Verse
Swanson, Robert & Finch, Roger & Jacobsen, Josephine
Robert Swanson Our l a v e s . The Other EAves Our lives, composed of waking, commuting. working and the rest, which would sound banal. if expressed in words, drone forward like trains on a...
...Persian...
...he knows that they were then: and will come again as soon as the hard adult footsteps recede and lies stiff, his eyes doll's-eye wide, in the bin of his bed, waiting for night's coal to cascade and smother him...
...The step is the child's first plunging waver, face to face with distance...
...It might have been a mouse with a marble at first until he heard it fling across the joists right there under the rug...
...Turkish...
...the man's steps from the cell to the distortion of a welcoming shape, opening metal arms...
...She knows one word the caterpillar taught her, lfitfen, and writes it down: l~tfen 'please?' loud enough for them to understand...
...by the millions, we humans would jump up from the grass, without thinking, with a burst of color or darkness...
...The deductive beams from flashlights slice the dark beneath the bed into rich sweet cake...
...Roger Finch AII=o Applles for a Job She comes to the place marked Special Skills and wonders what should she put: Shuts up like telescopes...
...Steps our proportion, we measure as we must: groom to bride: the refugee in the hard road's soft dust...
...They kiss the child a second time good-night and insist that the room was exorcised...
...14 December 1984:687...
...Was it Arabic...
...Distance is below...
...cros~d the skull's place...
...The other lives, composed of hairs, wings or fibers, flare up in the grass and in the weeds like tiny lights or like immense forests of darkness...
...Steps took Moses to the final glance...
...Their eyes without smiles are hovering in the air as they read what she has given them and will not be erased...
...She will show them just how very small she can become and begins to draw on one white glove...
...Climbs through pier glasses onto the silver side...
...There must be a caucus race to drown in tears, tables at lunch with cakes beneath them crying "Eat me...
...There must be tiny doors behind desks giving on secret gardens that want walking through...
...This is not real distance...
...Later came the sound of feet, not on wood, but on gravel, pacing up and down behind the wall, as something made the rocking chair rock slowly but strongly with two eyes above it, a voice that sighs in and out but will not speak...
...Nevertheless...
...what an explosion, if...
...This fast high shadow means nothing...
...One that was living behind a door slumps down in the form of a bathrobe, handless, helpless...
...We think they exist for us because we crush them under our shoe-soles or hunt them with rifles or sever them with scythes, but really, it is they who live forever, while we drone away our minutes like the whirrings of mill-wheels...
...Distance is where the steps go...
...if expressed in words, drone forward like trains on a single track...
...Hasn't he heard the witch ball they play with roll along the floor -- no...
...the steps scissor it out...
...And then there is Languages...
...Fails down rabbit holes without injury to .self...
...Josephine Jacobsen ~ l l e Steps Over sunny earth, meadow and lorest, goes the great mock bird-shadow, cltx:king its miles by instants...
...through the floor...
...Roger Finch The Aff!~!ty of Ghosts for r Parents can always prove they do not exist...
Vol. 111 • December 1984 • No. 22
