The Book Sense 76
-- The Children's 76
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• Five Deaths
• For David
• Old Poems

Five Deaths

1.

There will be a few books with different titles
on the shelves,

houses where walls are painted
another color,

shelves put up in odd places, rooms
with the bad breath of old smoke;

there will be perhaps
a certain small sadness in the trees.

2.

When at last he saw you
yesterday, stepping out from the crowd

on the street, there were other recognitions
in his eyes,

that you saw perhaps
as he turned to walk away.

3.

Vallejo on his Paris deathbed
at dawn
crying out

To Spain!
I'm going to Spain!

To his mother's time,
where he would never age.

4.

Into a corner of his eye
when for a moment he let his guard down
the world flew, and lodged.

It grew there.  You could see
the level rising, always rising.

So much world
in this small globe —
too much, finally.

5.

His bicycle encrusted
with the white wax of old candles

and new ones flickering against
his robes and the night,

always riding back to the same thing,
coming to different conclusions.

###

For David

Getting on towards nine in the morning,
a Thursday. The new year
bobs outside my window; I've caught the fish
of a new day. Karyn's off to work.
I give over my coffee and shopworn sadness
to this room where both are forever most
at home, where clown's-feet slippers
stand out beneath my desk
waiting for the next corny bit of business
and sunlight won't look me straight in the face.

Your letters continue to arrive, with stamps
upon which one could picnic, from strange countries.
sit balancing coffee and sadness
as chattery morning gathers bright skirts around me.
In dark hoods of chest, you write, our hearts wait,
blood-red, unappeased, and violent sunsets
rock weeping in the arms of the sea.

Since we've gone to our separate corners,
old friend, the world has filled up with corners
of every sort, smaller all the while. Days led us
hand over hand along the line
not to mystery or new adventures, only to one dusk after another
hammily swirling it cape, bad bit players all.
Villages of roofs and days and children reared themselves
slowly about you. And I – I was abroad in the world,
footless and disloyal as the wind.

The same wind that strikes now, perhaps: a sharp report
as midway up the tree beyond my window
a limb cracks away, subsiding into another
on its way to ground. The second shears away as well
and they hang there, a logjam at the mouth of gravity's river.
Intently I listen, but this mouth has no more to tell me.
Morning catches its breath and goes on.

For a moment, they say, the eyes fill with recognition.
Then the tongue begins to push its way out of the mouth
like a cork gone bad. Vessels of that larger vessel,
the body, empty themselves. Overrun by barbarians
whose throat-clearing language no one understands,
the city is in a sad state. Tomorrow, coming home
from work, you will no longer recognize it.
A wife and children who are not yours
will greet you at the door. It will all begin again.

This poem was written in December 1999 in tribute to Jim Sallis' close friend David Lunde.

###

Old Poems

We pass on the street
and do not recognize one another.
We sit side by side at a bar
talking for hours, saying nothing.
You want a refill, hon? asks
the waitress in her pocket-sprung apron.
Beautiful day, this old poem of mine
tells me as we walk by the river.
Out on a wide belt of water
boats eclipse one another.
I have no idea what he's talking about.

###

Copyright © James Sallis. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.

Sorrow's Kitchen

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