Take a statement, the same as yesterday’ s dictation:
Lately pain has been there waiting when I awake.
Creative despair and failure have made their patient.
Anyway, I’ m afraid I have nothing to say.
Those crazy phrases I desecrated the paper
With against the grain... Taste has turned away her face
Temporarily, like a hasty, ill-paid waitress
Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated —
chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw
for reasons they leave tactfully unstated,
leaving you to guess at your faux pas
From all you did and didn’ t say for ages,
as in some vast congressional report,
your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;
a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.
In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,
you see yourself, as if you’ d never met.
Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears
a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?
If I stand
alone in the snow
it is clear
that I am a clock
how else would eternity
find its way around
Sometimes in time’ s near
unassailable sangfroid there is
a thawing
& the memory
asserts its musicality again
reminds one that it is at heart
heart’ s artificer
* * *
Somewhere in Okinawa there are stairs
“My husband is the only
constant in”
are concrete stairs that lead one
(or at least led me, age six)
near straight from top to bottom of a cliff face
& they ended in a black-sand beach
1
Four poilus in a wood austerely shitting.
Death watches them, laughing, its sides splitting.
Life is a cry followed by laughter.
The body before, the waste after.
2
Could one hear in that wood the gentle click
of the shutter like the breaking of a stick
or the safety catch on its climacteric
3
They are not angels
though they have the hollow look
of beings bred on ether. There’ s an air
of cool removal from your life, the hawk’ s
indifference to the hare’ s terror.
You see it in their palms, raised casually
against the fresco’ s surface, as to glass
of submarine or spacecraft, and you see
it in their eyes, oracular, that let you pass
alone to unknown agony. The song
Fellow fugitive
Forgive yourself
And me thereby
Thus we can live
Whatever’ s left
Of time for us,
Each day a gift
We take on trust
A heave of afternoon light pulls a tulip from the turf, a bower for locusts, a cup of shells. The farmhouse tilts, a bent shadow on wheels. In cedar rooms a family is molded, silent, wrapped in the wire of steel eyes and stopped voice, romantic ash. This is not my house, my ghost, my uninvited guest, my lost labor of love, my thicket or grease, my JPEG gessoed or rawhide suit. The yellow light throbs like an internal organ — soft body of an overture to insect sounds — sapling of a new world — whose future awaits me at the tilting window of my own domestic hut.
Transfixed to the, by the, on the congruities, who is herself a vanishing point coming to closure — dusky flutter — trilling away like a watchdog on drugged sop, channeling her mother and grandmother who’ ve engraved on her locket phrases in script: “glide on a blade” and “rustling precedes the shuck.” This is not my teeming fate, my rind, my roiling ellipsis or valedictory spray of myrrh.
I flew into Denver April.
Rock salt and sand peppered the asphalt
reflecting myself on a downtown street
where I’ d paused on my route to smell lilacs.
The wanton winds chortled wickedly
over remnant snows in gray clumps of doom
and my heart soared gladly at winter’ s death
but an hour later I had whiskey breath
at a dead end bar full of Indians.
A Winnebago woman waltzed with me
and told me how handsome I truly was
so I bought her drinks and felt her hips
and somewhere between the grinds
