Two guys sucking each other in the steam room
didn’ t want anything
to do with me, evidently —
I left them to their comedy.
*
Legato longings:
wish for walnuts, wish for water,
wish to exorcise this morning’ s debauch —
two Fauré nocturnes.
*
In slow motion
Steve tussled with a motorcycle
trying to run me over
on the boulevard of moon smut
I.
Let me speak with expressive
hesitation & a feeling for
interment why even
lineate what isn’ t broken by
music let me speak with
inextricable reluctance.
I want to tear the heart
from refused convalescence
& feed it those long fronds
of river bed grass. I want to
tear the heart out of style
& put it between
utter thrall & the infancy
of all things impure.
Torn out, a flame thickens
between us as if
not right now we’ ll be
ripped from this life
His Exterior
Reader unmov’ d and Reader unshaken, Reader unseduc’ d
and unterrified, through the long-loud and the sweet-still
I creep toward you. Toward you, I thistle and I climb.
I crawl, Reader, servile and cervine, through this blank
season, counting — I sleep and I sleep. I sleep,
Reader, toward you, loud as a cloud and deaf, Reader, deaf
Side by side through the streets at midnight,
Roaming together,
Through the tumultuous night of London,
In the miraculous April weather.
Roaming together under the gaslight,
Day’ s work over,
How the Spring calls to us, here in the city,
Calls to the heart from the heart of a lover!
Cool to the wind blows, fresh in our faces,
Cleansing, entrancing,
After the heat and the fumes and the footlights,
Where you dance and I watch your dancing.
As it would for a prow, the basin parts with your foot.
Never a marsh, of heron blue
but the single red feather
from the wing of some black bird, somewhere
a planked path winds above water,
the line of sky above this aching space.
Movement against the surface
is the page that accepts no ink.
A line running even
over the alternating depths, organisms, algae,
a rotting leaf.
Begins in interruption:
an ambulance bell at the center
of sleep, the room tilts
sideways, furniture slides,
an octet of amber blue
verres à liqueur, one with a cut
at the lip, clatters as a quaalude
light in tatters mattes the
curtains ormolu:
I miss you
is what I want to say
like a rocket
stocked from the Reagan
years, its radar gone haywire,
wiring fried but
live inside a bunker of some
I was a man
and I was trying to save a woman in danger.
I picked her up in my arms
and flew.
Flying like a frog swimming in air
I ditched our nameless pursuer
and landed. There was a guy
waiting for us
who looked
like a king.
Caught.
Now I have to accept the punishment
for saving the woman.
First,
we have to take a shower.
The effect is to loosen
the skin from the muscle
until it peels off.
The woman
picks up the pieces of my skin and
Womanhood, wanton, ye want:
Your meddling, mistress, is mannerless;
Plenty of ill, of goodness scant,
Ye rail at riot, reckless:
To praise your port it is needless;
For all your draff yet and your dregs,
As well borne as ye full oft time begs.
Merry Margaret,
As midsummer flower,
Gentle as a falcon
Or hawk of the tower:
With solace and gladness,
Much mirth and no madness,
All good and no badness;
So joyously,
So maidenly,
So womanly
Her demeaning
In every thing,
