When did I learn the word “I”?
What a mistake. For some,
it may be a placeholder,
for me it’ s a contagion.
For some, it’ s a thin line, a bare wisp,
just enough to be somewhere
among the gorgeous troublesome you’ s.
For me, it’ s a thorn, a spike, its slimness
a deceit, camouflaged like a stick insect:
touch it and it becomes what it is:
ravenous slit, vertical cut, little boy
standing upright in his white
communion suit and black secret.
Air as lost time
Voice of a cloud, of a ghost crowned with nimbus
Smack-thin, it lingers forty years
I thought it came from the jeweled world we’ d seen
Everything stuffed, urgent, glittering alive
But it was just pleasure, blank and sure
Now what is there to sing
From speakers, the tune folds and fades in waves
Earphones drive it through your head
A charm,
a dream of protection.
Gurgles hold the night light’ s glow.
A stream of clouds
misting the branching tubes.
Water, in fog, a tub, plug to
wire in the wall saying
Okay, it’ s okay all night.
* * *
Grayscale breath on a fluid
field, with lo-fi
rainpatter — petrol blue — ,
a 60-watt sun uns
-crewed from the
woebegone sky: rip-
rap & coal slurries,
dragline & loess, what phosphor
-us is a semaphore
for, silklike
in its acoustic shadows
The giant takes us
down. A man with no arms.
Unbreakable.
What made today
is concordant,
transforms
the brief decisive phase we call fear.
I look to that whited-over part and see a face.
Then I look to the black and
see the same face.
There were tunnels… chambers
beneath some of the sidewalks… page after page of places…
The last thing you think of.
Won’ t be my fluffy blonde hair.
— ALL HUGE LIKE GIANT FLIGHTLESS KIWIS TWICE THE
SIZE OF OSTRICHES,
they turned and walked away from us
and you were there Jane and you were twenty-two
but this was the nineteen-forties,
in Wichita, near the edge of town, in a field
surrounded by a copse of cottonwoods. It was
THERE ARE HILLS LIKE SHARKFINS
and clods of mud.
The mind drifts through
in the shape of a museum,
in the guise of a museum
dreaming dead friends:
Jim, Tom, Emmet, Bill.
— Like billboards their huge faces droop
and stretch on the walls,
on the walls of the cliffs out there,
where trees with white trunks
makes plumes on rock ridges.
My mind is fingers holding a pen.
I saw you in green velvet, wide full sleeves
seated in front of a fireplace, our house
made somehow more gracious, and you said
“There are stars in your hair” — it was truth I
brought down with me
to this sullen and dingy place that we must make golden
make precious and mythical somehow, it is our nature,
and it is truth, that we came here, I told you,
from other planets
where we were lords, we were sent here,
for some purpose
i
thou
ii
iii
iv
v
vi
Originally appeared in the December 1912 issue of Poetry magazine.
