Anne Winters

ONE

The First Invention, ear laid to earth, is listening
to the fingerlength underground beings moving in segments
through tiny tunnels; one inch shrugs out another,
as bamboo climbs in segments, joint by green joint ...

Or an inexpressive mask that must travel
the world, uphill and down, always keeping its own
counsel, impelling  forwardfrom inward—

Through the meridian’s fine blue hairlines, the admirals are converging
in their fish-hulled ships, with their frogmen and sirens, and tanks with knotted chain flails
that beat the ground before them as they crawl.

Behind them the cities dim out, on the foredeck the admirals sigh
to lean from the curving bows, to trail
their fingertips in the water . . .

All alone on the landmass, the Ship’s Artist simply draws what he sees:
red men with arms like flesh clubs, blue-daubed men with parasol feet

After three months, Virginia is still a frontier.
Late at night, I close the door
on my husband practicing Mozart, the dishpan fills
and the network affiliates sign off one by one.
Now the country stations, tuning up like crickets
on radios in scattered valley kitchens:
Har yall this evenin folks!
(Wanting to say ‘I’m real fine’ I whisper ‘Wow.’)

Sparrows tapping your shutters louvres? snow owls
guano your eaves? Spring rainstorms sway
in your gutters; down-cellar a green pipe pearls

and roots find its fissures. Matter—outside us, out in le Vrai,
matter—un-does; fatiscit; a sort of eternal
breakdown and sloughage. Small wonder that Saturday

finds you botanizing some mast-high aisle
in the Depot. Fazed by stock-names and numbers, distinctions

All middle age invisible to us, all age
passed close enough behind to seize our napehairs
and whisper in a voice all thatch and smoke
some village-elder warning, some rasped-out
Remember me . . . Mute and grey in her city
uniform (stitch-lettered JUVENILE), the matron
just pointed us to our lockers, and went out.
‘What an old bag!’ ‘Got a butt on you, honey?’ ‘Listen,

All seas are seas in the moon to these
lonely and full of light.
High above laundries and rooftops
the pinstriped silhouettes speak nightmare
as do the faces full of fire and orange peel.
Every citizen knows what’s the trouble: America’s longest
river is—New York; that’s what they say, and I say so.

Wonderful thing, electricity,

Now the god of rainy August hangs his mask
among the city’s spires and balustrades
and stone clocktowers half-effaced in clouds.
On Park the first reflecting pool dims
with a thousand smelted-silver circle-rims,
while west on Fifth a modiste scatters leaves
in fall vitrines, and felt-browed mannequins
resign the world with gestures of disdain.

1

It opens as a long lamplit evening
with Rembrandt, stretched out with the glossy book
of his Works on Paper. Brown-petal etchings and drawings:
nut-brown, browner, irreclaimable rills

of iron-gall ink sucked and feathered into
the paper's wan cusps and culverts. The ink...it's as if
there's no pulling away from the wet, flowing line
to the tiny hedge-village perched on the edge of the cliff

and the paper. Here the ink's overwatered
and we barely, down in the forested loam,
disengage the gentle saint, his rounded hat molding

PART ONE

I

Slip-pilings on the Brooklyn littoral
—the poles still tarry, flimsy; the ferry terminus
with its walledup doors wan doorshapes
on eroded sills. Downstream, the strutwork
of the Williamsburg cable tower
threw its cool shadow half a mile inland

Four-fifty. The palings of Trinity Church
Burying Ground, a few inches above the earth,
are sunk in green light. The low stones
like pale books knocked sideways. The bus so close to the curb
that brush-drops of ebony paint stand out wetly, the sunlight
seethes with vibrations, the sidewalks
on Whitehall shudder with subterranean tremors. Overhead, faint flickers

crackle down the window-paths: limpid telegraphy of the

Fleeing his clubs, dull honors, wives, the ageing Hardy
hunches down in his potting-shed with his thumbtip-fumbled, fine-
printed seed catalogue’s inflorescences—
peripherally glimpsing the oxygenless blue line

of the fleur-de-lys scaling his inner wrist;
his chalky knuckles, his forearm’s crisp, lisse,
pleated wrinkles; softly brown-spotted
as a fox terrier’s belly. Yet this pleases, only this—

age-speckled surfaces, sun-galls rose-speckled; puckering
petals rugosely leaf-veined: the saturate, flooded
stemlines’ mauves and verdures on the backlit

catalogue’s tissuelike (nearly self-composting)