Excerpt from the book Present Vanishing

Goat
after Peter Matthiessen


This goat by the crooked door,
gazing through sheets of rain into the mud,
a cosmic vision? Or might it simply be
my grandfather’s goat, the one I remember
from the barn in Saratoga on Congress Street,
the black and white goat that lived among the chickens
back in the darkness. “I long to let go,
drift free of things,
to accumulate less, depend on less,
to move more simply,” the traveler in the Himalayas
said to the cosmic goat, yet I recall
that goat my grandfather named without imagination,
“Billy Goat,”
to which he used to croon,
“Billy? Billy? Billy?” and the goat
in all its stink and foolishness and hunger
would come to my grandfather’s hand,
here to be here, here to look no further.

All Those Years When Nothing Happened

All those years when nothing happened
the blind beggar was approaching you.
He was singing.
He was wiping his face with an orange bandanna.
And when he came to a lake a small boy would emerge from the reeds
to lead him around it.
And when he came to a city, feral cats
adopted him, and they led him safely from border to border.
And when he came to a highway
he raised both hands above his head and the traffic snarled
to let him cross. All those years
you were eating the remains of crow
as you sat on the back porch of a small gray house,
facing out over a clothesline and a meadow. You were almost nothing.
You did not have denim-blue eyes or sympathetic ears
or Bob Dylan’s buggy-whip voice,
nor were you wearing anything that would remind anyone of computers,
but the blind beggar kept approaching you anyway
through sunflower fields and fields of Joe Pye Weed,
around rural junkyards, the wrecks piled upon each other
like segments of broken spine,
singing (he was always singing)
“Take the A Train,” “Sentimental Journey,” “Mama Loves Mambo,”
“Where Have all the Flowers Gone”
while you were at your ordinary job,
doing your ordinary job in your ordinary way,
counting the money, what money there was, if that’s what you did,
as the small town—or was it a city—tumbled around you.
You felt, sometimes, as if you had somehow stepped into the wrong life,
a life of Quick-Marts, Doc-in-the-Boxes,
auto shopping lots on main highways leading out of town,
junk mail, junk cereal, junk TV, junk T-shirt slogans,
no loitering, no lingering, no lasting, no ever-lasting,
your life mainly snatches of TV skits,
and what you grabbed from the kitchen on the way from the bathroom,
what you would be trying to forget if you could remember,
while the blind beggar was approaching you. In his back pocket
he carried a first edition of Ginsberg’s Howl
he would ask others to read to him when he stopped for the night.
He was tall, he was short, he was fat, he was thin
depending upon the seasons. He liked the feel of water glasses,
the sound of truck cement mixers slowly revolving,
contrasts of dirt roads and paved roads and pebble roads
beneath his feet. He liked the smell
of candle smoke and dusk, lilacs, deep green leaves,
water and willows and the way the sky smelled
as he emerged into it from a long climb up through a tenement
onto the roof, into warm circles of sunlight.
He liked to run both hands across the hoods of cooling cars,
and the shoulders of anyone, feeling bones and muscles,
but even doing these things he thought of you always,
knowing you were waiting for him although you did not quite know you were waiting,
that sometimes you could almost see him down the road, the speck of him,
or hear his songs at night, from so long a ways off
they seemed to be the songs of mother and child, moles and spiders,
tiny computer chips—the blind beggar
who was bringing you the present you had always wanted,
a bowl of blueberries, maybe,
to sit out in the sun and eat from a bowl of blueberries
while the blind beggar sang, perhaps
“Alice’s Restaurant,” every verse,
and you saw him at last: his onyx ring,
the shades of gray in his pepper and salt beard,
his American smile, or Italian, or African, or Chinese, or Colombian,
the admiration of your wife or husband or your closest friend,
his strangeness you had been missing for so long
     that your whole body never quite felt rhymed,
his vividness, his god-damned / god-blessed vividness,
how he listened intently to every true thing you said,
like “carrots”
or “Sweet Virginia hills,”
as you learned to say true things again,
his hands cupping his chin, leaning his whole self towards you,
requesting you simply,
“Tell me of you and your world.”