After his ham & cheese in the drape factory cafeteria,
having slipped by the bald shipping foreman
to ride a rattling elevator to the attic
where doves flicker into the massive eaves
and where piled boxes of out-of-style
cotton and lace won’t ever be
decorating anyone’s sun parlor windows.
Having dozed off in that hideout he fixed
between five four-by-six cardboard storage cartons
Darling, I leave you the forever unblooming
twig half-sunk in spring mud & the Nature that allows
such delicate & lasting atrocity.
Darling, darling, darling: my voice is a branch that would reach.
I leave you the ragged sky, once full of cloud & now
not. I leave you these things just as I leave
you: graceful passage from one something to the next.
Darling, even in this my voice dissipates
and hue
to have unheld a scale —
silver dishes little mirrors on their chains —
they go that way, This
and hoist
It’s not like looking into a pool,
to let your intelligence run away with you
Come back quarter size, apricot moon
A changeling is a child who
appeared under cover
of the ordinary, in exchange
I wear my heart on my sleeve,
or rather both sleeves, since
it's usually broken.
Sometimes when I join my hands
to pray, the jagged edges
briefly touch,
like a plate that fell and cracked
apart from being asked
to hold too much.
To strip away this incessant chatter,
yes, but what lies underneath it?
Death, of course, or our fear of death.
Which is why we talk so much,
bury our heads in books, turn forests
into pages and pages into mirrors
in which we see ourselves appear
and disappear. When I look up
from the story I've been reading
about the Jews in Nazi Germany
and the silence that closed their
mouths forever, I see a girl outside
the cafe smiling in at her father
who smiles back but cannot hear her.
Love’s language is hyperbole, but whispered,
sibilant similes and promises sotto voce.
It’s easy to imagine you've misheard,
the form and content clash, create this weird
distortion like an echo or a tape delay.
Love’s language is hyperbole, but whispered.
On which do you place emphasis: The words?
Or the breath? The farfetched or the foreplay?
It’s easy to imagine you've misheard
when objectivity has disappeared
and your lover is getting further carried away.
Love’s language is hyperbole, but whispered
You would have thought it foolish to speak to the dead,
but I have lived two decades longer now than you
and all this time I have carried you in my head
so I think I have the right to question what you said,
dear teacher. My religious upbringing’s residue,
you would have thought it foolish. To speak to the dead,
however, is sometimes necessary, especially haunted
by all the things I know you hoped I’d do
with all this time that I have carried you in my head.
In a dream last night I followed where you led
Be precise
authority is magic.
When you think you've got it straight
wax wane declination
feel the movement under your hand
one summer morning
as you observe it set
then rise that night.
Always use a well-sharpened pencil
followed by a good eraser.
Watch the white emerge.
Someone said
that working through difficult equations
was like walking
in a pure and beautiful landscape –
the numbers glowing
like works of art.
And in the same crowded room
a woman I thought I didn’t like
was singing to herself –
talking and listening
My notebook has remained blank for months
thanks to the light you shower
around me. I have no use
for my pen, which lies
languorously without grief.
Nothing is better than to live
a storyless life that needs
no writing for meaning —
when I am gone, let others say
they lost a happy man,
though no one can tell how happy I was.
