REVERSALS
There are graves under the houses and houses
under the graves and linking the three
a broad stone staircase where the dead
go up and the living go down. They pass one another
wordlessly which might mean they don’ t know, or else
they’ re pretending not to know. You can smell
the orange grove on the hill; you can hear
children bowling barrel hoops down the street.
Two women gossip as they fill their jug at the spring.
Their secrets cloud the water.
APPROACH LIFE AS IF IT WERE A BANQUET
Your rightful portion averts your ireful potion:
Caress what can’ t be blessed, cup shadows under breasts.
Let pass what’ s out of ken: lover, job, riches,
a ripe peach
until it reaches you.
Bring salt for your honey, lime for your grenadine.
Money’ s not your fault.
You’ re a feathered peahen
preening for marzipan men.
Three years she grew in sun and shower,
Then Nature said, "A lovelier flower
On earth was never sown;
This Child I to myself will take;
She shall be mine, and I will make
A Lady of my own." Myself will to my darling be
Both law and impulse: and with me
The Girl, in rock and plain,
In earth and heaven, in glade and bower,
Shall feel an overseeing power
To kindle or restrain.
My throat is full of sparklers
making me a lighthouse
for a loveship that can fly
Our mother monarchy
sweet land paternity
I’ ll eat their offspring’ s money and let you have a bite
The mockingbird says, hallelujah, coreopsis, I make the day
bright, I wake the night-blooming jasmine. I am
the duodecimo of desperate love, the hocus pocus passion
flower of delirious retribution. You never saw such a bird,
such a triage of blood and feathers, tongue and bone. O the world
is a sad address, bitterness melting the tongues of babies,
breasts full of accidental milk, but I can teach the flowers to grow,
take their tight buds, unfurl them like flags in the morning heat,
At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings
turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.
We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak
in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.
They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,
from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters
will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets
burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.
I can’ t tell you I had climbed for hours on
ledges and crawled through gaps in the earth.
My hands negotiating
through the teeth of the palisade
lipped under the vineyard of temperate skies.
And I can’ t tell you that I came
onto a ledge within the shelter of a granite roof,
ceaselessly carved by centuries of dripping water.
Feeding from pooled water and singular sunlight
a chamisa plant sat like a chopped wood.
The opposite end of root
speaking for its entirety through
silence and color.
I’ m in the barricade hearing the clock thickening you.
Autumn encircles a confusion that’ s nothing new.
Flash back to warring eyes almost letting me drown.
Out of which, a picture of me walking in a foreign head.
I can’ t hear what you said. Then you say: Cold room,
the second that life unwinds. A tinctured vase returns
Sam paused on the stairs. He had forgotten a thing.
In Leland’ s room a copy of Thomas Merton lay on the floor.
The air was full of gnats of possibility. What was the story?
Sam looked at the clock twice. The day was dropping
softly away while Sam’ s sneakers made the wood stairs creak.
The wood was sure it was wood. Alice got home from the store.
The bags had to be unloaded as the day went and went.
Then the sundown kitchen grew quiet.
Sam crossed his legs one way, then the other way. He had chosen
Like the ghost of a dear friend dead
Is Time long past.
A tone which is now forever fled,
A hope which is now forever past,
A love so sweet it could not last,
Was Time long past.
