English Poems

The glass door was spinning panes
like an open book.
A suit the color of sky close to night,
wire of eyeglasses a gold moon.

He bowed as if judicial
and called a French name.
Glasses were filled with ice
the color of amber.

We were in America.

He asked me to take his hands.
They are cold, he said.
I warmed his cold hands
as we sat on the rouge banquette.

It was the last May of the century.

Now the summer air exerts its syrupy drag on the half-dark
City under the strict surveillance of quotation marks.

The citizens with their cockades and free will drift off
From the magnet of work to the terrible magnet of love.

In the far suburbs crenellated of Cartesian yards and gin
The tribe of mothers calls the tribe of children in

Across the bluing evening. It’ s the hour things get
To be excellently pointless, like describing the alphabet.

Music: Sexual misery is wearing you out.
Music: Known as the Philosopher’ s Stair for the world-weariness which climbing it inspires. One gets nowhere with it.
Paris: St-Sulpice in shrouds.
Paris: You’ re falling into disrepair, Eiffel Tower this means you! Swathed in gold paint, Enguerrand Quarton whispering come with me under the shadow of this gold leaf.
Music: The unless of a certain series.
Mathematics: Everyone rolling dice and flinging Fibonacci, going to the opera, counting everything.
Fire: The number between four and five.

They moved across the screen like a computer simulation.
They moved across the screen like complex models & we learned
to call this a nature show.
Animals but set in gray shades for video capture with a lighter area for
the face.
Almost white they moved across the screen like a compressed
meditation.
But the song was never familiar.
Because this was the only room this was the only room where we

Our grand peregrinations through these temporary cities,
These pale window box poppies of the laughing class,
Drifting as if time came in the same long dollops as starlight,
Resemble an epic journey as a coffee bean resembles a llama’ s foot,
Though the kitchen table may be far from the desert
It’ s near in spirit, a yellow oasis before the wind
Starts its restless sweeping of white flower-dust across the lintel,
Marking the fine edge of things like children asleep
At the opera, piled up near the door, summer passing

My fugues have no apparent relation to past trauma of any kind.
When it came time to rehearse we decided to get glamorous.
We get all done-up for rehearsal. Gradually, imperceptibly, things begin
slipping back into their normal place. My body is slowly rotating
into its proper north-south orientation. My playing is flawless
as it turns out. The audience goes nuts
but what was it all about?
Had I longer to see the aspects and facets of the family,
which as we know are not always tickety-boo but I have drifted away

James James
Morrison Morrison
Weatherby George Dupree
Took great
Care of his Mother,
Though he was only three.
James James
Said to his Mother,
“Mother,” he said, said he:
“You must never go down to the end of the town,

i.

I grew up an anxious painting by my dad’ s shaking hand.
In the painting of my dad, a quiet hole beats
through the dull, black night. I’ m heir to an orange heart
in the rhythmic black where a man leans quietly
and wonders. I wonder about my dad, a hole
in my painting. I used to think my dad was dull,
but his shaking hand gave rhythm to my body.
In my dad’ s painting, a hole glows orange in the dull night
where I sit beneath the canvas looking up.
My dad looks down and laughs.

Side by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.

Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day’ s work over,
How the Spring calls to us, here in the city,
Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!

Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces,
Cleansing, entrancing,
After the heat and the fumes and the footlights,
Where you dance and I watch your dancing.