Lawrence Raab

I can't remember how old I was,
but I used to stand in front
of the bathroom mirror, trying to imagine
what it would be like to be dead.

In the book you've been reading
it's the end of the season.
The shades have been drawn
in that house by the lake,

and a woman is standing
alone on the porch. 

I read the papers and think about hatred:
and the way ideas, especially big ideas,
look more and more like excuses for hatred.

Watching a couple of crows
playing around in the woods, swooping
in low after each other, I wonder
if they ever slam into the trees.

We knew the rat in the crawlspace
was chewing on something essential.
But who'd go down to set the traps?
The house was ours—wasn't it my duty
to protect it?

Twenty years ago there was a life for each of us
to turn away from
or embrace. A song returns to remind me
of what I must have felt,
and when it's over, I play it back again.

Out of a patch of fog, or the branches
of a broken tree, or as a light
suddenly aglow on the ceiling—
they assemble themselves, and briefly appear.

If we agree that the truth is never
  only what we want to believe,
the urgent arguments of desire

still have the body's weight behind them,
 the weight of the bully who tells you
what to say and then makes sure you mean it.

William Blake saw an angel
sitting in a tree. Blondin crossed Niagara
on a cable. And Maria Taglioni
for a Russian highwayman
danced on a panther's skin spread over the snow
in 1855.

No, I just can't write today, I said
to myself, sprawling on the couch, my mind
an open invitation to sleep, when there it was:
The Invisible Hand. A title. Having arrived
unbidden, it felt like inspiration,

The poem that argues successfully against death
finds its place in the book you can buy
in stores that do not sell poetry.

As such things go, my reign of terror
felt impressive.