After the Gentle Poet Kobayashi Issa
New Year’ s morning —
everything is in blossom!
I feel about average.
A huge frog and I
staring at each other,
neither of us moves.
This moth saw brightness
in a woman’ s chamber —
burned to a crisp.
After the Last Bulletins
After the last bulletins the windows darken
And the whole city founders readily and deep,
Sliding on all its pillows
To the thronged Atlantis of personal sleep,
And the wind rises. The wind rises and bowls
The day’ s litter of news in the alleys. Trash
Tears itself on the railings,
Soars and falls with a soft crash,
After the Phone Call
She looked nearly the same
But when I hugged her
There was substantially more
To her — no doubt as with me.
She fibbed as I did at the edge
Of curb under the streetlight
As spiders dropped like tiny
Parachutes — they were difficult
To see. On the periphery
Of good luck, I thought,
Revisiting her quirky habits
And expressions, what I eventually
Found so bothersome. Except
When I glanced at my watch
I discovered I was trembling
Like a small-time embezzler.
I see, she said, you must have
After the Wilderness
When Clifford wasn’ t back to camp by nine,
I went to look among the fields of dead
before we lost him to a common grave.
But I kept tripping over living men
and had to stop and carry them to help
or carry them until they died,
which happened more than once upon my back.
And I got angry with those men because
After-Glow
Out of the smoke and dust of the little room
With tea-talk loud and laughter of happy boys,
I passed into the dusk. Suddenly the noise
Ceased with a shock, left me alone in the gloom,
To wonder at the miracle hanging high
Tangled in twigs, the silver crescent clear.
Time passed from mind. Time died; and then we were
Once more at home together, you and I.
Afternoons
Quick passage into
memory and behind
only blank spaces,
blue stain on pink
litmus or merely
known so closely
something falls away
receding from touch,
caught in the air
your fingers move,
agile water-fly
padding the surface
Against Complaint
Though the amaryllis sags and spills
so do those my wishes serve, all along the town.
And yes, the new moon, kinked there in night's patch,
tugs me so — but I can't reach to right the slant.
And though our cat pads past without a tail, some
with slinking tails peer one-eyed at the dawn, some
with eyes are clawless, some with sparking claws
contain no voice with which to sing
of foxes gassing in the lane.
Round-shouldered pals
Against Conceit
Don't say Sir Pigeon in his cobalt bonnet.
Don't find among your notes
jottings on duvets and blizzards and the page
unwalked acrossblack missives of girlhood
must be sent off and do not claim the furnace
of the universe is powered by human screams.
When the dark turns dark
or when the bullet lifts a scalp,
it is enough to know the lover feels the slap
Against Epiphany
What god was it that would open
earth’ s picture book and see the two
of us on a road, snowfields glittering
on every side and poplars bent like
the fingers of an old man clutching
what he loved about the sun?
Which one was it that would peer
into our thatched, white-washed
farmhouse, and see the fur, flies,
and shit-stained walls? Which one
laughed at the barbed wire fences,
the wall topped with broken glass?
Against Travel
These days are best when one goes nowhere,
The house a reservoir of quiet change,
The creak of furniture, the window panes
Brushed by the half-rhymes of activities
That do not quite declare what thing it was
Gave rise to them outside. The colours, even,
Accord with the tenor of the dayyes, ‘grey’
You will hear reported of the weather,
But what a grey, in which the tinges hover,
About to catch, although they still hold back
The blaze that's in them should the sun appear,
And yet it does not. Then the window pane