Couplet

“I’ m glad you’ re positive.”
“I’ m glad you’ re positive,

too, though, of course, I wish
you weren’ t.” I wish you weren’ t

either is the response I expect,
and you say nothing.

And who can blame you?
Not me. I’ m not the one

who’ ll call you after dinner and a movie.
You’ re not the one who’ ll call me.

We both know we have
that — what? — that ultimate date

one night to come, one bright morning.
Who can blame us? Not the forks

and not the knives that carry on
and do the heavy lifting now.

From breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do —
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Two women on a train
sit beside me.

I am young and the world
is flying and I am watching.

One of them is frosty.
The other turns like a leaf

to hand me something —
it looked for all the world like a page.

I thought at the time
that it needed me and I was right.

The letters fell into place
and simple flowers grew.

Now it talks unceasingly
in long white verses

as if at a wedding,
something women understand

and gently want and then regift.
I myself agree with Herbert,

I don’ t say things I don’ t want to say
or chew the fat with fat cats just because.

With favor-givers who want favors back,
I tend to pass on going for the ask.

I send, instead, a series of regrets,
slip the winding snares that people lay.

The unruffledness I feel as a result,
the lank repose, the psychic field of rye

swayed in wavy air, is my respite
among the shivaree of clanging egos

on the packed commuter train again tonight.
Sapping and demeaning — it takes a lot

That we await a blessed hope, & that we will be struck
With great fear, like a baby taken into the night, that every boot,

Every improvised explosive, Talon & Hornet, Molotov
& rubber-coated bullet, every unexploded cluster bomblet,

Every Kevlar & suicide vest & unpiloted drone raining fire
On wedding parties will be burned as fuel in the dark season.

That we will learn the awful hunger of God, the nerve-fraying
Cry of God, the curdy vomit of God, the soiled swaddle of God,

Knock me or nothing, the things of this world
ring in me, shrill-gorged and shrewish,

clicking their charms and their chains and their spouts.
Let them. Let the fans whirr.

All the similar virgins must have emptied
their flimsy pockets, and I

was empty enough,
sugared and stretched on the unmown lawn,

dumb as the frost-pink tongues
of the unpruned roses.

When you put your arms around me in that moment,
when you pulled me to you and leaned

back, when you lifted me
just a few inches, when you shook me

We’ ve come back to the site of   her
conception. She calls it why

and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.

It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —

to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.

I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.

The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.

But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe

I was involved in the serious business
of ripping apart my own body.

I’ d run my fingers over it,
seeking but never finding

the right point of entry,
so having to tear one myself,

though midway through
I’ d always tire,

and let night enter
like a silver needle,

sewing my eyelids shut.
This was not an original practice,

but thinking, for a time, that it was
felt like being able to choose

when spring would arrive:
engineering an April

At Robben Island the political prisoners studied.
They coined the motto Each one Teach one.

In Argentina the torturers demanded the prisoners
Address them always as “Profesor.”

Many of my friends are moved by guilt, but I
Am a creature of shame, I am ashamed to say.

Culture the lock, culture the key. Imagination
That calls boiled sheep heads “Smileys.”

I could pick anything and think of you —
This lamp, the wind-still rain, the glossy blue
My pen exudes, drying matte, upon the page.
I could choose any hero, any cause or age
And, sure as shooting arrows to the heart,
Astride a dappled mare, legs braced as far apart
As standing in silver stirrups will allow —