VERSE
Westerfield, Nancy G.
THE MAN WHO SAW UFO'S Emeritus, where once he tumbled Chains of his equations and the real numbers, Now he is interviewed, porchborne, Outside the disheveled household of his widowerhood, And...
...THE MAN WHO SAW UFO'S Emeritus, where once he tumbled Chains of his equations and the real numbers, Now he is interviewed, porchborne, Outside the disheveled household of his widowerhood, And tells, with hands like toads, warted, Fidgeting, how even the cat hackled At one of them three houses wide, Unbattening its azure portholes over the end Of the street...
...Together, They have stumbled upon a darkness That humps itself beneath the porch floor And the pavement in his street of happy endings, Golden weddings, porch swings lamplit Under the trumpet vines...
...The cat beside him, Staring fixedly into the floorboards, Confirms or denies nothing...
...His eyes Are cowled, his forehead is tiers Of questions, his ears hollowed With listening: mousers, both of them...
...then with dignity retrieves The cat, thanks the interviewer, retreats Within dark doubledoors of tallwood Behind dense blinds, an unidentity Digiting down to two, to one, Digiting toward the infinitude of none...
...In cosmic sums, cosmic geometries, he expounds, With reference to the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, What signs he sees, pointing to floor And heaven, what unidentifieds, What luminosities...
Vol. 105 • March 1978 • No. 5
