Classic Poem

All night he lies awake tuning the sky,
tuning the night with its fat crackle of static,
with its melancholy love songs crooning
across the rainy air above Verdun
& the autobahn's blue suicidal dawn.

Wherever he lives there is the same unwomaned bed,
the ashtrays overflowing their reproaches,
his stained fingers on the tuning bar, fishing
for her voice in a deep mirrorless pond,
for the tinsel & elusive fish
(brighter than pennies in water & more wished upon)-
the copper-colored daughter of the pond god.

He casts for her, the tuning bar his rod,
but only long-dead lovers with their griefs
haunt him in Piaf's voice-
(as if a voice could somehow only die
when it was sung out, utterly).

He finally lies down and drowns the light
but the taste of her rises, brackish,
from the long dark water of her illness
& his grief is terrible as drowning
when he reaches for the radio again.

In the daytime, you hardly know him;
he walks in a borrowed calm.

You cannot sense
his desperation in the dawn
when the abracadabras of the birds
conjure another phantom day.

He favors cities which blaze all night,
hazy mushrooms of light under the blue
& blinking eyes of jets.
But when the lamps across the way go under,
& the floorboards settle,
& the pipes fret like old men gargling-
he is alone with his mouthful of ghosts,
his tongue bitter with her unmourned death,
& the terrible drowning.

I watch from my blue window
knowing he does not trust me,
though I know him as I know my ghosts,
though I know his drowning,
though, since that night when all harmony broke for me,
I have been trying to tune the sky.