Come, O come, my life’s delight,
Let me not in languor pine!
Love loves no delay; thy sight,
The more enjoyed, the more divine:
O come, and take from me
The pain of being deprived of thee!
Thou all sweetness dost enclose,
Like a little world of bliss.
Beauty guards thy looks: the rose
In them pure and eternal is.
Come, then, and make thy flight
As swift to me, as heavenly light.
Often I think of the beautiful town
That is seated by the sea;
Often in thought go up and down
The pleasant streets of that dear old town,
And my youth comes back to me.
And a verse of a Lapland song
Is haunting my memory still:
"A boy's will is the wind's will,
And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts."
She said the cornflake cake made her day,
she said a man cannot be blamed for being
unfaithful: his heart is not in tune with his
extremities and it’ s just the way his body
chemistry is. She said all sorts of things.
We saw a duck pond and a man with a tub
of maggots and a tub of sweet corn, we saw
the walled garden and the old-fashioned library
in the park, stopped for a cup of tea in a cafe
where we had the cornflake cake cut into halves
1.
The dark socket of the year
the pit, the cave where the sun lies down
and threatens never to rise,
when despair descends softly as the snow
covering all paths and choking roads:
then hawkfaced pain seized you
threw you so you fell with a sharp
cry, a knife tearing a bolt of silk.
My father heard the crash but paid
no mind, napping after lunch
a love person
from love people
out of the afrikan sun
under the sign of cancer.
whoever see my
midnight smile
seeing star apple and
mango from home.
whoever take me for
a negative thing,
his death be on him
like a skin
and his skin
be his heart’ s revenge.
*
lucy one-eye
she got her mama’ s ways.
big round roller
can’ t cook
can’ t clean
if that’ s what you want
you got it world.
Sometimes when my eyes are red
I go up on top of the RCA Building
and gaze at my world, Manhattan —
my buildings, streets I’ ve done feats in,
lofts, beds, coldwater flats
— on Fifth Ave below which I also bear in mind,
its ant cars, little yellow taxis, men
walking the size of specks of wool —
In the suburbs on a bike path that in
any other age would be a road roughed
halfway through some dark wood’ s listening heart
two damp young men in suits sucked dry of light
walk stiffly and uncertain round a bend
in each left hand the black box of a book
They see me then spread out to fill the way
as sun blares down and dry May wind slaps
cheap loose plastic cloth against their shins
The thinner taller blond one greets me in
an earnest tone these days not often heard
and when I do not take his offered hand
I am looking at a smallpox vaccination scar
In a war movie on the arm
Of a young actor. He has just swum
Across a river somewhere in Normandy
Into the waiting arms of his rejoicing comrades.
O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen,
o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks
accuse of spoiling souls,
whose destiny is downward,
whose reflecting's up — I think
I must have come from you.
Just one more cup.
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
"I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly.
"Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing."
Yin, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind,"
she purrs — her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
