Excerpt from the book Scattered Chapters: New and Selected Poems

Falling


Snow buries cars and yews and garbage cans
Beside the dirty, beige garage and sits so
Delicately on the unwavering, maple limbs.
A girl of ten who cannot sleep for
The excitement and enchantment of it
Watches the great specks falling through the globe
Of yellow light that is the streetlight nearest
To her house, the house in which she lies in bed
Protected from the dreamy descent of the endless sky,
Protected from the wet and cold. Safe.

She feels her heart beating and it seems loud,
Louder than it should be but then she thinks how
It’s something she never truly listens to, she’s never
That still or the world around her isn’t that still.
It’s scary, this heart inside her chest that lives
Its own life, that one day will stop and she,
As they say in the tales she reads, will be no more.

Come morning, it may still be snowing.
A friendly, important man on the radio
Will announce there is no school today.
She will be free to sculpt the drifts
And prairies into igloos, tunnels and walls,
To place snow on her tongue and taste
The cool airiness, to feel the sting
Of wind-sifted flakes on her face.
Now, though, she goes to the window
And stares and stares. The snow feels like the heart
Of the whole world, falling, falling and perfect.


Calendar (1956)

Rabinowitz tries to crawl
Inside the numbers.
He multiplies, for instance,
The days of the year times
A fortunate life span
And arrives at an impressive
Figure—Twenty-five thousand
And five hundred.
Still, it is a poor, unprepossessing
Number beside the tree
From which millions of leaves fell.

Rabinowitz sits with a calendar
Which he fills in
With names such as Shulamith
Or Schmuel or Hersh or Reva.
Each day of the calendar
Gets a name and he says
The name when he looks
At the calendar in the morning,
A sound he makes
For the sake of sound,
A wafer of prayer,
A blue speck of feeling.

During the last week of December
He fills in every day
Of the next year with names.
He dreams of thin black hair,
Frizzy brown hair, half-smiles,
Grimaces, sobs, small fingers,
Fat fingers, thumbs,
Old people and children,
Loud voices, murmurs.

This is the calendar
That awaits a new religion,
Braver than the previous ones.
Today is Tsaureh-The-Baker’s-Wife Day.
The Jews have their years.
The Gentiles have theirs.
Eternity cares nothing.

Existence plods on like
A caravan to nowhere
But Rabinowitz has spoken for each day.
He dreams of reddish, curly hair,
Dimples, long necks,
Deep, serious, brown eyes
That bury oblivion.