I'll not weep that thou art going to leave me,
There's nothing lovely here;
And doubly will the dark world grieve me,
While thy heart suffers there.
I'll not weep, because the summer's glory
Must always end in gloom;
And, follow out the happiest story —
It closes with a tomb!
And I am weary of the anguish
Increasing winters bear;
Weary to watch the spirit languish
Through years of dead despair.
The sun is warm, the sky is clear,
The waves are dancing fast and bright,
Blue isles and snowy mountains wear
The purple noon's transparent might,
The breath of the moist earth is light,
Around its unexpanded buds;
Like many a voice of one delight,
The winds, the birds, the ocean floods,
The City's voice itself, is soft like Solitude's.
All the way north on the train the sun
followed me followed me without moving
still the sun of that other morning
when we had gone over Come on over
men at the screen door said to my father
You have to see this it’ s an ape bring
the little boy bring the boy along
Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight.
Snarls, bread trucks, yeast
breathing inside huddled bags,
and sleepers completing lives
behind their gray windows.
A whistle on the phonewires,
feathers, twitches, whistling
down to the hot loaves.
Reeds everywhere, pulse,
flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs.
An answer. Radio news
It’ s true we have invented quark-extraction,
and this allows our aiming gravity at will;
it’ s true also that time
can now be made to flow
backward or forward by
the same process. It may be true as well that
what is happening at the focal point,
the meristem of this process,
creates a future kind of space,
a tiny universe that has
quite different rules. In this, it seems,
whatever one may choose to do or be becomes
at once the case. In short,
we have discovered heaven and
it’ s in our grasp. However,
Plurality is all. I walk among the restaurants,
the theatres, the grocery stores; I ride the cars
and hear of Mrs. Bedford’ s teeth and Albuquerque,
strikes unsettled, someone’ s simply marvelous date,
news of the German Jews, the baseball scores,
storetalk and whoretalk, talk of wars. I turn
the pages of a thousand books to read
the names of Buddha, Malthus, Walker Evans, Stendhal, André Gide,
Zipping your skirt, you rustle past,
sand hissing through a glass,
with the Bedouin snap and flash
of static-electric
sparks disturbing fabric.
This morning’ s charge could rouse
The Desert Fathers of Sinai
over which I drowse.
A rose can’ t change the world. It can only open or close.
A rose drives the world like an enormous gear.
It pushes a schooner east of Borneo.
When a body has been rearranged, it is held together with a rose.
A rose is a weapon, a guide, a compass.
It shatters the glass to explain a spilled blue shore. This is how we know we are in the presence of tragedy.
You shouldn’ t have. You couldn’ t have. You did. You are.
We piece together an aftermath.
He forgets that he used to call me mariconcito-
that I harbored years of hatred toward him
while hoping to find my real father. My
childhood memories of him reminding me
I was my mother's son, not his. I tried
to poison him once and scattered sharp nails
inside the shoes in his closet. By the time one
of his sons died of AIDS I was already lost
in contempt for the man I blamed for everything.
There was the time I was in love and he met my
boyfriend. Now he forgets to go to the bathroom
