin, Jr., Resident, b. 1930)
Lucia’s gone mad and still the subways shudder,
lights change and traffic moves, more or less.
“Roses” she calls the splattered blood on her wedding dress.
Laughing, she shreds her veil, rocks it like a baby
even as the city falls asleep to flickering reruns
or reaches for a hand beneath covers
or tips the last drops from a wine glass
and pushes back from snowy linen.
Lucia’s gone mad, and still as stone we stare
even as night duty takes its long, dreamy drags,
and slow bears of cleaning women lumber down halls,
and barges like disoriented whales drift the river
deep in its own black mystery. Which remains
long after, unbearably alive, Lucia, radiant,
rises for her bow. Long after we empty,
alluvial, down the sweeping staircase,
murmuring amongst ourselves, pacific as doves.
Geranium
(Arthus Sasso ,Resident, b. 1915)
Thank you for the dead geranium, red
memory of a short-stemmed city.
For nickel shows, tea rooms, the rotten-egg
mill-smell that crept between the fretted sheets.
For elms that divided our limbs with dusk,
and twisted things in ash trays, girls lit with gin,
long trains moaning, the night in a plum.
Thanks, too, for captured Kaiser helmets stowed in attics,
the Alligator Man and Monkey Woman at the circus,
and rented clarinets, and dented trombones,
ladies in a savage dance, hair bound high.
Thanks, perhaps, for noon, the dark bird’s love call,
being born on ice, out of wolf, wolf.
For the stately progress of capped men
towards a gray chowder, something shaken by the gills.
And all that we devoured, and all that didn’t drown.
Hibernaculum
(Slack Davis, Resident, b. 1921)
After harvest, after the vines are burned
we leave the land to wolves and curl to sleep by the stove.
Oak cut in the hunter’s moon weeps hard tears
and each stone, tortured by ice, confesses.
Of long walks in long afternoons people dream
of talking to the dead, shirts buttoned to their chins:
how accustomed to the necessity
of honeyless days and islands
we throw the windows open to asperges
of sacred rain, the part where we laugh
at buzzing emeralds of incessant flies.
Heaven, They Say
(Martin Ziegler, Resident, b. 1919)
is like walking on clouds,
the blind-bright summer kind of clot
we pop out of when we level off.
Cotton-candy tundra.
Flint-struck radiance
like being
inside the dome of an egg.
And there’s room here for everyone
who ever was or will be—
philosophers, bassoonists, snake charmers, scribes,
Visigoths, ventriloquists, vacuum-cleaner salesmen.
Yet to see the face of God
would drive one mad.
They say the first aviators
dazzled at the sight,
tried to walk atop the clouds.
Imagine wind
ripping at your goggles,
roar and vibration in your bones.
The first step believing
your body will be borne up,
your feet touch down.