I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.
I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.
She visits still too much, dressed in aromas
of fir needles, mango, mold: I still get lost
knowing she’ s close, me not getting younger
or more conscious. Sometimes I fantasticate
I’ m broad awake: her witchy presence waits
for me to jump into her arms, but then she’ s just
an incoherent ache in sleep’ s freaked scenes.
I feel her frosty nitrogenous hands and wrists
vaporing nooses around my head and feet
and genitals, conjuring my drab hair
into a party bowl of oiled, desirable locks.
Up — or out? — here:
a problem of preposition,
my uneasy relation
with the world. Whether I’ m
above it or apart. On the other side
of the latched glass door, a man
loves me. Worries. Calls my name.
•
Where — for art — thou-
sands of windows go dark
in slow succession. On Essex
and Ludlow and Orchard.
A thousand times goodnight.
•
A boy throwing stones at a window.
Right window, wrong boy.
•
I was passionate,
filled with longing,
I searched
far and wide.
But the day
that the Truthful One
found me,
I was at home.
The truck grinds by
and pumps out grit;
the road glints and
goes still.
The barn owl that
had not finished here
returns. But with
its fill
of scavenges,
face ruffled in mulch,
the vole is lost
and safe
so the silent specter
flits away, its
moon face to
the moon
and rears unknown
against a copse,
claws tipped for
the strafe
and something dies
too soon.
He filled her between
the hay bales in
that Dutch barn, now
abandoned,
I like to lie with you wordless
on black cloud rooft beach
in late june 5 o’ clock tempest
on clump weed bed with sand
fitting your contours like tailor made
and I like to wash my summer brown face
in north cold hudson rapids
with octagon soap
knees niched in steamy rocks
where last night’ s frog stared
at our buddhist sleep
but most of all I like to see
the morning happen...
Immersed
we don’ t
ask
who entered
whose stream.
Take
my hand there
is no
line no
bridge only
fond
foolishness —
the bread
crumbs I
bring you
in
morning —
they float
on the
surface
water with
two
violins
un-
strung like
the silent
song
on your
lips soft
as the
same
hands I
crushed to
keep
you from
death.
1
I now release from my blood the bird of thirty she wasted
that’ s how wars crumble us
I now tell those who are exhausted from the expense
of children the secret of happiness and happiness itself
As we sat at the feet of the string quartet,
in their living room, on a winter night,
through the hardwood floor spurts and gulps
and tips and shudders came up, and the candle-scent
air was thick-alive with pearwood,
ebony, spruce, poplar, and horse
howled, and cat skreeled, and then,
When we talk about when to tell the kids,
we are so together, so concentrated.
I mutter, “I feel like a killer.” “I’ m
the killer” — taking my wrist — he says,
holding it. He is sitting on the couch,
the old indigo chintz around him,
rich as a night sea with jellies,
I am sitting on the floor. I look up at him,
as if within some chamber of matedness,
some dust I carry around me. Tonight,
to breathe its Magellanic field is less
painful, maybe because he is drinking
a wine grown where I was born — fog,
