I accompany this life’ s events like a personal journalist:
“Little did she know when she got in the car that afternoon...”;
or “Despite inauspicious beginnings,
this was to be their happiest year.”
Little did I expect that our horoscopes would prove true.
And how could we foresee an answer to
that frankly secular prayer, we with so little faith
as to be false prophets to our most fortunate gifts.
We are dropping one and gaining two — .
The things I cannot do
include to sleep,
to calm the spillway of the blood,
to face an auditorium,
wishing it were churchy pillbox hats —
recital mothers’ —
with no sense of Vogue or the Baroque.
I’ ve other pills
to tramp on grief,
estrange pain,
and hatch the part of waking that is dreams,
double one dose to un-depress
and to write less and less
a chronicle of anxiety.
I spot-treat
a spate of addiction
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.
Test for the Old Smile, they’ re going to roast it —
it’ ll have to keep its ends up all night,
for the secretary says she finds it creepy,
and the golfing partner says you got that right,
and the rival says it’ s fake, and the ambitious
junior makes his point with a few slides,
and the protege the Smile was always sweet to
walks up and says it turns his insides.
V
Leave off your works, bride. Listen, the guest has come.
Do you hear, he is gently shaking the fastening chain of the door?
Let not your anklets be loud, and your steps be too hurried to meet him.
Leave off your works, bride, the guest has come, in the evening.
IX
Amidst the rush and roar of life, O beauty, carved in stone, you stand mute and still, alone and aloof.
Great Time sits enamoured at your feet and repeats to you:
“Speak, speak to me, my love; speak, my mute bride!”
But your speech is shut up in stone, O you immovably fair!
VIII
Lest I should know you too easily, you play with me.
You blind me with flashes of laughter to hide your tears.
I know, I know your art;
You never say the word you would.
Lest I should prize you not, you elude me in a thousand ways.
Lest I should mix you with the crowd, you stand aside.
I know, I know your art;
You never walk the path you would.
VII
Sing the song of the moment in careless carols, in the transient light of the day;
Sing of the fleeting smiles that vanish and never look back;
Sing of the flowers that bloom and fade without regret.
Weave not in memory’ s thread the days that would glide into nights.
To the guests that must go bid God-speed, and wipe away all traces of their steps.
Let the moments end in moments with their cargo of fugitive songs.
