English Poems

The former President lost his temper. Why did you yell in my mom’ s house?

She sounded like she does when her hands shake.

Was her reading too intense?

-- Did I kill Bin Laden? No. But I tried.

A compendium of words was stored here
Just underneath the chimney
I’ d like to see it that way
Fortune won’ t stand still for that
And pressure of the air flattens paper
I’ d like to see it that way
One comes into the room groomed, a pleasure
There’ s a patch of glitter in the glamor
I’ d like to see it that way
Each moment opens up sudden as an umbrella
On a day storms gather like wool
A way I’ d really like to see it
So you can’ t assume a face again
Before the non-face puts in its appearance

Pindar, poet of the victories, fitted names
And legends into verses for the chorus to sing:
Names recalled now only in the poems of Pindar:

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”

Your head is still
restless, rolling
east and west.
That body in you
insisting on living
is the old hawk
for whom the world
darkens.
If I am not
with you when you die,
that is just.

It is all right.
That part of you cleaned
my bones more
than once. But I
will meet you
in the young hawk
whom I see
inside both
you and me; he
will guide
you to the Lord of Night,
who will give you
the tenderness
you wanted here.

An old woodcut of the London Bridge
and a colored lithograph of a barley field.
There are no other pictures on Ward D.

The London Bridge lifts sooty towers above the river.
But it's the barley field I see.
A golden ocean of barley.

It's not like the other grain-fields.
Maybe it's those inward-looking eyes
gone into it so it becomes heaven?

His heart is like a boat that sets forth alone
on the ocean and goes far out from him,
as Aphrodite proceeds on her pleasure journeys.
He pours the gold down the runnels
into a great mystery under the sand.
When he pulls it up by the feet
and knocks off the scale, it is a god.
What is it she finds with those men

Half the women are asleep on the floor
on pieces of cardboard.
One is face down under a blanket
with her feet and ankle bracelet showing.
Her spear leans against the wall by her head
where she can reach it.
The woman who sits on a chair won’ t speak
because this is not her dress.
An old woman sings an Italian song in English
and says she wants her name in lights:
Faye Runaway. Tells about her grown children.
One asks for any kind of medicine.
One says she has a rock that means honor
and a piece of fur.

The mind goes caw, caw, caw, caw,
dark and fast. The orphan heart
cries out, “Save me. Purchase me
as the sun makes the fruit ripe.
I am one with them and cannot feed
on winter dawns.” The black birds
are wrangling in the fields
and have no kindness, all sinew
and stick bones. Both male and female.

It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God’ s fist made in the walls.