Some nights the quiet is all wrong. A tape, 
it plays white noise. These nights I crown 
myself in earphones and tune the short-wave in 
to new music of the sphere. Grandmother voice 
over Radio Albania wants to send over a hit 
about wheat, and love. Over Voice of America 
our voice is simply enunciated as if only 
foreigners have ears. Silence is a drawn chord. 
Between Tirane and Washington the static is 
a Geiger counter gone sane. I tune the BBC. 
The Repulsive Aliens play their catchy music-- 
codas from the white dwarf before collapse. 

Some evenings I haunt my office. Windows open 
out to Mary Lyon's grave and campus maples 
kept pretty by will. The hour we love between 
dog and wolf comes as stars show up, up there 
all along. In my dark office I drink coffee 
I cannot see, start to disappear. I make up 
faces for students blasting maples and her grave 
with Culture Club, The Police. Hair is green, 
cheeks flour white. Mary Lyon said, "Testify!" 
Dickinson took a carriage over the Holyoke Range 
to her own seminary of despair, a dress 
kept white in legend and a whiter sustenance. 

More white than crystals Parker melted in spoons, 
a hero addicted to pain. Students here know 
Stalin's white Siberia and each red cent doctors 
earn in their cures. They know Reggie Jackson, 
Patton. Bird is black, fiendish, jazz-like. 
Modifiers are right and wrong. Bird did burn 
his room in a colored L.A. hotel, yelled Fire, 
colored and naked. He did die in a baroness's 
Manhattan suite, laughing at Dorsey on T.V. 
Don't those stories kill? From L.A. to New York, 
from fire to laughter, he played hopeless rooms 
we can inhabit because he did not need hope. 

Bird lived, died, lives some more. The last time 
I visited Dickinson's grave, it was occupied. 
Inside the black iron fence young lovers lay 
clothed on her grave. He was on her and on her. 
I have not yet been back. Friends, make sense 
of those lovers. Were they mocking the virgin 
in legend, she who knew Babylon inside out? 
Tell me in some nights a Parker solo hums 
also out of you, or a Dickinson phrase 
moves your lips, cryptically. Our ears record 
sounds of dead stars. Tell me we call them back 
since they call us and we can hear, once again.
                        

You know how it is. 
Your accident lets you meet a long-lost friend, 
one whose love meant the world to you. 
What's coincidence 
but a slender awareness of merged parallels, 
a thing you suspect goes on all the time. 
Harmony, a kiss, a word you savor on your tongue, 
all striving toward the horizon, 
toward that depot. 

Well, imagine how I feel. 
Tolstoy died in a red cottage. 
I am renting a red cottage! 
Now I occasionally look toward the snowy woods 
for Sophia wringing her hands, 
that woman held at arm's length from her husband, dying. 
But all this is bullshit. 
I live in a red cottage 
between a ridge named after an eager animal, 
and a river called by some Breath of the North. 

Wouldn't you feel once in a while 
that what surrounds you 
is the makings for a folktale, 
a legend, a story to bring children up by, 
then doubt as they grow body hair, their voices changing? 
And so I feel haloed by this stammering white air, 
blizzard, the black shawled mourners in the woods 
nothing more than hungry wild fowl, 
and a hateful man dead who put blood and bread together.
                        

Waiting for the doctor (whose real name you had a hunch 
was Diogenes something Duck) 

you scanned the hieroglyphics in your palms, 
also reading my dog of a mind. Like your paired hands, 

my hemispheres can add up to a stunning 
zero. That's why for me 

each good joke is the knocking 
on the night door. A knothole closes around Chaplin, 

clicking his heels at The End, and just what do you think 
our nervous systems do? They bare our teeth 

in laughter against the wolf, huffing and puffing. 
Whisper inside our stick house that nothing 

tickles us, that in the atomic world 
of Democritus we are the indivisible ones and the void, 

our own meat and zero. Maybe Madame Hazel 
will make a house call. 

Maybe Hazel will tell off the universes 
in the script of our fortunate palms, 

in those atoms of our Crab Nebulae. 
Waiting for no doctor, Bodhidharma 

sat crosslegged until his hams were cured, today's lesson 
in the Classic Comic entitled Patience,

a Pre-Cautionary Tale. In tomorrow's match 
Fumon is pinned to his reed mat, 

gazing into his own crystal of death. Magnificent, 
he says, Magnificent. 

No one knows the final word. 
The ocean bed's aflame, 

out of the void leap wooden lambs. 
I don't know about you, I can't read the coffee grounds, 

so what can we do but decipher 
each other's scrawled mind. Like and unlike 

the neurologists pulling through their clean fingers 
the electroencephalograms, we ponder 

one another's graph and proclaim, 
We're healed! But healed of what original crime 

or capital disease? Fumon's void 
where the wooden 

lambs gambol? A plutonic atom of Democritus 
that might be nothing but a charge, or less? 

We're in a fix, so we might as well throw back our faces, 
show the sky our pearlies, 

and laugh, for something up there is wolf to our pig, 
final word to our tongue.

All I know today: snow at mind's end. 
The window thermometer with the praying hands 

reports fifty degrees out there, but snow conceals 
the old garden where I have lain like a dog, snapping at flies. 

Icicles our length are hanging 
from the eaves and dripping on the wooden porch, a drumming 

water clock for this fifth season, 
our minds' season. 

Got a minute? Then take this short walk with me 
to the untrammeled snow, a radiant field, 

where the scarecrow the children call Mr. Sund 
lies scrawled at mind's end. 

We know: he is sticks, rags, a man's old fedora. 
Let's say: He's a character inked in the snow.