1-Oct

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.

KARL J. SHAPIRO

The corner lamp, the safety eye of night,

Enveloped in the sun blinks and goes blind

And soon the early risers pick their way

Through kitchenware and pillows bolt upright.

The bureau on the sidewalk with bare back

And wrinkling veneer is most disgraced,

The sketch of Paris suffers in the wind;

Only the bike, its nose against the wall, does not show haste.

Two hours - the movers mop their necks and look,

Filing through dust and echoes back and forth.

The halls are hollow and all the floors are cleared

Bare to the last board, to the most secret nook;

But on the street a small chaos survives

That slowly now the leviathan ingests,

And schoolboys and stenographers stare at

The truck, the house, the husband in his hat who stands and rests.

He turns with miserable expectant face

And for the last time enters. On the wall

A picture-stain spreads from the nail-hole down.

Each object live and dead has left its trace.

He leaves his key; but as he quickly goes

This question comes behind: Did someone die?

Is someone rich or poor, better or worse?

What shall uproot a house and bring this care into his eye?

Karl J. Shapiro