No answer yet.
Pineapple slices from the can
so neatly cored,
yellow ciphers,
the terrible sweetness
of logical things,
the song of zero.

2.
Listen, I tell myself again,
a train goes by,
every night
about this hour,
never exactly the same minute,
freedom is not far,

3.
then why is the train going
and why did it come back
to go again and again
while only the horny and the hungry
are awake to hear it,
busy themselves with its meaning,
the far cities,
the forests of why?

4.
No answer yet
but nothing bores the questioner,
on and on, all night long,
sleep is just another form of it,
sleep is asking.

5.
Of course the night
tries to answer you,
always has, since you were a kid
in a railroad flat in Cypress Hills,
windowless bedroom
cross on the wall,
the dark did all it could.
It lurked and listened—
I think that was enough,
taught me to wait in the dark.

6.
So that the joyous morning
was always a kind of disappointment,
a fruit too sweet, too bright,
too new, and me a clumsy pharisee
hugging the scraps of the law,
the dry leaves left from dream.

7.
I.e., poetry. Who’s there?
Did the chest of drawers
shift in the dark?
Why does the floor creak?
Who is your mother?
sometimes I dared to ask the dawn,
Guessing at the answers
no one would give.

8.
Yes, there were windows,
but they were far away.
Even in the kitchen the table
was as far as could be from the light,
there was a war on, I drank my milk
and ate white bread, I understood
that much at least
about time and history,
eggs are oval, fruit is round,
any minute they’ll make me
go to school.

9.
                                 The feeling
does not change. it reeks
of morning still. No answer
comes apart from what we do,
every minute of our lives
is our attempt to answer
nobody’s question.
And nobody is the most
important one there is.

                                       5 August 2020