My poems: fledglings, heirs,
Plaintiffs and executors,
The silent ones, the loud,
The humble and the proud.
As soon as the shovel of time
Threw me onto the potter’ s wheel —
Myself without kith or kin —
I grew beneath the hand, a miracle.
Something stretched out my long neck
And hollowed round my soul
And marked on my back
Legends of flowers and leaves.
I stoked the birch in the fire
As Daniel commanded
And blessed my red temper
Until I spoke as a prophet.
O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas'd eyes, embower'd from the light,
Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the "Amen," ere thy poppy throws
Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,
I wanted to be sure to reach you;
though my ship was on the way it got caught
in some moorings. I am always tying up
and then deciding to depart. In storms and
at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide
around my fathomless arms, I am unable
to understand the forms of my vanity
or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder
Go, smiling souls, your new-built cages break,
In heaven you’ ll learn to sing, ere here to speak,
Nor let the milky fonts that bathe your thirst
Be your delay;
The place that calls you hence is, at the worst,
Milk all the way.
you want to eat me
out. right. what does it taste like
you want to eat me right out
of these jeans & into something
a little cheaper. more digestible.
more bite-sized. more thank you
come: i am greasy
for you. i slick my hair with msg
every morning. i’ m bad for you.
got some red-light district between
your teeth. what does it
taste like: a takeout box
between my legs.
plastic bag lady. flimsy white fork
to snap in half. dispose of me.
With what stillness at last
you appear in the valley
your first sunlight reaching down
to touch the tips of a few
high leaves that do not stir
as though they had not noticed
and did not know you at all
then the voice of a dove calls
from far away in itself
to the hush of the morning
White hail pelting the frozen bog,
I’ m stuck in the first line of January,
following my host’ s dog
on his walk through the stone century,
around the quarry, slices of marble and mud,
past a herd of miners exhaling smoke,
past a barn smelling of merde,
and back to where I’ m stuck and broke.
The fucking dog barks at the night,
mad at the stars all his life and then again.
I rethink kicking him out,
but being cool, I let him in.
I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if —
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we’ re not here alone, you and I.
I’ ve been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.
Will you read my little pome,
O you girls returnèd home
From a summertime of sport
At the Jolliest Resort,
From a Heated Term of joys
Far from urban dust and noise?
You I speak to in this rhyme,
You have had a Glorious Time
Swimming, golfing, bridging, dancing,
Riding, tennising, romancing,
On the springboard, on the raft —
You’ ve been often photographed.
To the richest Treasury
That e'er fill'd ambitious eye;
To the faire bright Magazin
Hath impoverisht Love's Queen;
To th' Exchequer of all honour
(All take pensions but from her);
To the taper of the thore
Which the god himself but bore;
To the Sea of Chaste Delight;
Let me cast the Drop I write.
And as at Loretto's shrine
Caesar shovels in his mine,
Th' Empres spreads her carkanets,
The lords submit their coronets,
Knights their chased arms hang by,
Maids diamond-ruby fancies tye;
