On the phonograph, the voice
of a woman already dead for three
decades, singing of a man
who could make her do anything.
On the table, two fragile
glasses of black wine,
a bottle wrapped in its towel.
It is that room, the one
we took in every city, it is
as I remember: the bed, a block
of moonlight and pillows.
My fingernails, pecks of light
Cutlery clatters into the sink.
But always the characters, uniquely themselves,
only some decades older. They search
for their coats. You were, she reminds him,
our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent
here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos:
Morningside Heights, one of your lives.
Thirty years
since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes —
I came awake in kindergarten,
under the letter K chalked neat
on a field-green placard leaned
on the blackboard's top edge. They'd cagedme
in a metal desk — the dull word writ
to show K's sound. But K meant kick and kill
I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
Inappropriate clothes, odd habits
Out of sync with wasp and wren.
I admit I don’t know how
To sit still or move without purpose.
I prefer books to moonlight, statuary to trees.
for my love, Charles (1938-2000)
Say: 言
Twelve o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s crying with all her might and main,
And she won’t eat her dinner — rice pudding again —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
I’ve promised her dolls and a daisy-chain,
And a book about animals — all in vain —
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
She’s perfectly well, and she hasn’t a pain;
But, look at her, now she’s beginning again!
What is the matter with Mary Jane?
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady on a white horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
Jingle! Jangle! Jingle!
Jingle! Jangle! Jingle!
Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady on a white horse,
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.
This time we are getting drunk on retsina
in somebody’ s Italian backyard. We are a long way
from Georgia
and all of us are lonely. I wave my arms
and caw like Hadrian after his lover drowned himself.
My wife walks by the pond singing a hymn;
I think she is leaving me for good. I say, Imagine
my heart is huge and has
little men
Ring-a-ring o' roses,
A pocket full of posies,
A-tishoo! A-tishoo!
We all fall down.
