My embarrassment at his nakedness,
at the pool’ s edge,
and my wife, with his,
standing, watching —
this was a freedom
not given me who am
more naked,
less contained
by my own white flesh
and the ability
to take quietly
what comes to me.
The sense of myself
separate, grew
a white mirror
in the quiet water
For love — I would
split open your head and put
a candle in
behind the eyes.
Love is dead in us
if we forget
the virtues of an amulet
and quick surprise.
I spent a night turning in bed,
my love was a feather, a flat
sleeping thing. She was
very white
and quiet, and above us on
the roof, there was another woman I
also loved, had
addressed myself to in
a fit she
returned. That
encompasses it. But now I was
lonely, I yelled,
but what is that? Ugh,
she said, beside me, she put
her hand on
my back, for which act
I think to say this
wrongly.
I leave you in your garden.
In the yard
Behind it, run the Airedales you have reared
With boxer’ s vigilance and poet’ s rigour:
Dog-generations you have trained the vigour
That few can breed to train and fewer still
Control with the deliberate human will.
And in the house there rest, piled shelf on shelf,
Hanging out the wash, I visit the cats.
"I don't belong to nobody," Yang insists vulgarly.
"Yang," I reply, "you don't know nothing."
Yin, an orange tabby, agrees
but puts kindness ahead of rigid truth.
I admire her but wish she wouldn't idolize
the one who bullies her. I once did that.
Her silence speaks needles when Yang thrusts
his ugly tortoiseshell body against hers,
sprawled in my cosmos. "Really, I don't mind,"
she purrs — her eyes horizontal, her mouth
an Ionian smile, her legs crossed nobly
My father lived in a dirty-dish mausoleum,
watching a portable black-and-white television,
reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica,
which he preferred to Modern Fiction.
One by one, his schnauzers died of liver disease,
except the one that guarded his corpse
found holding a tumbler of Bushmills.
"Dead is dead," he would say, an antipreacher.
I took a plaid shirt from the bedroom closet
and some motor oil — my inheritance.
Once I saw him weep in a courtroom —
neglected, needing nursing — this man who never showed
Born, I was born.
Tears represent how much my mother loves me,
shivering and steaming like a horse in rain.
My heart as innocent as Buddha's,
my name a Parisian bandleader's,
I am trying to stand.
Father is holding me and blowing in my ear,
like a glassblower on a flame.
Stars on his blue serge uniform flaunt a feeling
of formal precision and stoicism.
Growing, I am growing now,
as straight as red pines in the low mountains.
Please don't leave, Grandmother Pearl.
I become distressed
In america,
I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in
and sweep us apart.
They’ re too busy
looting the land
to watch us.
They don’ t know
we need each other
critically.
They expect us to call in sick,
watch television all night,
die by our own hands.
They don’ t know
we are becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss
we confirm the new world coming.
It’ s not that I don’ t like the hospital.
Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave.
The smell of antiseptic cleansers.
The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true.
My friend, the one who’ s dying, took me out
To where the patients go to smoke, IV’ s
And oxygen in tanks attached to them —
A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared
A cigarette, which was delicious but
Too brief. I held his hand; it felt
Like someone’ s keys. How beautiful it was,
The sunlight pointing down at us, as if
I. Blood
