Where does such tenderness come from?
These aren’ t the first curls
I’ ve wound around my finger —
I’ ve kissed lips darker than yours.
The sky is washed and dark
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
Other eyes have known
and shifted away from my eyes.
But I’ ve never heard words like this
in the night
(Where does such tenderness come from?)
with my head on your chest, rest.
In the beginning, a word, move;
then a plan and then the reasons,
which I do not remember exactly.
I remember clearly only the clothes
we were given for the journey
and the last, silent meal we ate.
We left the place as lightly as we
had come, so many years before.
And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence — and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’ d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
I wait for my shadow to forget me,
to take that one phantom step that I keep
from taking. I wait for the simple flash
of a dancer's spat upon this one moon
of stage-light, the mind's lonely oval
illuminated on the surface of some
windless pond or slew. And the old soft-shoe
practices to get it right, husha-husha-hush
in its constant audition of sawdust.
Even this choreography of useless
wishing is not enough to keep tonight
from becoming nothing more than some floor's
forgotten routine where faded, numbered
Rain commenced, and wind did.
A crippled ship slid ashore.
Our swimmer’ s limbs went heavy.
The sand had been flattened.
The primary dune, the secondary dune, both leveled.
The maritime forest, extracted.
Every yard of the shore was shocked with jellyfish.
The blue pillow of the man o’ war empty in the afterlight.
The threads of the jellyfish, spent.
Disaster weirdly neatened the beach.
We cultivated the debris field.
Castaway trash, our treasure.
Jewel box, spoon ring, sack of rock candy.
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
pausing upon the stone crucifix,
singing: “I am marvelous alone!”
Thrash, thrash goes the hayfield:
rows of marrow and bone undone.
The horizon’ s flashing fastens tight,
sealing the blue hills with vermilion.
Moss dyes a squirrel’ s skull green.
The cemetery expands its borders —
little milky crosses grow like teeth.
How kind time is, altering space
so nothing stays wrong; and light,
i
We lived on a lake with Muscovy ducks.
Interior decorators flush with furniture plans,
the ducks thrust with the thrust of youth.
ii
Monaco was clean, with small clean streets.
There was not much in the way of a shore.
There was hardly any place to go.
One clipped, well-behaved London plane tree,
not welcoming like most ordinary trees,
was kept apart by a white spear-tipped fence,
and had a somewhat diffident sense of noblesse oblige.
Through the cream silk brocade window treatments,
you could see it; it did not contain birds,
repelled the idea of nests, its roots
trained and snipped. At night, it was lit.
In Miami, this May afternoon, I look up,
the sky hot, so hot, always, and heating up hotter —
how long I have loved this scene.
The clouds are white optimistic churches;
I cannot number them.
Herons, pelicans, and gulls glide like dreams
through cloud-portals, cloud-porticos, and cloud-porte-cochères
Giotto could have done with his passion for blues and dimensions.
Hard not to love a place always called by possibility.
Nearby, Cuba is singing and somewhere here
Richard Blanco is writing his poems.
As I enter the city,
In your arms was still delight,
Quiet as a street at night;
And thoughts of you, I do remember,
Were green leaves in a darkened chamber,
Were dark clouds in a moonless sky.
Love, in you, went passing by,
Penetrative, remote, and rare,
Like a bird in the wide air,
And, as the bird, it left no trace
In the heaven of your face.
In your stupidity I found
The sweet hush after a sweet sound.
All about you was the light
That dims the greying end of night;
Desire was the unrisen sun,
