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.
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
America is inconceivable without drugs
and always has been. One of the first acts
was to dump the tea. The drug that furnished
the mansions of Virginia was tobacco,
a drug now in much disrepute.
Sassafras, a cure-all, is what they came for
and they dealt it by the bale altho it
was only a diaphoretic to make you perspire —
people were so simple in those days.
The Civil War saw the isolation of morphine
making amputation a pleasure and making
the block of wood between the teeth,
The show did not start off
auspiciously, the contestants
were nervous and kept fiddling
with the wires attached
to their privates, the men
being especially anxious
over the question of balls.
The women were more querulous.
one comes to language from afar, the ear
fears for its sound-barriers —
but one “comes”; the language “comes” for
The Beckoning Fair One
plant you now, dig you
later, the plaint stirs winter
earth…
air in a hornet’ s nest
over the water makes a
solid, six-sided music…
a few utterly quiet scenes, things
are very far away — “form
is emptiness”
comely, comely, love trembles
and the sweet-shrub
John Gordon Boyd
died on the birthday
of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers:
Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald
John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness”
and with extraordinary eyes & ears…
I think of two texts
on the grievous occasion of his death:
“Religion does not help me.
The faith that others give to what is unseen,
I give to what I can touch, and look at.
My Gods dwell in temples
made with hands.”
— Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis
where the car hit him, fireweed sprang with
blazons of fennel
and umbels
of dill fell
through the spokes of a wheel
on Whistun holiday to the sun, Denton
Welch spun a web in his crushed cycle,
sat in the seat, spine curled up like a spider —
and spied: “saw
the very drops of sweat glittering frostily
between the shoulder blades”
of a lad
