Relationships

Life in
unbridled

collapse, Let tuneful praise ascend

Not a single line

out of step with my band, aboard

the riverboat
when the sun
shown red

and especially dark upon my room

Over the warming ground, swings toll like clock tower bells.
Squirrels spiral the trunk of a pine.
We fill a pail with sand.
The day is robin’ s eggshell fine.

My mother’ s shoulder had three shallow scars.
Shining archipelago.
The quiet theaters of our lives.
Immune is a sung word, skirting sorrow.

Kneeling at no registry of toddlers with amorphous voices.
Night sweats without monument.
The lake has the sea on its breath.
One man has an island.

I know that rarity precedes extinction,
Like that of the purple orchid in my garden,
Whose sudden disappearance rattled me.

Jane, in her way, is also beautiful.
And therefore near extinction, I suppose.
She is certainly rare and fragile of  bone.

She insists she is dying, day by dubious day,
And spends her evenings looking at photographs
Of  her mother, who never believed in love.

Rare Jane, I worship you. But I can’ t deny
You access to the endless
With its river of cold stars.

(there’ ll be days like this.)
— The Shirelles
These folks ’ bout to respect me into the grave.

At eighty Mama said, (mama said)
“People think you change when you’ re old
but you still got a girl inside.”

We’ ve come back to the site of   her
conception. She calls it why

and cries all night,
sleepless, wild.

It seems the way is always
floating and the goal —

to live so the ghosts we were
don’ t trail us and echo.

I think we are inside a flower,
under a pollen of stars vast as scattered sand.

The air pulses with perfume,
flowers calling to flowers and the ferrying air.

But my eyes are thin and elsewhere.
I am thinking, maybe

Some species can crack pavement with their shoots
to get their share of sun some species lay
a purple froth of eggs and leave it there
to sprinkle tidepools with tadpole confetti
some species though you stomp them in the carpet
have already stashed away the families
that will inherit every floor at midnight
But others don’ t go forth and multiply
as boldly male and female peeling the bamboo
their keepers watching in despair or those
endangered species numbered individually

As a boy he had trouble speaking,
past three before a real word preened
from his lips. And for the longest time,
malaprops haunted him. His older sister
did what she could to train the bitten seal
of   his brain to twirl the red ball
on the nose of eloquence, and his grandmother
tired of   insisting he utter the names
of   toys or foods — for every desire
was coded — and gave him whatever
he grunted and pointed to.
O, the man then a boy
thought, when I tower among them
I should invent my own speech

A man who’ s trying to be a good man
but isn’ t, because he can’ t not take
whatever’ s said to him as judgement.
It causes him, as he puts it, to react.
His face and neck redden and bloat,
a thick blue vein bulges up his forehead
and bisects his bald pate, scaring his children
but provoking hilarity at work
where one guy likes to get his goat
by pasting pro-choice bumper stickers
on his computer screen while he’ s in the john,

The love we’ ve defined for ourselves
in privacy, in suffering,
keeps both of us lonely as a fist,
but does intimacy mean a happy ending?
I’ m afraid of marriage.
Driving past them at night, the shadows
on a drawn curtain hide terrible lives:
a father stuck in a job, his daughter
opening her blouse to strangers.

Most of the past is lost,
and I’ m glad mine has vanished
into blackness or space or whatever nowhere
what we feel and do goes,
but there were a few cool Sunday afternoons
when my father wasn’ t sick with hangover
and the air in the house wasn’ t foul with anger
and the best china had been cleared after the week’ s best meal
so he could place on the table his violins
to polish with their special cloth and oil.
Three violins he’ d arrange
side by side in their velvet-lined cases