Sing lullaby, as women do,
Wherewith they bring their babes to rest,
And lullaby can I sing too
As womanly as can the best.
With lullaby they still the child,
And if I be not much beguiled,
Full many wanton babes have I
Which must be stilled with lullaby.
It had almost nothing to do with sex.
The boy
in his corset and farthingale, his head-
voice and his smooth-for-the-duration chin
was not
and never had been simply in our pay. Or
was it some lost logic the regional accent
restores?
A young Welsh actor may play a reluctant
Dear one, the sea smells of nostalgia. We’ re beached and bloated, lie
on shell sand, oil rigs nowhere seen. It’ s Long Island, and the weather
is fine. What to disturb in the heart of a man?
A boy is not a body. A boy is a walk.
Shed the machine.
Must be entirely flesh to fight.
Must be strategy instead of filling.
On paunchy green hills
in some province of China, you are the one I speak to.
Someone buys a perfume, recalling
that the bones of his beloved are small.
When he writes the note, when he wraps
the little bottle, he takes that into account. So do I.
I used to think
The mind essential in the body, even
As stood the body essential in the mind:
Two inseparable things, by nature equal
And similar, and in creation’ s song
Halving the total scale: it is not so.
Unlike and cross like driftwood sticks they come
Churned in the giddy trough: a chunk of pine,
A slab of rosewood: mangled each on each
With knocks and friction, or in deadly pain
Sheathing each other’ s splinters: till at last
Without all stuff or shape they ’ re jetted up
I am walking through water with one of my sisters,
the river banked with tiger lilies, the sun
like having a lemon juiced into your eye, our senile dog
ecstatic behind us,
and I am yammering
about my discovery —
a chest deep pool, sentried by trees
that caterpillars were killing
with their yearly carnival tents.
Mortal oddment, there’ s no wish in the blood
But beat, but stay gift-strong, but make demands
To keep within veins this ore’ s diffuse gold,
These voices that know without being known —
These voices that riddle thought with herself,
Ridicule thought in her flimsy eternal
Gowns a child can tear in half with a breath —
That chorus arterial, unbribable,
Blowing song through self as a child blows
A dandelion apart —
All those weeds? —
Fighting a losing battle
lives next door
to a vibrant woman
in her 30’ s.
When he talks to her
sub-mediocre takes over
in a big way.
Zombie-ized by the big eye
she even sleeps with it on.
Just sign me: concerned.
Plum black & the blush white of an apple
shoulder, melon & cream, in tones to list
the flesh; in light, washed colors off at last
& textures sheer with damp I slowly pull
from you with your quick help. Weekend's ample
procrastinations to forget the least
of what we want to do. April, half a blast
of cold, half new light, green & simple.
