Child
one with the sun
in trackless fields
of yellow grass and thistle, scent
of humid heavy air and the wing music
of bees and flies.
Child, slender
nakedness to itself unknown,
true colour of the light
dispersed invisibly
or glowing around the black hulls
of distant thunderheads, around
the grasshopper’ s countenance,
solemn, vigilant and wise.
He glanced around to check if the treacherous gods
had really given him the reward promised for his accomplished song
and there she was, Eurydice restored, perfectly naked and fleshed
in her rhyming body again, the upper and lower smiles and eyes,
the line of mouth-sternum-navel-cleft, the chime of breasts and hips
and of the two knees, the feet, the toes, and that expression
of an unimaginable intelligence that yoked all these with a skill
she herself had forgotten the learning of: there she was, with him
About the age of twenty, when the first hairfall
signals that nature is finished with the organism
and we just begin to conceive the use of women
(having been all this time
more enamored of the fountain than the cistern),
we retire to nursing homes,
whether they be kaleidoscopic gardens
aimed like a blunderbuss of hermeticism at our neighbors,
or a desperate dream safari through old Zambesi,
where the suicidal waves of angry natives
give the illusion that we are advancing rapidly,
Your idea of embracing horror
was overwhelmed by the horror:
In case you sit across from the meteorologist tonight,
and in case the dim light over the booth in the bar still shines
almost planetary on your large, smooth, winter-softened
forehead, in case all of the day — its woods and play, its fire —
has stayed on your beard, and will stay through the slight
drift of mouth, the slackening of even your heart's muscle —
... well. I am filled with snow. There's nothing to do now
but wait.
The cliff above where we stand is crumbling
and up on the Palisades
the sidewalks buckle like a broken conveyer belt.
Art Deco palm trees sway their hula skirts
in perfect unison
against a backdrop of gorgeous blue,
and for you I would try it,
though I have always forbidden myself to write
poems about the beach at sunset.
All the clichés for it sputter
like the first generation of neon,
and what attracts me anyway
Out of a high meadow where flowers
bloom above cloud, come down;
pursue me with reasons for smiling without malice.
Bring mimic pride like that of the seedling fir,
surprise in the perfect leg-stems
and queries unstirred by recognition or fear
pooled in the deep eyes.
Christmas trees lined like war refugees,
a fallen army made to stand in their greens.
Cut down at the foot, on their last leg,
they pull themselves up, arms raised.
We drop them like wood;
tied, they are driven through the streets,
dragged through the door, cornered
in a room, given a single blanket,
only water to drink, surrounded by joy.
Forced to wear a gaudy gold star,
to surrender their pride,
they do their best to look alive.
Cancer loves the long bone,
the femur and the fibula,
the humerus and ulna,
the greyhound’ s sleek physique,
a calumet, ribboned with fur
and eddies of dust churned to a smoke,
the sweet slenderness of that languorous
lick of calcium, like an ivory flute or a stalk
of Spiegelau stemware, its bowl
bruised, for an eye blink, with burgundy,
a reed, a wand, the violin’ s bow —
loves the generous line of your lanky limbs,
the distance between points A and D,
epic as Western Avenue, which never seems to end
Last night
tossed in
my bed
the sound of the rain turned me
around,
a leaf
in a dried gully
from side to
side,
the sound of the rain took me
apart, opened to what is it?
breath caught in memory of
a deep sweetness
