Henry Taylor   AFTER A MOVIE ...........The last small credits fade as house lights rise. Dazed in that radiant instant of transition, you dwindle through the lobby and out to curbside, pulling on a glove .....with the decisive competence ...........of the scarred detective ...........or his quarry. Scanning the rainlit street for taxicabs, you visualize, without looking, your image in the window of the jeweler's shop, where white hands hover .....above the string of luminous pearls .............on a faceless velvet bust. ..............Someone across the street enters a bar, leaving behind a charged vacancy in which you cut to the dim booth inside, where you are seated, glancing at the door. .....You lift an eyebrow, recognizing ............the unnamed colleague ...........who will conspire with you against whoever the volatile script provides... A cab pulls up. You stoop into the dark and settle toward a version of yourself. .....Your profile cruises past the city ...........on a home-drifting stream ...........through whose surface, sometimes, you glimpse the life between the streambed and the ripples, as, when your gestures are your own again, your fingers life a cup beyond whose rim .....a room bursts into clarity ...........and light falls on all things.   LANDSCAPE WITH TRACTOR How would it be if you took yourself off to a house set well back from a dirt road, with, say, three acres of grass bounded by road, driveway, and vegetable garden? Spring and summer you would mow the field, not down to lawn, but with a bushhog, every six weeks or so, just often enough to give grass a chance, and keep weeds down. And one day--call it August, hot, a storm recently past, things green and growing a bit, and you're mowing, with half your mind on something you'd rather be doing, or did once. Three rounds, and then on the straight alongside the road, maybe three swaths in from where you are now, you glimpse it. People will toss all kinds of crap from their cars. It's a clothing-store dummy, for God's sake. Another two rounds, and you'll have to stop, contend with it, at least pull it off to one side. You keep going. Two rounds more, then down off the tractor, and Christ! Not a dummy, a corpse. The field tilts, whirls, then steadies as you run. Telephone. Sirens. Two local doctors use pitchforks to turn the body, some four days dead, and ripening. And the cause of death no mystery: two bullet holes in the breast of a well-dressed black woman in perhaps her mid-thirties. They wrap her, take her away. You take the rest of the day off. Next day, you go back to the field, having to mow over the damp dent in the tall grass where bluebottle flies are still swirling, but the bushhog disperses them, and all traces. Weeks pass. You hear at the post office that no one has come forward to say who she was. Brought out from the city, they guess, and dumped like a bag of beer cans. She was someone, and now is no one, buried or burned or dissected; but gone. And I ask you again, how would it be? To go on with your life, putting gas in the tractor, keeping down thistles, and seeing, each time you pass that spot, the form in the grass, the bright yellow skirt, black shoes, the thing not quite like a face whose gaze blasted past you at nothing when the doctors heaved her over? To wonder, from now on, what dope deal, betrayal, or innocent refusal, brought her here, and to know she will stay in that field till you die? Aimee Jackson Triplet gouache; 31" x 17.5"; 1993 more work by Aimee Jackson       ELEVATOR MUSIC A tune with no more substance than the air, performed on underwater instruments, is proper to this short lift from the earth. It hovers as we draw into ourselves and turn our reverent eyes toward the lights that count us to our various destinies. We're all in this together, the song says, and later we'll descend. The melody is like a name we don't recall just now that still keeps on insisting it is there.   RISING A ONE-EYED HORSE One side of his world is always missing. You may give it a casual wave of the hand or rub it with your shoulder as you pass, but nothing on his blind side ever happens. Hundreds of trees slip past him into darkness, drifting into a hollow hemisphere whose sounds you will have to try to explain. Your legs will tell him not to be afraid if you learn never to lie. Do not forget to turn his head and let what comes come seen: he will jump the fences he has to if you swing toward them from the side that he can see and hold his good eye straight. The heavy dark will stay beside you always; let him learn to lean against it. It will steady him and see you safely through diminished fields.   THE SAVAGE GOD A. Alvarez came to know what bizarre is; he found himself feeling so odd he sat down and wrote The Savage God. Lucan took an elegant knife, opened a vein and bled out his life. Eustace Budgell found that writing pure sludge'll earn a few lines in Pope's Dunciad. He's lost the luster that once he had. Thomas Chatterton shunned being spattered on; he helped himself to some arsenic and kept his cadaver more scenic. Vladimir Mayakovsky was scornful of golf club, of kayak, of ski, and of sporty aristocrats who let poor poets lose at Russian roulette. Hart Crane plunged into the bounding main. His situation could not have been graver: his father invented the candy Lifesaver. Cesare Pavese didn't exactly go crazy, but suffered forty-two years with vague, powerful fears. Vachel Lindsay heard the wind say there's a time to die and took a big swig of lye. Sylvia Plath trod a different path more on than in the shoes of Ted Hughes. Into the traffic Randall Jarrell jumped, stumbled, or fell while sane, drugged, or delirious: it's mysterious. Richard Brautigan couldn't catch the rich trout again so he turned toward the haywire harms of alcohol and firearms. Paul Celan tried to revive his vital élan, but the attempt being vain he jumped into the Seine. John Berryman hailed the grim ferryman at a point from which his descent could be reckoned at thirty-two feet per second per second. Lew Welch failed to squelch the little voice inside that said he ought to shoot himself in the head. Weldon Kees parked by a bridge an rode the breeze. It would be better by far to have found Kees in the car.   Henry Taylor received the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for this third book of poems, The Flying Change. His other poetry collections are Brief Candles: 101 Clerihews, Understanding Fiction, and, now in one volume, The Horse Show at Midnight and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards. He is professor of literature and co-director of the MFA program in creative writing at American University. Published in Volume 3, Number 2, Spring 2002.