When my lover became my enemy
I made my bed amongst winds
and drove the old road ’ till my heart crashed.
Where’ s the bypass?
Washing my shirts, wringing them out.
Hung in the breeze.
Water skips
undressed
over outcrops.
What it says is.
Wind,
roots in rock.
Lying on Long Tongue,
sun diffused in mist.
Easy sleep
without waking.
He is for a long time bleating the embassy collection:
(water-resistant cot,
a resurgent stretch of storefronts to dive into,
compadre, col legno, funding the new permits, pleasing
room, murderous rain.
Near-spring night, stars on flat blackboards, essay estate
questions passed person to person.
The lottery window
I turn red past,
hyacinth-lanced dawn.
In green tree talk
the transcriber dons a dark robe, a mirror.
The love we’ ve defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
I’ m afraid of marriage.
Driving past them at night, the shadows
on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:
a father stuck in a job, his daughter
opening her blouse to strangers.
move
Here we are
in our doughboys and camos, our doughty frocks
with drips of bitter on the sleeve, our passions revving
their pulp to pittance at a gas station
in the city that never peeps —
Let’ s make believe
I am happy, I laugh
Black poison, all of me
Its bottleful,
Become sparkling water
My cup runneth over
I am your son
You are my daughter,
The only one
One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.
One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.
I am angry with X, with Y, with Z,
for not being you.
Enthusiasms jump at me,
wagging and barking. Go away.
Go home.
I am angry with my eyes for not seeing you,
they smart and ache and see the snow,
an insistent brilliance.
It lists beneath a sycamore
swashing in high summer leaf,
and takes a hit from underneath:
a root knuckle bulges along the floor.
Its eight loopholes have fissures, sprouting
thistles; through each the wheat is fattening.
“What’ s this thing for?” A starling sings
its wind-up song. The sun slides out.
And this taste of piss, that Fetherlite
slumped in the corner, those Holsten cans,
the markered slogan
do not try to answer. Might.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?
I've been to London to see the fair Queen.
Pussy cat, pussy cat, what did you there?
I frightened a little mouse, under her chair.
