Sections of it speak directly to me.
Here is a stone with holes in it.
like a stone it has furrows, like my fathers brow. Once
he could get up when he wanted and go
into an untouched future: when I knew him
he was sprinting to get to death
before his cares could catch up
and kill him. The small rainbow
that forms around me now curves in.
like the birth forceps that hoisted me out
— witness the depressions in the temple bones —
until its two ends almost touch
my feet. could it be that I
am the pot of gold? Both pots, one inside the other,
like the fire leaping inside the steel drum the night workers hold out
their hands to, in the icy air before morning,
or the pitch black of speech about to be born through scarlet lips,
or the child getting off her bicycle inside the old woman the priest has
told to get ready to die,
or the father of Edinburgh rising early inside the son of Pawtucket—
to whom on Sundays after church he read the funnies, Scripture
in the father tongue?
Now the rainbow throws its double into the air above it—
as on those sundays, when the first blessing was we were blessed,
and the second, we knew we were blessed.
In the fire pit, where fire patches
of black skin slide over fiery flesh,
a scrap of paper the wind, agent
of Providence, tosses in
vanishes without a flame or crackle—
and my rocks, densest concentration of future anywhere in the body,
suddenly hurt, with the claustrophobia of a million swimmers
terrified they will never get out.
In the light before dawn the blue glimmering fades
above four pillows dented all night by four dreaming heads.
The father, already in the cellar,
yanks the great iron lever, the iron teeth gnash, ashes dotted with fire
crash into the ash pit: and shovels in
a new utopia of coal, in a black field,
which lies quiet, then jets up all over
in flickerings like little senseless bluets.
The pipes and radiators of the house
knock and bang in free un-unnison.
In the bathroom he strops the razor,
hoots out last nights portion of disgust,
and shaves, a fleshy, rhythmic rasping, like a katydid's.
Galway Kinnel from When One Has Lived a Long Time
Alfred A. Knopf New York 1990
When I was growing up our Dad shoveled coal into our furnace
every morning. The coal filled a corner room in the basement. Regularly
the coal was delivered through an opening by the basement stairs and 'slid'
into the dark foreboding room where there was nothing but coal. The coal was
delivered not far from the slotted opening by the kitchen door through which
the 'iceman' made his delivery into our icebox. From his truck he would hoist
the ice blocks using heavy tongs, put it on the leather pad on his shoulder,
and carry it to the house. Today I can actually 'see' that the ice is
covered with sawdust.
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