The Presence
We know it and we feel it —
the fierce will of things
to set themselves apart,
isolated by their beauty,
bereft in isolation.
Museum of the Thing:
the living glove, earthen shoe,
a parakeet’s soft feather
that seems to be made of fur —
yellow tuft of sunlight
falling through the air
like nothing but itself,
as water is nothing but water,
grinding and turning as if
there were no passage.
Where does the work get done
that tenders so much beauty
and leaves us in such grief?
Sweetmeat and papaya,
your own face in chrome
with its hint of speed —
all these chaste subjects
love us in their way —
needle & thimble, dog & bone.
Whatever is absent in them,
let is speak its name:
fingerprint, blue smudge,
a typewriter with new keys —
one for infinity and one for sleeping.
Each night the objects come
to watch us in our beds,
above which hang
the dusty family portraints
retreating toward a quaintness
that can only be remembered —
mother in her kingdom
of white gloves and black bibles,
the mouse she trapped in her hand
as it leaped from a cabinet.
And father, poor father,
whose kindness went on forever,
into a clear confusion,
what were those sounds I heard
from the bed beyond the wall?
Which way should I drive now
to find the house we lived in,
vanished including its trees?
Gone the upstairs bedrooms
with their perfect shining floors,
not even a ghost to warm them.
All things come to witness
these absences like objects —
pears so near to ripeness
they melt in the hand
and roads that go only south,
with a sound of tires like rain.
Buy Paul Hoover's book @ SPD or Amazon
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