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I listened to them talking, talking,
That tableful of keen and clever folk,
Sputtering... followed by a pale and balking
Sort of flash whenever some one spoke;
Like musty fireworks or a pointless joke,
Followed by a pointless, musty laughter. Then
Without a pause, the sputtering once again...
The air was thick with epigrams and smoke;
And underneath it all
It seemed that furtive things began to crawl,
Hissing and striking in the dark,
Aiming at no particular mark,
And careless whom they hurt.

On the warm Sunday afternoons
And every evening in the Spring and Summer
When the night hurries the late home-corner
And the air grows softer, and scraps of tunes
Float from the open windows and jar
Against the voices of children and the hum of a car;
When the city noises commingle and melt
With a restless something half-seen, half-felt—
I see them always there,
Upon the low, smooth wall before the church;
That row of little girls who sit and stare
Like sparrows on a granite perch.

You have not conquered me—it is the surge
Of love itself that beats against my will;
It is the sting of conflict, the old urge
That calls me still.

It is not you I love—it is the form
And shadow of all lovers who have died
That gives you all the freshness of a warm
And unfamiliar bride.

I could not pity your pain but I pitied the branches
Losing what little the frost had left them to hold.
I could not warm you with sorrow; I turned to the sparrows,
Clustered like heavy brown blossoms puffed out by the cold.

The brain forgets but the blood will remember.
There, when the play of sense is over,
The last, low spark in the darkest chamber
Will hold all there is of love and lover.

The war of words, the life-long quarrel
Of self against self will resolve into nothing;
Less than the chain of berry-red coral
Crying against the dead black of her clothing.

Green miles of leafy peace are spread
Over these ranks, unseen and serried;
Screening the trenches with their dead
And living men already buried.
The rains beat down, the torrents flow
Into each cold and huddling cave;
And over them the beet-fields grow,
A fortress gentle as a grave.

Sometimes after hours of wine I can almost see
the night gliding in low off the harbor
down the long avenues of shop windows

past mannequins, perfect in their gestures.
I leave some water steaming on the gas ring
and sometimes I can slip from my body,

Gone to seed, ailanthus, the poverty
tree. Take a phrase, then
fracture it, the pods’ gaudy nectarine shades
ripening to parrots taking flight, all crest
and tail feathers.
A musical idea.
Macaws
scarlet and violet,
tangerine as a song

At the hour the streetlights come on, buildings
turn abstract. The Hudson, for a moment, formal.
We drink bourbon on the terrace and you speak
in the evening voice, weighted deep in the throat.

They plan to harvest oysters, you tell me,
from the harbor by Jersey City, how the waters
will be clean again in twenty years. I imagine nets
burdened with rough shells, the meat dun and sexual.

There’ s a sickness in me. During
the night I wake up & it’ s brought

a stain into my mouth, as if
an ocean has risen & left back

a stink on the rocks of my teeth.
I stink. My mouth is ugly, human

stink. A color like rust
is in me. I can’ t get rid of it.

It rises after I
brush my teeth, a taste

like iron. In the
night, left like a dream,

a caustic light
washing over the insides of me.

*