Transplanting
1. X-Ray
Triolet
She was in love with the same danger
everybody is. Dangerous
as it is to love a stranger,
she was in love. With that same danger
an adulteress risks a husband’ s anger.
Stealthily death enters a house:
she was in love with that danger.
Everybody is dangerous.
Triptych for Topological Heart
it befalls us. an exchanged glance, reflective spasm.
Trollius and trellises
of course, I may die in the next ten minutes
and I’ m ready for that
but what I’ m really worried about is
that my editor-publisher might retire
even though he is ten years younger than
I.
it was just 25 years ago (I was at that ripe
old age of 45)
when we began our unholy alliance to
test the literary waters,
neither of us being much
known.
Troop Train
It stops the town we come through. Workers raise
Their oily arms in good salute and grin.
Kids scream as at a circus. Business men
Glance hopefully and go their measured way.
And women standing at their dumbstruck door
More slowly wave and seem to warn us back,
As if a tear blinding the course of war
Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish.
Trouble Deaf Heaven
Is there a sound? There is a forest.
What is the world? The word is wilderness.
What is the answer? The answer is the world.
What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness.
What is the end? No one lives there now.
What is a beginning? The beginning is light.
What makes happiness? Nothing.
What makes an ending? What does not.
What is her skin? Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies,
of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full
trouble with spain
I got in the shower
and burned my balls
last Wednesday.
met this painter called Spain,
no, he was a cartoonist,
well, I met him at a party
and everybody got mad at me
because I didn’ t know who he was
or what he did.
True Love
Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.
Turkey Buzzards
They've been so long above it all,
those two petals
so steeped in style they seem to stall
in the kettle
simmering over the town dump
or, better still,
the neon-flashed, X-rated rump
of fresh roadkill
courtesy of the interstate
that Eisenhower
would overtake in the home straight
by one horsepower,
the kettle where it all boils down
to the thick scent
of death, a scent of such renown
it's given vent