Relationships

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.

Love cities, this is what my brother taught me
as he cut soldiers’ hair, then tidied tomatoes
watching Sonya and I dance on a soapy floor —
I open the window, say in a low voice, my brother.
The voice I do not hear when I speak to myself is the clearest voice.
But the sky was all around us once.
We played chess with empty matchboxes,
he wrote love letters to my wife
and ran outside and ran back, yelling to her, “You! Mail has arrived!”
Brother of a waltzing husband, barber of a waltzing wife

In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.

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

Monaco was clean, with small clean streets.
There was not much in the way of  a shore.
There was hardly any place to go.
One clipped, well-behaved London plane tree,
not welcoming like most ordinary trees,
was kept apart by a white spear-tipped fence,
and had a somewhat diffident sense of  noblesse oblige.
Through the cream silk brocade window treatments,
you could see it; it did not contain birds,
repelled the idea of  nests, its roots
trained and snipped. At night, it was lit.

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

Some bloodied sea-bird’ s hovering decay
Assails us where we lie, and lie
To make that symbol go away,
To mock the true north of the eye.
But lie to me, lie next to me;
The world is an infirmity.

Too much of sun’ s been said, too much
Of sea, and of the lover’ s touch,
Whole volumes that old men debauch.
But we, at the sea’ s edge curled,
Hurl back their bloody world.
Lie to me, like next to me,