A Robbery

For R. R. and R. M.

By day I had dispraised their life,

Accused foremost their little cheated wives

Whose hands like trailers ludicrously hitched

To husbands, over the graph of business bump;

As often, with my friend, I laughed at them,

All but their young, whose strenuous anarchy

Asked why and promised war.

KARL J. SHAPIRO

So of their legal dark of nights

And bed revenge and competent small births

That wall us out of marriage I despaired.

Men brought home hate like evening papers, maids

Longed for their slums, the inarticulate clock

Spoke once, and faces double-locked and still

Turned to the wall to sleep.

I show that fear unearthed their boy.

Into the taut membrane of night like knives

A woman screams, rending with rape our rest;

Bodies are ripped from beds, the snapped dream hangs,

And quick to plunge the torn portieres of sleep

We race soft-running Horror the length of halls.

Ghouls are at every door.

Down in the hostile dark as one

The heavy faces point, close in, take aim,

And hands describe centripetal broad wheels

Through which unseen a wily robber moves.

Voices enlarge, cops clamber from the sky,

Our sudden symmetry dissolves-we laugh.

Nothing is caught or lost.

Yet our emergency is lost,

Which would have naked in the domestic night

Brought us like actual murder to relief.

Boys have mixed blood and kissed to seal an oath;

Boys have an oath; oh, we were close to boys,

The salesman, the real-estator, the clerk and I,

Their enemy, their poet.

Robber, paid agent of our hate,

I kiss my hand to you across the roofs

And jungle of back alleys where you hide.

You with your guns are like a boy I loved

Who was born dead and never had a name,

Who was my very son. Night took him off.

Hard to unlearn is love.

OCTOBER I

That season when the leaf deserts the bole

And half-dead see-saws through the October air

Falling face-downward on the walks to print

The decalcomania of its little soul-

Hardly has the milkman's sleepy horse

On wooden shoes echoed across the blocks

When with its back jaws open like a dredge

The van comes lumbering up the curb to someone's door and

knocks.

And four black genii muscular and shy

Holding their shy caps enter the first room

Where someone hurriedly surtenders up

The thickset chair, the mirror half awry,

Then to their burdens stoop without a sound.

One with his bare hands rends apart the bed,

One stuffs the china-barrel with stale print,

Two bear the sofa toward the door with dark funereal tread.