English Poems

When I know what people think of me
I am plunged into my loneliness. The grey

hat bought earlier sickens.
I have no purpose no longer distinguishable.

A feeling like being choked
enters my throat.

My embarrassment at his nakedness,
at the pool’ s edge,
and my wife, with his,
standing, watching —

this was a freedom
not given me who am
more naked,
less contained

by my own white flesh
and the ability
to take quietly
what comes to me.

The sense of myself
separate, grew
a white mirror
in the quiet water

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent —
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

For love — I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.

Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.

I spent a night turning in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat

sleeping thing. She was
very white

and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I

also loved, had
addressed myself to in

a fit she
returned. That

encompasses it. But now I was
lonely, I yelled,

but what is that? Ugh,
she said, beside me, she put

her hand on
my back, for which act

I think to say this
wrongly.

Sir star, Herr Lenz, white season body
master snapping masts in half, absent
winds’ workmanship: what window
will I look you through, what brook, stream

creaking past fretwork weeds, clouds
in the context of cold? Lord knot
to be untied, skiff hard alee ill winds:
a hiss of wish and cinders and I

am warm, crossing dazed oceans by hand
to sow the doubtful sea with drought. Mine
of rain and seize and sluice, you change

Petrarch dreams of pebbles
on the tongue, he loves me
at a distance, black polished stone
skipping the lake that swallows

worn-down words, a kind of drown
and drench and quench and very kind
to what I would've said. Light marries
water and what else (unfit

for drinking purposes), light lavishes
my skin on intermittent sun. (I am weather
and unreasonable, out of all
season. Petrarch loves my lies

1
When in his twenties a poetry's full strength
Burst into voice as an unstopping flood,
He let the divine prompting (come at length)
Rushingly bear him any way it would
And went on writing while the Ferry turned
From San Francisco, back from Berkeley too,
And back again, and back again. He learned
You add to, you don't cancel what you do.

You go from me
In June for months on end
To study equanimity
Among high trees alone;
I go out with a new boyfriend
And stay all summer in the city where
Home mostly on my own
I watch the sunflowers flare.

The blue jay scuffling in the bushes follows
Some hidden purpose, and the gust of birds
That spurts across the field, the wheeling swallows,
Has nested in the trees and undergrowth.
Seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both,
One moves with an uncertain violence
Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense
Or the dull thunder of approximate words.