I thought I was so tough,
But gentled at your hands,
Cannot be quick enough
To fly for you and show
That when I go I go
At your commands.
Even in flight above
I am no longer free:
You seeled me with your love,
I am blind to other birds —
The habit of your words
Has hooded me.
As formerly, I wheel
I hover and I twist,
But only want the feel,
In my possessive thought,
Of catcher and of caught
Upon your wrist.
I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.
My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.
I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,
A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.
I leave you in your garden.
In the yard
Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared
With boxer’ s vigilance and poet’ s rigour:
Dog-generations you have trained the vigour
That few can breed to train and fewer still
Control with the deliberate human will.
And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
"I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly.
"Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing."
Yin, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind,"
she purrs — her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil — my inheritance.
Once I saw him weep in a courtroom —
neglected, needing nursing — this man who never showed
Half-eagle, half-lion, the fabulous
animal struts, saber-clawed but saintly,
a candlewicked ornament dangling
from our rickety sugar pine. Butternut
pudding in our bellies. His reindeer
and sleigh hurried here and gone — thank God
for us childless folks. Almost: the lovelocked
Griffins on the sofa, sockfooted, hearing
Born, I was born.
Tears represent how much my mother loves me,
shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
My heart as innocent as Buddha's,
my name a Parisian bandleader's,
I am trying to stand.
Father is holding me and blowing in my ear,
like a glassblower on a flame.
Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling
of formal precision and stoicism.
Growing, I am growing now,
as straight as red pines in the low mountains.
Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl.
I become distressed
In america,
I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in
and sweep us apart.
They’ re too busy
looting the land
to watch us.
They don’ t know
we need each other
critically.
They expect us to call in sick,
watch television all night,
die by our own hands.
They don’ t know
we are becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss
we confirm the new world coming.
It’ s not that I don’ t like the hospital.
Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave.
The smell of antiseptic cleansers.
The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true.
My friend, the one who’ s dying, took me out
To where the patients go to smoke, IV’ s
And oxygen in tanks attached to them —
A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared
A cigarette, which was delicious but
Too brief. I held his hand; it felt
Like someone’ s keys. How beautiful it was,
The sunlight pointing down at us, as if
Before the glimmer of his sunken eyes,
What question could I answer with my lies?
Digesting everything, it’ s all so plain
In him, his abdomen so thin the pain
Is almost visible. I probe the lump
His boyfriend noticed first, my left hand limp
Beneath the pressure of the right. With AIDS
You have to think lymphoma — swollen nodes,
A tender spleen, the liver’ s jutting edge —
It strikes me suddenly I will oblige
This hunger that announces death is near,
And as I touch him, cold and cavalier,
