There is no escaping the storm of roses
crisscrossed on the split-cracked wall
of a dead fountain arch.
There is no escaping their uterine balls,
expanding as a reminder of the children I never had.
If you listen carefully you can hear the vibrations,
the heart drone of their petal jaw-harps.
And there’ s no going back,
no indiscovery of Mars
or these red planets brooding before me,
light predators, sun-hatched
and bloodening like the fists of women
who have gone to war.
Did you know I’ m in this hospital bed?
I’ m not. I’ m in the same light you stand in,
much the same way I’ m in the waist of your Carolina
watching from the screen across the bed
whose pulse is worn down with an IV to the head.
We are all snow birds atop
the cherry blossoms of August.
Springtime in Washington D. C.
passed too fast, nearly in the flash of Rose
brushing her teeth over the bedpan.
Only open homes & woods & pansies’ blue ledges
can lead the zero with his only arms
to embrace himself in open fields for all to gape upon.
He unbuttons steel-gray sheets, a knotted top coat,
bares himself, his hole, a vision
as framed by the marker that is
where
his body blew and left enclosure intact,
skeletal innards
enough to make moviegoers ask,
“Has anyone finished themselves yet?”
I haven’ t. I swim the lagoon, take note:
the babies are barely dirty,
their armpits smooth with silky soot
When the man behind the counter said, “You pay
by the orifice,” what could we do but purchase them all?
Ah, Sandy, you were clearly the deluxe doll, modish and pert
in your plastic nurse whites, official hostess to our halcyon days,
where you bobbed in the doorway of our dishabille apartment,
a block downwind from the stockyards. Holding court on
the corroded balcony, K. and I passed hash brownies, collecting
change for the building’ s monthly pool to predict which balcony
Three days I heard them grieve when I lay dead,
(It was so strange to me that they should weep!)
Tall candles burned about me in the dark,
And a great crucifix was on my breast,
And a great silence filled the lonesome room.
Mountains rise above us like ideas
Vague in their superior extent,
Part of the range of disillusionment
Whose arresting outline disappears
Into the circumstantial clouds that look
Like footnotes from above. What wisdom said
The mind has mountains? Imagination read
The history of the world there like a book.
It is half past ten in Stonington.
The trees droop apprehensive of the heat
And the sky has turned that pale suspicious colour
That means that it cannot support more light.
Here on the terrace I and a companion
Each pretends to read. The papers say
That it is 90 in New York today.
I have known great gold Sorrows:
Majestic Griefs shall serve me watchfully
Through the slow-pacing morrows:
I have knelt hopeless where sea-echoing
Dim endless voices cried of suffering
Vibrant and far in broken litany:
Where white magnolia and tuberose hauntingly
Pulsed their regretful sweets along the air- —
Once upon a time
I caught a little rhyme
I set it on the floor
but it ran right out the door
I chased it on my bicycle
but it melted to an icicle
I scooped it up in my hat
but it turned into a cat
I caught it by the tail
but it stretched into a whale
I followed it in a boat
but it changed into a goat
When I fed it tin and paper
it became a tall skyscraper
Then it grew into a kite
and flew far out of sight...
“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are
No rhymes)” was just the title, and I only read that far.
That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar
When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions,
And I was scared this hothead would start hedging his assertions
Before I had him dead-to-rights. (A Chekan’ s or a SMERSHian’ s
Lot, you know, is not an happy one.) He might retract.
