Everyone in me is a bird.
I am beating all my wings.
They wanted to cut you out
but they will not.
They said you were immeasurably empty
but you are not.
They said you were sick unto dying
but they were wrong.
You are singing like a school girl.
You are not torn.
Child, the current of your breath is six days long.
You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast. Your lips are animals; you are fed
with love. At first hunger is not wrong.
The nurses nod their caps; you are shepherded
down starch halls with the other unnested throng
'Tis time this heart should be unmoved,
Since others it hath ceased to move:
Yet though I cannot be beloved,
Still let me love!
My days are in the yellow leaf;
The flowers and fruits of Love are gone;
The worm — the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone!
Spared by a car or airplane crash or
cured of malignancy, people look
around with new eyes at a newly
praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.
For I’ ve been brought back again from the
fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie
down for long naps. And I’ ve also been
pardoned miraculously for years
by the lava of chance which runs down
the world’ s gullies, silting us back.
Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet
happened away.
On my birthday
A crow guffaws, dirty man throwing the punch of his
one joke. And now, nearer, a murder
answers, chortling from the pale hill’ s brow.
From under my lashes’ wings they stretch
clawed feet. There the unflappable years
perch and stare. When I squint, when I
grin, my new old face nearly hops
off my old new face. Considering what’ s flown,
what might yet fly, I lean my chin
on the palm where my half-cashed fortune lies.
For your birthday, I’ m learning to pop champagne corks
with a cossack sword when all you asked for was world peace.
I’ m actioning the deliverables to wish you many happy returns
of the ecstasies that are imminent when all you requested
was a contentment so quiet it’ s inaudible. Remember when
I gave you a robe of black silk that floats and does not rustle?
When all you desired was to turn from what was finished and hard
Sweetheart
when you break thru
you’ ll find
a poet here
not quite what one would choose.
I won’ t promise
you’ ll never go hungry
or that you won’ t be sad
on this gutted
breaking
globe
but I can show you
baby
enough to love
to break your heart
forever
Light a match. Watch the blue part
flare like a shocked piñata
from the beating
into the sky,
watch how fast thin
wood burns & turns toward the skin,
the olive-orange skin of your thumb
Like words put to a song, the bunched tobacco leaves
are strung along a stick, the women
standing in the August heat for hours — since first light —
under the pitched tin roof, barefoot, and at their feet
the babies, bare-assed, dirty, eating dirt.
The older children hand the leaves from the slide,
three leaves at a time, stalks upright, three handers
for each stringer, and three more heaped canvas slides
The fact of the harp swells into the air,
Alien and familiar and entirely too large,
An elephant lost in the suburbs,
And opens with its cry a strange passage
Between the harp itself, the fragile harp,
And the almost guilty knowledge
Of the stroke of luck that brought it here
And the care with which it must depart.
