Original Fire: Selected and New Poems

Clouds

The furnace is stoked. I’m loaded

on gin. One bottle in the clinkers

hidden since spring

when Otto took the vow

and ceremoniously poured

the rotgut, the red-eye, the bootlegger’s brew

down the scoured steel sink,

overcoming the reek

of oxblood.

That was one promise he kept.

He died two weeks after, not a drop crossed his lips

in the meantime. I know

now he kept some insurance,

one bottle at least

against his own darkness.

I’m here, anyway, to give it some use.

From the doorway the clouds pass me through.

The town stretches to fields. The six avenues

crossed by seventeen streets,

the tick, tack, and toe

of boxes and yards

settle into the dark.

Dogs worry their chains.

Men call to their mothers

and finish. The women sag into the springs.

What kind of thoughts, Mary Kröger, are these?

With a headful of spirits,

how else can I think?

Under so many clouds,

such hooded and broken

old things. They go on

simply folding, unfolding, like sheets

hung to dry and forgotten.

And no matter how careful I watch them,

they take a new shape,

escaping my concentrations,

they slip and disperse

and extinguish themselves.

They melt before I half unfathom their forms.

Just as fast, a few bones

disconnecting beneath us.

It is too late, I fear, to call these things back.

Not in this language.

Not in this life.

I know it. The tongue is unhinged by the sauce.

But these clouds, creeping toward us

each night while the milk

gets scorched in the pan,

great soaked loaves of bread

are squandering themselves in the west.

Look at them: Proud, unpausing.

Open and growing, we cannot destroy them

or stop them from moving

down each avenue,

the dogs turn on their chains,

children feel through the windows.

What else should we feel our way through—

We lay our streets over

the deepest cries of the earth

and wonder why everything comes down to this:

The days pile and pile.

The bones are too few

and too foreign to know.

Mary, you do not belong here at all.

Sometimes I take back in tears this whole town.

Let everything be how it could have been, once:

a land that was empty and perfect as clouds.

But this is the way people are.

All that appears to us empty,

We fill.

What is endless and simple,

We carve, and initial,

and narrow

roads plow through the last of the hills

where our gravestones rear small

black vigilant domes.

Our friends, our family, the dead of our wars

deep in this strange earth

we want to call ours.