Paul Carroll

Our matchbox bedroom in the loft above your sculpture factory Turns magical at times Behind its dark blue Druid door.   Last night, Inside you, sweetheart, It felt as if I were coming from the soul itself. And that Indian Summer Sunday afternoon a year ago When the bed became a meadow Of purple thistles, the honey hidden at the bottom of the stem Farm kids know to find For the sweetest suck of all. And sometimes in the winter when the room turns into a Cornell box Filled with the everyday miracles— Soap bubble pipe and thimble, wooden rabbits And old tan magazine illustrations of the Zodiac. Or turns into an igloo in which the only place to go Is to burrow here below the yellow blanket and the pillows To the South Pacific Of ourselves.   And then those mornings on vacation Gentle as the feathers of a light spring rain, and at the same time hard, like the beak Of a hawk.   You are where I belong.

Fall a scrimage of yellow leaves today All over Lincoln Park Like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field Museum by the lake. I am carrying the night. I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars for the dinner of the Dalai Lama. It is the sky two nights ago; Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word for blue had been invented; The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric creatures moving in a dance; The stars are brilliant ants.  They may have died a billion years ago. I feel so happy.   It is as if I'm with my wife who's making sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street. I like everything about her. The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene and love everything about it for its reality— These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish, The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry, Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish, The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown Is almost ghostly, The way the family album on the table in the livingroom has a gallery of ghosts. There is only wonder. Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur We're allowed to touch As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum. I bike along the lake and watch The whiplash of the waves and think, I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been a star: Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree.  Or been one of the bees of oblivion In any ordinary orgasm. If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.

To Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, James Dickey Were you guys lucky, too, to caddy, the light on freshly-sprinkled fairway delicate and bright as eye of an Indiana owl or glitter of fish flickering in the Shedd Aquarium of the imagination, the tough but tender touch of leather socks covering the cobra- headed clubs, the crack of brassie on golf ball like whip of mule skinner filling all Death Valley; or to anoint oneself in grease and oil, sweating beneath the belly of a car or truck in the pit in Shimskis' Garage in Homewood; or to find felicity at Marshall Field's as a stockboy numb and dazed by rawboned, adolescent lust, stumbling about beneath a pyramid of boxes past models cooly on parade among the customers all day, filling immaculate brassieres with flesh like fortune cookies and in silken Oriental half-slips as I sweat like Sydney Greenstreet examining the statue of the Maltese Falcon in his hotel suite; and to fight, like a goddamn fool, in Navy alleys behind black-and-tan saloon in Minneapolis, my iron ring, its longhorns, slashing, can open up a cheek; and to sweat out a basketball game of one-on-one, the comments cryptic and intense as a fragment by Archilochos; and to pitch papers onto porches on a bike route as if your arm were Bobby Feller's blazing corncobs at a knot-hole in Des Moines; to cut the uncut hair of graves beneath an R. Crumb "Keep on Truckin'" sun large as a lemon drop, and to hawk cufflinks made by Swank as well as cashmere sweaters from the Shetland Isles, to scrub as if they had the London Plague of Robert Greene dying in a bed of straw in Cheapside Gran Canyons filled with dirty dishes in the Phi Gam kitchen in Bloomington, to tool around behind wheel of Checker taxi as if it were a chariot in a race in Babylon, to tote the 85¢ YWCA Blueplate Special to the widows of the ghosts of pioneers, to mix drink behind the bar as if concocting cocktails for Long John Silver and Blind Pew or Bathhouse John and wee, shrewd Hinky Dink, to create a 100 half-moons in a night by manipulating the control box in this elevator roomy as a shoebox purchased by Paul Powell here in a hotel with its 50 bags full of the fleas of Illinois— this great, unique chance to hear the language where it lives.

My mouth is snow slowly caking that stiff pigeon. My mouth, the intricately moist machinery of a plant. I have forgotten if I ever had a mouth. I have two mouths. One like warm rain; or wind manipulating the worn limbs of an elm. My mouth knows nothing of music. Or of the oils of love. Its shape is the shadow of innumerable pigeons; its words, at times, their bones. My eyes too know of shadows. And of the delicate hairs of my grandmother's heart. And of the plums of puberty. And the shadow of the eggs inside the woman who moves immemorially through clover past the wheat field and alfalfa and the 1890 Roman Catholic cemetary near the farm in Palos Park. My eyes know of the blue shadow of the one desire. The mind does not; it is an animal, ignorant, ambiguous, talking, as it must, with many voices. I walk toward you as if wading through the waves in somebody else's dream. I walk toward you as if wading through the waves in somebody else's dream. I shall survive this death, even though the heart is a shadow of a bone. Or thick glass. My mouth quick with many bees.

As a kid I tried to coax its coming By sleeping beneath light sheets Weeks before The funeral of the summer locusts in the yard; Then when Granny peeled down the crucifix of flypaper that dangled from the ceiling of the kitchen Magic wasn't needed any longer To fill the air with pigskins.   The air itself Acrid, lambent, bright As the robes of the Chinese gods inside their house of glass In the Field Museum by the lake. Even practice could be fun— The way, say, even sepia photographs of old-time All Americans could be pirates' gold Like my favorite Bill Corbus, Stanford's "Baby- Face Assassin" crouching at right guard, the last to play without a helmet on— And the fun of testing muscles out Like new shoes; the odor of the locker room pungent As the inside of a pumpkin; And the sting of that wet towel twirled against bare butt by a genial, roaring Ziggy, Mt. Carmel's All State tackle from Immaculate Conception Parish near the mills; And then the victory, especially the close shaves, could feel Like finally getting beneath a girl's brassiere She'll let you keep Unhooked for hours while you neck Until the windshield of your Granddad's Ford V-8 Becomes filled by a fog Not even Fu Manchu could penetrate.   Jack, Next football weather my son Luke will be in high school, Bigger than I was and well-coordinated—but Couldn't care a plenary indulgence If he ever lugs a pigskin down the turf Or hits a long shot on the court.   At times, I wish he would. So he might taste the happiness you knew Snagging Chris Zoukis' low pass to torpedo nine long yards to touchdown And sink archrival Lawrence High 45 years ago come this Thanksgiving Day.   Still, He has his own intensities As wild as sports and writing were for us: Luke's the seventh Rolling Stone, His electric guitar elegant and shiny black As a quiet street at night Glazed by rain and pumpkin frost.