If you sleep the night inside someone, her cells,
saltwater-stained, fuse with yours like the blood of twins.
Apes in Mauritania grow stronger, Galileo tells us,
influenced by the sphere of angels.
Here, then — thumbnail sketches
for zoning changes along the riparian bank
of the species boundary, for a chimera.
Like fiber optics, human nerves
lay along glassy bone & spinal veins of a fetal mouse
that will be drowned before ever waking.
I
Motionless forgetful music of women and men
touching each forehead, breathing a soul into each immeasurable other,
on earth where we are, stranger, through madness unattainable
or grace, in difficult traffic reaching for each immeasurable other:
no one on earth (O bitterness, O desire, — who commands the ships? —
or, who — ) touching the Lord’ s shoulder, and breathing a soul, has measured
this motionless forgetful music of women and men. Thus
I (behind the eye what sleeps?) must from the blind borrow this light.
Don’ t forget this: Men who live in this time remember the price of each bottle of vodka. Sunlight on the canal outside the train-station. With the neighbor’ s ladder, my brother Tony “Mosquito” and I climb the poplar in the public garden with one and a half bottles of vodka and we drink there all night. Sunlight on a young girl’ s face, asleep on the church steps. Tony recites poems, forgets I cannot hear. I watch the sunlight in the rearview mirror of trolleys as they pass.
A kiss on the forehead — erases misery.
I kiss your forehead.
A kiss on the eyes — lifts sleeplessness.
I kiss your eyes.
A kiss on the lips — is a drink of water.
I kiss your lips.
A kiss on the forehead — erases memory.
1917
Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’ t the first curls
I’ ve wound around my finger —
I’ ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
i
We lived on a lake with Muscovy ducks.
Interior decorators flush with furniture plans,
the ducks thrust with the thrust of youth.
ii
In your arms was still delight,
Quiet as a street at night;
And thoughts of you, I do remember,
Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
Love, in you, went passing by,
Penetrative, remote, and rare,
Like a bird in the wide air,
And, as the bird, it left no trace
In the heaven of your face.
In your stupidity I found
The sweet hush after a sweet sound.
All about you was the light
That dims the greying end of night;
Desire was the unrisen sun,
After the trumpets, after the incense
There were nights insomnia fathered gods
I then rejected as too angry or distracted,
Or whose appetite for submission revealed
Their own lack of faith. Say our names,
All synonyms for trust. Others spoke
In sugared paradox: To know is to know
