I am Underground

The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.

The other is weather.

I know what weather is.

The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.

Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.

The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?

Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.

Today is weather.

The sound of the weather

Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.

Everyone weeps.

The tears of today

Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.

The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.

The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.

The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.

The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.

The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?

The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.

The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.

What are these ashes?

Here is the hate

That does not travel.

Here is the robe

That smells of the night

Here are the words

Retired to their books

Here are the stones

Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge

Over the water

Here is the place

Where the sun came up

Here is a season

Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.

The days are beautiful.

Ann Lauterbach is the author of five collections of poetry: If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 (Penguin, 2001), On a Stair (1997), And for Example (1994), Clamor (1991), Before Recollection (1987), and Many Times, but Then
(1979). She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation,the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C.
MacArthur Foundation. Since 1991 she has taught at Bard College, where she is David and Ruth Schwab III Professor of Language and Literature
and co-directs the Writing Division of the M.F.A. program.