Read A Wave for Free Online

much in the normal way dreams have of proceeding. I still think the old plain way is better: the ideas, speeches, arguments—whatever you want to call ’em—on one hand, and strongly written scenes and fully fleshed-out characters in flannel suits and leg-o’-mutton sleeves on the other. For the new moon is most beautiful viewed through burnt twigs and the last few decrepit leaves still clinging to them.”
    Suddenly he glanced upward toward the scree and noticed a girl in a Victorian shirtwaist and a straw boater hat moving timidly down the path through the now wildly swirling mists. She was giggling silently with embarrassment and wonder, meanwhile clasping an old-fashioned kodak, which she had pointed at Mercury.
    “It is Sabrina,” he said. “The wheel has at last come full circle, and it is the simplicity of an encounter that was meant all along. It happened ever so many years ago, when we were children, and could have happened so many times since! But it isn’t our fault that it has chosen this moment and this moment only, to repeat itself! For even if it does menace us directly, it’s exciting all the same?”
    And the avalanche fell and fell, and continues to fall even today.

The Path to the White Moon
    There were little farmhouses there they
    Looked like farmhouses yes without very much land
    And trees, too many trees and a mistake
    Built into each thing rather charmingly
    But once you have seen a thing you have to move on
    You have to lie in the grass
    And play with your hair, scratch yourself
    And then the space of this behavior, the air,
    Has suddenly doubled
    And you have grown to fill the extra place
    Looking back at the small, fallen shelter that was
    If a stream winds through all this
    Alongside an abandoned knitting mill it will not
    Say where it has been
    The time unfolds like music trapped on the page
    Unable to tell the story again
    Raging
    Where the winters grew white we went outside
    To look at things again, putting on more clothes
    This too an attempt to define
    How we were being in all the surroundings
    Big ones sleepy ones
    Underwear and hats speak to us
    As though we were cats
    Dependent and independent
    There were shouted instructions
    Grayed in the morning
    Keep track of us
    It gets to be so exciting but so big too
    And we have ways to define but not the terms
    Yet
    We know what is coming, that we are moving
    Dangerously and gracefully
    Toward the resolution of time
    Blurred but alive with many separate meanings
    Inside this conversation

Ditto, Kiddo
    How brave you are! Sometimes. And the injunction
    Still stands, a plain white wall. More unfinished business.
    But isn’t that just the nature of business, someone else said, breezily.
    You can’t just pick up in the middle of it, and then leave off.
    What if you do listen to it over and over, until
    It becomes part of your soul, foreign matter that belongs there?
    I ask you so many times to think about this rupture you are
    Proceeding with, this revolution. And still time
    Is draped around your shoulders. The weather report
    Didn’t mention rain, and you are ass-deep in it, so?
    Find other predictions. These are good for throwing away,
    Yesterday’s newspapers, and those of the weeks before that spreading
    Backward, away, almost in perfect order. It’s all there
    To interrupt your speaking. There is no other use to the past
    Until those times when, driving abruptly off a road
    Into a field you sit still and conjure the hours.
    It was for this we made the small talk, the lies,
    And whispered them over to give each the smell of truth,
    But now, like biting devalued currency, they become possessions
    As the stars come out. And the ridiculous machine
    Still trickles mottoes: “Plastered again …” “from our house
    To your house …” We wore these for a while, and they became us.
    Each day seems full of itself, and yet it is only
    A few colored beans and some straw lying on a dirt floor
    In a mote-filled shaft of light. There was