English Poems

When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’ t know your fear

is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,

who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,

or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?

This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind

that doesn’ t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,

the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,

If only I could forget him, the Frenchman
I saw outside our quarters, creeping round
near daybreak in that density of garden
as if he'd almost grown into the ground.
He was just looking back, peering about him
to check that he was safe here and alone:
once he was sure, his plunder was all his!
Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on.

Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass,
everything goes somewhere—and everything we do—nothing
ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs.
Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings,
our solitudes. Our eyes.

Child
You've boarded me over like a window or a well.

Mother
It was autumn
I couldn't hear the students
only the music coming in the window,
Se tu m’ ami
If you love me

I went for a week's journey in soft ermine.
Darling, the ovals of your hair...
autumn leaves,
your hair the hue of rain-drenched bark, your voice:

Don't ever leave me...

You who I don’ t know I don’ t know how to talk to you

— What is it like for you there?

Here... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —

What are you afraid of?

a labyrinth,
as if at its center,
god would be there —
but at the center, only rose,
where rose came from,
where rose grows —
& us, inside of the lips & lips:
the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair,
we are born of,
fed by, & marry with,
only flesh itself, only its passage
— out of where? to where?

Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream,
Never mind you, Jim,
come rest again on the country porch of my knees.

Girl shouting Oliver! at the top of the cut-through
by Jacob’ s Gallery, you have now entered
the slenderest of histories, the skin-bound book
I store between my temples; in that mean
and moonless city, you must hang fraught
in your too-long coat, not a winner, but placed,
and in this cutty version of forever, forever
calling on your unseen beau, one flake in
a limbic blizzard, one spark in the synaptic blaze.
And now the rain turns, light but going steady
on the Willamette. Along the bank, I lift my pace

No, nor a fierce hurrah
for what it does without choice,
for following the light
for the same reason the light follows it.

Just a thing rough to the touch, a face
like a thousand ticks turning their backs,
suckling at something you can’ t see,
and a body like a tag off the earth

so that my child hands couldn’ t tear it out
from the overgrown lot next door.
My palms raw with the shock
of quills and spines. Its hold like spite, and ugly

My father’ s been dead for thirty years
but when he appears behind my shoulder
offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride
in something I’ ve done that isn’ t even thistledown
or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world
— “Albie, grip in the middle and turn
with a steady pressure” — it’ s measurable,
if not the way the wind is in a sock,
or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way
an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him
with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,

I’ ll fly off to a fjord in Norway,
post “Oh the pain” above my doorway
if you insist on going your way,
for this is not a duck.

That is what cowards say, and realists
who run away, shun the appeal its
rare white fur holds, although they feel it’ s
a rabbit full of pluck.

Let’ s multiply, let’ s twitch our noses,
let’ s walk among the night’ s dark roses,
though where the oldest story goes is
a place where tongues might cluck.