I was too shy to say anything but Your poems are so beautiful.
What kinds of things, feelings, or ideas inspire you,
I mean, outside the raw experiences of your life?
He turned a strange crosshatched color
as if he stood in a clouded painting, and said, Thanks,
but no other phenomena intrude upon my starlit mind.
When you take the lost road
You come to the snow
And when you find the snow
You get down on your hands and knees
Like a sick dog
That’ s been eating the grasses of graveyards
For twenty centuries.
When you take the lost road
You find woman
Who has no fear of light
Who can kill two cocks at once
Light which has no fear of cocks
And cocks who can’ t call in the snow.
(Oakland)
Make it
the place
it was then,
so full it split
vision to live
there in winter
so late & wet
abundance
toppled toward
awful — birds
of paradise
a profusion
the ripe colors
of anodized
metal; in gutters
umbrellas
smashed
like pigeons,
bent ribs bright
among black
slack fluttering;
camellias’
pink imagoes
dropping
into water
& rotting,
sweet stink —
& did not
stop :
the inundated
One must be brave to live through
a day. What remains
is nothing but the pleasure of longing — very precious.
Longing
purifies as does flying, strengthens as does an effort,
it fashions the soul
as work
fashions the belly.
It is like an athlete, like a runner
who will never
stop running. And this
gives him endurance.
He startled to see a statue of blind
justice really did loom over the courtroom. But
remained determined to scorn symbolism.
She needed a quarter to call her lover —
the docket was full, she’ d be late for lunch —
and he gave her one. It was not a taunt,
acquiescence, wager, or plea. It was
a quarter. The fact that they had done this —
even this! — together and cordially,
Zipping your skirt, you rustle past,
sand hissing through a glass,
with the Bedouin snap and flash
of static-electric
sparks disturbing fabric.
This morning’ s charge could rouse
The Desert Fathers of Sinai
over which I drowse.
She was in love with the same danger
everybody is. Dangerous
as it is to love a stranger,
she was in love. With that same danger
an adulteress risks a husband’ s anger.
Stealthily death enters a house:
she was in love with that danger.
Everybody is dangerous.
XII
Handsome, like those foam-topped tidal waves breaking high, in little crystal globes.
Handsome, like the breeze that lifts a little tuft of tulle. If tulle were life.
Handsome, like a frozen face, tear-tracked, when the sun hammers down.
Handsome. Like fire.
Handsome, like the bottomless sky, with that one proud penetrating star.
