Free Verse

In Japan, when you die, they wheel
what’ s left of you out of the incinerator,
and what’ s left of your family takes turns
picking with special chopsticks.
It looks like they have gathered to dine
over a dead campfire, but they are not,
of course, eating you. They are feeding you
to the round mouth of an urn:
only in pieces, Father, to the fire.
In their bright swimsuits,
my daughters spill warm sand over my skin
as I lie still, watching the sun
needle the sky. The baby licks her fingers

O you gods, you long-limbed animals, you
astride the sea and you unhammocked
in the cyprus grove and you with your hair
full of horses, please. My thoughts have turned
from the savor of plums to the merits
of pity — touch and interrupt me,
chasten me with waking, humble me
for wonder again. Seed god and husk god,
god of the open palm, you know me, you
know my mettle. See, my wrists are small.
O you, with glass-colored wind at your call
and you, whose voice is soft as a turned page,

I read that in this famous person’ s poems “she searches
for signs of what lies beneath and beyond the self.”
Which seemed to me pointless, as if you wouldn’ t know

whether to paint with egg tempera or eat it. At eighteen,
I came across Tolstoy’ s “What is Art?” where he said
an artist is different from other people because instead

of eating an apple he paints it. Even then I thought why
can’ t he paint it and then eat it, the way at eight, the war
just over, I stood shoeless in line in the snowy playground

Ah Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would you do with it?
I’ d take my earrings out of hock,
Marry a blind man,
And live on a tree-lined block.

But Margarida,
If I gave you my life,
What would your mother say?

We communicated by cheeses,
unwrapping them gingerly,
parting the crust with a fork,
tasting dew, must, salt,
raising an eyebrow,

or we let chianti talk for us,
rolling it in the glass,
staring — it was dark and shiny
as the pupil, and stared back —
or we undressed each other;

we took long walks hand in hand
in the vineyards, the pastures,
resenting each other bitterly
for our happiness that excluded us
as surely as the world did,
mountain after mountain.

The kids should visit a history museum
in their senior year, to understand disgrace as
one form of Clinton’ s victory. On the other hand
the European Community foreign debt gives
everybody bad dreams. So we do need to solve
the problem of students reading difficult things
that will lead them astray: why did Rimbaud
turn from socialism to capitalism? As if

To be free of situations,
To live from day to day without events

We gaze into your eyes, eyes, eyes, eyes.
We forget the display is blind.

Your fanned tail really a cupped palm,
gathering each hen’ s quiver to your ear,

your feathers the green-blue glamours of
reflective absence. No one

ever praises the ass of the peacock,
grin of quills that does the heavy lifting,

or how you eat anything from ants
to Styrofoam, from cheese to chicken.

Road roamer, flower devourer:
the one who’ ll pick a fight with a goat.

Geneticist as driver, down the gene
codes in, let's say, a topless coupe
and you keep expecting bends,

real tyre-testers on tight
mountain passes, but instead it's dead
straight, highway as runway,

helix unravelled as vista,
as vanishing point. Keep your foot
down. This is a finite desert.

You move too fast to read it,
the order of the rocks, the cacti,
roadside weeds, a blur to you.

Every hour or so, you pass a shack
which passes for a motel here:
tidy faded rooms with TVs on

Wake me in South Galway, or better yet
In Clare. You'll know the pub I have in mind.
Improvise a hearse — one of those decrepit
Postal vans would suit me down to the ground —
A rust-addled Renault, Kelly green with a splash
Of Oscar Wilde yellow stirred in to clash
With the dazzling perfect meadows and limestone
On the coast road from Kinvara down toward Ballyvaughan.