Archaic, his gestures
hieratic, just like Caesar or Sappho
or Mary’ s Jesus or Ann’ s Mary or Jane
Austen once, or me or your mother’ s you
the sudden baby surges to his feet
and sways, head forward, chin high,
arms akimbo, hands dangling idle,
elbows up, as if winged.
Whitecaps surge in from some infinite distance
Rocks, grottoes, clay stridencies beneath the storm
Amalgams of sea-wrack and brownish moss
Each tide pushes forth its flesh-antennae
The persistent squid stretches its arms, wave-crests
Cave in, everything gives way to sand
Which silently drinks up the acid, cold red sweat
Those children launched in assault against the waves
How could they turn their heads
Back toward those who've brought them this far
To be taken even farther in their turn
I
The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’ clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.
And then the lighting of the lamps.
Talking to my friend Emily, whose drinking
patterns and extravagance of personal
feeling are a lot like mine, I’ m pretty
convinced when she explains the things we do
while drinking (a cocktail to celebrate the new
account turns into a party that lasts till 3
a. m. and a terrific hangover) indicate
a problem of a sort I’ d not considered.
I’ ve been worried about how I metabolize
the sauce for four years, since my second bout
of hepatitis, when I kissed all the girls
at Christmas dinner and turned bright yellow
I am a pretty little Dutch girl,
As pretty as I can be, be, be,
And all the boys in the baseball team
Go crazy over me, me, me.
My boy friend’s name is Fatty,
He comes from the Senoratti,
With turned-up toes and a pimple on his nose,
And this is how the story goes:
Seeing photos
of ancestors
a century past
is like looking
at your own
fingerprints —
circles
and lines
you can't
recognize
until someone else
with a stranger's eye
looks close and says
that's you.
Though the road turn at last
to death’ s ordinary door,
and we knock there, ready
to enter and it opens
easily for us,
yet
all the long journey
we shall have gone in chains,
fed on knowledge-apples
acrid and riddled with grubs.
It is always the dispossessed —
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’ s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.
Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he’ s out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.
Translation broadens language
as divorce and remarriage extend family.
Born to fade and break, facts
huddle inside black brackets.
Work means inquisition as a child
separates a cricket’ s wings from thorax.
Ideas come apart as monads, metastasizing
rhapsody on the edge of delicate dusk.
Thunder sounds in the distance or television,
always on in this constant rain.
I was a math major — fond of all things rational.
It was the first day of my first poetry class.
The prof, with the air of a priest at Latin mass,
told us that we could “make great poetry personal,”
could own it, since poetry we memorize sings
inside us always. By way of illustration
he began reciting Shelley with real passion,
but stopped at “Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” —
because, with that last plosive, his top denture
popped from his mouth and bounced off an empty chair.
