Relationships

Man is so afraid, he look down at cock, long ago many
centuries ships land on the enemy’ s beach, take down
mast in the dark, climb up cliffs in the fog, ram
enemy’ s door, do bad things in castle, oh yea, man
go crazy play in blood like baby with duck in bathtub,
man think about favorite dog, got worms in heart, takes
dog to field trial, dog sniffs out man’ s lies, point
at fool in frozen water, fool man, dead dog, man look
at leaf frozen in pond, man think about woman in new

I place these numbed wrists to the pane
watching white uniforms whisk over
him in the tube-kept
prison
fear what they will do in experiment
watch my gloved stickshifting gasolined hands
breathe boxcar-information-please infirmary tubes
distrusting white-pink mending paperthin
silkened end hairs, distrusting tubes
shrunk in his trunk-skincapped
shaven head, in thighs

I was young once, at least, if not beautiful.
And what is beauty anyway? The light off snow
is pretty. I was young once, as young as any.
After all, she thought, to know the edge
of truth or of mountains, you need to lie or fall.

Everyone has an inner life, O careless love,
it's as simple as that. That's why they hurried
to marry before the month ended — fear of June.
She would avert her eyes from the magazines'
special issues with brides on their creamy covers.

Heraldry and all its lovely language;
I chose my time there learning
elsewhere, where else than land,
Landscape, and how to live, in it
is not like, nothing is like, the colors
or the snow, it is not like pearl and
it is not like the glitter of rainwater
that darkens the bark against which
the occasional bloom-laden branch
might be seen shedding petals. No.
Here is the past: One was once a boy
and read books and could not pronounce

Pei designed the building with views,
smooth masonry, and the mountains aligned
for a photo opportunity; inside are files
sufficient for forever, for fine tuning weather.

Great Spangled Fritillary, the watcher vaguely recalls
from Teach Yourself Lepidoptery, a book.
He wanted to live in a land of appropriate weather
with views of mountains and with music constant.

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.

The marriage ran under their skin, a rash, or maybe
all that red wine, luminescent cocktail hours
in which lost books were rediscovered, or just a rash,
a reaction sending out runners across her chest,
a vine, something close, ruby scarves coming back
into fashion, their son coming back
from school, from the yard, but now, dinnertime
and the family parted, split houses, her ex and his anger
spread down the long hallway of their house
and into the windows of her new apartment, their daughter’ s doubled

The first person in recorded history
struck by a comet slept on her couch
across the road from the Comet Drive-In

and the comet found her roof, her sadness, her knee,
and woke her. Everything that hurts

hurt before, she said. Showing at the drive-in, a documentary
on tightrope-walking: a young man frustrated
that his dream, the World Trade Center, was not yet built

so he practiced for years in a meadow crossing intended sky, intent
like a pillowcase sweetening him, no harm... Here

The blue booby lives
on the bare rocks
of Galápagos
and fears nothing.
It is a simple life:
they live on fish,
and there are few predators.
Also, the males do not
make fools of themselves
chasing after the young
ladies. Rather,
they gather the blue
objects of the world
and construct from them

Here lies, whom hound did ne’ er pursue,
Nor swifter greyhound follow,
Whose foot ne’ er tainted morning dew,
Nor ear heard huntsman’ s hallo’,

Old Tiney, surliest of his kind,
Who, nursed with tender care,
And to domesticate bounds confined,
Was still a wild jack-hare.