What seemed a mystery was
in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.
What seemed a memory was in fact
a dividing line. Insert bird for wind.
Insert wind for departure when everyone is
standing still. Insert three mountains
burning and in three valleys a signal seer
seeing a distant light and a signal bearer
sprinting to a far-off bell. What seemed
a promise was in fact a sigh.
Cutlery clatters into the sink.
But always the characters, uniquely themselves,
only some decades older. They search
for their coats. You were, she reminds him,
our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent
here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos:
Morningside Heights, one of your lives.
Thirty years
since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes —
With her one horrid eye persistently unfastened, a vigilant bird
watched my grandfather during the Great Depression
use each evening of one whole year to wander his corn fields
knowing this world is just one pig after another
in one pen after another. Therefore, the bird heard him suppose,
shouldn’ t he with his best gun, machete, Buick, or rope
terminate his acquaintance with the tiresome setup
of breakfast-lunch-dinner-dawn-dusk-fall-winter-spring-summer-
That whine is the sound
of waste, rot, the frantic,
grinding inability to attend
to anything but sere thwarting
of yourself, a dry corrosion
which some say they know,
but you and I —
(my jaw clenched as you
turn a page,
you with a heart like drywall,
I who would
lace my arms with razors,
then press them
slowly to your lips,
the metal taste
mixing with flesh,
and through gritted teeth
I making the sound
of you, you, you
do not know, meaning
only me, me)
We communicated by cheeses,
unwrapping them gingerly,
parting the crust with a fork,
tasting dew, must, salt,
raising an eyebrow,
or we let chianti talk for us,
rolling it in the glass,
staring — it was dark and shiny
as the pupil, and stared back —
or we undressed each other;
we took long walks hand in hand
in the vineyards, the pastures,
resenting each other bitterly
for our happiness that excluded us
as surely as the world did,
mountain after mountain.
This is the life I wanted, and could never see.
For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough:
That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless,
And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come.
And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart
Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace.
And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come
“Nothing but sunlight and gleaming,
linoleum flecked with flame,
a thick coat of wax that flashed
down a corridor and led to a room,
a place where I curled up a few
innocuous inches off the floor.
Straps — word out of strophe,
the restraints of line and stanza —
straps hung in loops on closet hooks.
On the nightstand a basket with
peanut butter crackers, a vivid
and unnatural orange, a crinkly
wrap. A knee-high fridge stocked
with icy juices, foil boxes, straws
glued on. A female voice next door
We wear harnesses like crossing guards.
In a pouch over the heart,
over stent and bypass, a black
box with leads pressed onto metal
nipples. We pedal and tread and row
while our signals are picked up
by antennas on the ceiling, X’ s
like the eyes cartoonists give the dead.
I wish we could control this revolting
want of control: these people
with their spongy eyes, their mouths
of trembling shoehorns, billhooks for penises
and bear traps for vulvas.
One taste of sunlight and at once
they can’ t do without it. Water,
the same, and food, and air,
and a dozen other squalid habits.
Some — like their copulation,
a rusting carnation in a cut-glass neck —
are not physically compulsive but
the partners can’ t stop wanting them to be:
so we desire to be raped
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,
the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips
and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression
of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill
she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him
