English Poems

O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you
astride the sea and you unhammocked
in the cyprus grove and you with your hair
full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned
from the savor of plums to the merits
of pity — touch and interrupt me,
chasten me with waking, humble me
for wonder again. Seed god and husk god,
god of the open palm, you know me, you
know my mettle. See, my wrists are small.
O you, with glass-colored wind at your call
and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

I read that in this famous person’ s poems “she searches
for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.”
Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’ t know

whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen,
I came across Tolstoy’ s “What is Art?” where he said
an artist is different from other people because instead

of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why
can’ t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war
just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground

Ah Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would you do with it?
I’ d take my earrings out of hock,
Marry a blind man,
And live on a tree-lined block.

But Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would your mother say?

We communicated by cheeses,
unwrapping them gingerly,
parting the crust with a fork,
tasting dew, must, salt,
raising an eyebrow,

or we let chianti talk for us,
rolling it in the glass,
staring — it was dark and shiny
as the pupil, and stared back —
or we undressed each other;

we took long walks hand in hand
in the vineyards, the pastures,
resenting each other bitterly
for our happiness that excluded us
as surely as the world did,
mountain after mountain.

The child’ s assignment:
“What is a city?”
All dusk she sucks her pencil
while cars swish by
like ghosts, neighbors’ radios
forecast rain, high clouds,
diminishing winds: at last
she writes: “The city is everyone.”
Now it’ s time
for math, borrowing and exchanging,
the long discipleship
to zero, the stranger,
the force that makes us

After death, my father
practices meticulously
until the Bach is seamless,
spun glass in a dream,
you can no longer tell
where the modulations are,
or the pedal shifts
or the split fingerings...

if he rests
it’ s to wind the metronome
or sip his cup of ice...

We want to give ourselves away utterly
but afterwards we resent it, it is the same
with the sparrows, their eyes burn so coldly
under the dusty pines, their small chests swell
as they dispute a crumb, or the empty place
where a seed was once: this is our law too,
to peck and peck at the Self, to take turns
being I, to die in a fierce sidelong glance,
then to hold the entire forest in one tilt
of a tufted head, to take flight suddenly
and fuck in midair, tumbling upward.

It ends badly, this glass of wine,
before you drink it
you have to drink a prior glass,
before you sip you gulp,
before you chug the bottle
you pour it down your throat,
before we lie together
naked, we divorce, before we rest
we grow old, it ends in chaos,
but it is delicious,
when we wake it is the past,
we are the faces staring
from the high lit window,
the unmet lovers, the rivals
who do not exist,
united in a radiance
that will not fade at dawn.

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’ s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if

To be free of situations,
To live from day to day without events