Paul Hoover

The Windows (Homosyntactic Series)

The Air in Paris (I)

It is walking on my green fields

and its snow is at my window.

It makes the sun set in my thick world;

it runs the sideshows in my thin dream.

In my mind, it runs on empty

Like a sailboat in the wind.

It revives the hours that are always expiring;

it has no time for me. 

Its fistfights in black hallways

Drain moonlight from my swamplands,

Make me sigh, fly, and break,

Sleep, having slept on the way.

The Pardon (II)

Like a net of golden fish captured in a pool,

sunlight yellows the grass in a yard of the Summer Palace;

I lie down upon it,

a kind of emotional tourist.

And everywhere there is a table

of elderly, grumpy, eternal children of chess players;

they shall enter the cafeteria.

In light there remains some darkness.

The sun is immortal and psychotic;

it wants someone to stare at it,

and I am certain that I

will make that blinding error.

in a bedroom or yellow kitchen (III)

in my bedroom or yellow kitchen

unhinged by the anxious evening

when only I am awake

and the plumbers are plumbing their wives

with offers of milk in the kitchen,

I sing by ceiling light

not for amusement or money

or the anger and shame of the crowd

setting themselves on fire

but for no purpose at all

except I thought I should.

not for the relentless waitress, nor

the bartender’s fury, I sing

moderato on a private, sea-drift stage

not for the flowers beheaded

by lawnmowers and children

but for the sheer pleasure, my tongue

around each word and high note

that grants me little fame or courage

but because I knew I could.

because laughter is last (IV)

because laughter is last

I hesitate to mention

the parallax of glass

will never quite disguise you

simply to follow the rule

when trees are at the window

your kisses are proof

and proof’s a nobler state

than wisdom

sheriff, I swear by all badges, don’t try —

the worst mess of your day is more than

spilled silk that covers

our lives and those of others;  therefore, we’ll

gladly die, dreaming of alarms

for lies are always ellipses

and life is perhaps no author

The Dog was Pleasant, and the Cat was Firm (V)

The dog was pleasant, and the cat was firm.

The spider became the web; and the violin concerto

was like the dog’s dream of chasing a cat.

The dog was pleasant, and the cat was firm.

Their worlds were broken, as if they had no words;

nevertheless, an irresistible ladder rose upon the stage,

preferred to lean, had to lean, to be truly a ladder.

The man to whom the dog was true, for whom

the factory glass was shattered, knows

glass shatters only when it must.

The dog was pleasant; it was perfectly so.

The cat was firm; it had no laughter.

The cat was half of the story, a part of every conjecture:

the relation of dogs and cats, themselves

fiction, as fall is spring and summer’s summer; whereas,

a young man is winter, leaning and laughing here.