On Motel Walls by David Wagoner

Beyond the foot of the bed: a seascape whose ocean,

Under the pummeling of a moon the shape and shade

Of a wrecking ball, is breaking into slabs

Against a concrete coast. Next to the closet:

A landscape of pasty mountains no one could climb

Or fall from, beyond whose sugary grandeur

Lies Flatland, a blankness plastered on plasterboard.

And over the bed: a garden in the glare

Of shadowless noon where flowerheads burst more briefly

And emptily and finally than fireworks.

For hours, I’ve been a castaway on that shore

By that fake water where nothing was ever born,

Where the goddess of beauty sank. I’ve flopped on those slopes

Where no one on earth could catch a breath worth breathing,

And I’ve been caught in that garden

Where the light is neither waves nor particles

But an inorganic splatter without a source.

Tonight, what’s in the eye of this beholder

Is less and less and all the ways I can go

Dead wrong myself through the quick passing

Of sentences: tomorrow, I may be staring

Straight in the face of the hanging judge of my future

Who’ll read me with the deadpan of a jailer

Before a search, a lock-down, and lights out.

I’ll do hard time all night inside these walls

In my mind’s eye, a transient facing a door

That says, Have you forgotten anything

Of value? Have you left anything behind?

From “Through the Forest: New and Selected Poems 1977-1987” (Atlantic Monthly Press: $16.95, hardcover, $7.95, paperback; 233 pp.). Wagoner is editor of Poetry Northwest, professor of English at the University of Washington and a chancellor of the Academy fo American Poets. 1987 David Wagoner, by permission.