Kitten curious, or roaring down drinks
in Soho sumps, small hours tour buses,
satellite station green rooms, or conked
out in the bathtubs of motorway hotels,
there you were, with muck-about kisses,
sharking for the snappers, before hell
Is it a weightless pistol —
your hand.
The tail of smoke
like a limitless conversation
risks blooming and death.
The head of a desert.
A blank crawls parallel to lines of combed hair.
A barometer pursued its dream
without even blinking.
A released piglet
pricked up its rose petal ears
and vanished like a star.
Everyone
waits for everyone
on an unknown
but familiar
infinite chessboard.
Translated from the Japanese
Twelve dollars sixty cents,
& the fact that there is no blood no storm
can’ t wash into dirt, that the time for these words
is already ended,
that for all the rain that has been here before
so have I.
& there is less water in the world
She does this thing. Our seventeen-
year-old dog. Our mostly deaf dog.
Our mostly dead dog, statistically
speaking. When I crouch.
When I put my mouth to her ear
and shout her name. She walks away.
Walks toward the nothing of speech.
She even trots down the drive, ears up,
as if my voice is coming home.
It’ s like watching a child
believe in Christmas, right
before you burn the tree down.
Every time I do it, I think, this time
she’ ll turn to me. This time
she’ ll put voice to face. This time,
When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’ t know your fear
is not fear, itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,
who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,
or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?
This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind
that doesn’ t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,
the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,
If only I could forget him, the Frenchman
I saw outside our quarters, creeping round
near daybreak in that density of garden
as if he'd almost grown into the ground.
He was just looking back, peering about him
to check that he was safe here and alone:
once he was sure, his plunder was all his!
Whatever chanced, he'd not be moving on.
Orange peels, burned letters, the car lights shining on the grass,
everything goes somewhereand everything we donothing
ever disappears. But changes. The roar of the sun in photographs.
Inching shorelines. Ice lines. The cells of our skin; our meetings,
our solitudes. Our eyes.
Child
You've boarded me over like a window or a well.
Mother
It was autumn
I couldn't hear the students
only the music coming in the window,
Se tu m’ ami
If you love me
I went for a week's journey in soft ermine.
Darling, the ovals of your hair...
autumn leaves,
your hair the hue of rain-drenched bark, your voice:
Don't ever leave me...
You who I don’ t know I don’ t know how to talk to you
— What is it like for you there?
Here... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship —
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices —
What are you afraid of?
a labyrinth,
as if at its center,
god would be there —
but at the center, only rose,
where rose came from,
where rose grows —
& us, inside of the lips & lips:
the likenesses, the eyes, & the hair,
we are born of,
fed by, & marry with,
only flesh itself, only its passage
— out of where? to where?
Then god the mother said to Jim, in a dream,
Never mind you, Jim,
come rest again on the country porch of my knees.
