Wanting leads to worse than oddity.
The bones creak like bamboo in wind,
and strain toward a better life outside the body,
the life anything has that isn’ t human.
Feel the chair under you? What does it want?
Does lust bend it silly, like a rubber crutch?
Tell a tree about the silky clasp of cunt.
It won’ t shift an inch. It won’ t ache to touch.
I could pick anything and think of you —
This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue
My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page.
I could choose any hero, any cause or age
And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart,
Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart
As standing in silver stirrups will allow —
Two guys sucking each other in the steam room
didn’ t want anything
to do with me, evidently —
I left them to their comedy.
*
Legato longings:
wish for walnuts, wish for water,
wish to exorcise this morning’ s debauch —
two Fauré nocturnes.
*
In slow motion
Steve tussled with a motorcycle
trying to run me over
on the boulevard of moon smut
I.
Let me speak with expressive
hesitation & a feeling for
interment why even
lineate what isn’ t broken by
music let me speak with
inextricable reluctance.
I want to tear the heart
from refused convalescence
& feed it those long fronds
of river bed grass. I want to
tear the heart out of style
& put it between
utter thrall & the infancy
of all things impure.
Torn out, a flame thickens
between us as if
not right now we’ ll be
ripped from this life
Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as a falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
In every thing,
I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful.
What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you,
I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life?
He turned a strange crosshatched color
as if he stood in a clouded painting, and said, Thanks,
but no other phenomena intrude upon my starlit mind.
(Oakland)
Make it
the place
it was then,
so full it split
vision to live
there in winter
so late & wet
abundance
toppled toward
awful — birds
of paradise
a profusion
the ripe colors
of anodized
metal; in gutters
umbrellas
smashed
like pigeons,
bent ribs bright
among black
slack fluttering;
camellias’
pink imagoes
dropping
into water
& rotting,
sweet stink —
& did not
stop :
the inundated
He startled to see a statue of blind
justice really did loom over the courtroom. But
remained determined to scorn symbolism.
She needed a quarter to call her lover —
the docket was full, she’ d be late for lunch —
and he gave her one. It was not a taunt,
acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was
a quarter. The fact that they had done this —
even this! — together and cordially,
Zipping your skirt, you rustle past,
sand hissing through a glass,
with the Bedouin snap and flash
of static-electric
sparks disturbing fabric.
This morning’ s charge could rouse
The Desert Fathers of Sinai
over which I drowse.
She was in love with the same danger
everybody is. Dangerous
as it is to love a stranger,
she was in love. With that same danger
an adulteress risks a husband’ s anger.
Stealthily death enters a house:
she was in love with that danger.
Everybody is dangerous.
