Here, in the half-dark of the sauna,
the bodies of the women glisten...
Naked, disproportionate, lush,
hung and burdened with flesh, they open slowly,
like orchids blooming out of season.
Sweat beads my forehead.
Heat rings my breasts, like circlets,
and I am my body, all shimmering flesh.
The world bends us to its purpose.
In the public gardens, we found
a “gazing globe” balanced
on a waist-high pedestal,
a silver ball a foot in circumference,
reflecting sky and ground,
ourselves as we stood above it.
We stared into its depths,
as in a crystal ball,
our faces large and wild,
arms and legs unnaturally small,
as if a spell were on the world,
or, finally, we clearly saw the world
for what it was: too brightly
shining, circular, unadorned.
Handsome, like those foam-topped tidal waves breaking high, in little crystal globes.
Handsome, like the breeze that lifts a little tuft of tulle. If tulle were life.
Handsome, like a frozen face, tear-tracked, when the sun hammers down.
Handsome. Like fire.
Handsome, like the bottomless sky, with that one proud penetrating star.
Around the bend of a phrase
you return, it’ s dawn in a book, it’ s
a garden, one can
see everything, the dew, a moth
on a leaf and it’ s you
who rises suddenly amid the pages
and the book grows more lovely
because it’ s you
and you’ ve not grown old, you walk
slowly to the door.
The one cashier is dozing —
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn’ t her.
Poetry rejoices even if the culture dies,
over the girl with her first electric, how her high,
thin voice, amplified many times
over by the loudspeaker, is like a giant's
in the green grass of the festival site.
Over the fragile bells of digitalis, how they hide
the pistil and the pollen inside.
Rejoices over rain on the Faroe Islands,
over rendezvous on the Champs-Elysées at evening.
It rejoices over Japan, over Korea,
over arts refined over a thousand years —
the art of swordsmanship, or of drinking tea.
It was winter, near freezing,
I'd walked through a forest of firs
when I saw issue out of the waterfall
a solitary bird.
It lit on a damp rock,
and, as water swept stupidly on,
wrung from its own throat
supple, undammable song.
As he looked up from his glass, its quickly melting ice,
into the bisected glowing demonic eyes of the goat,
he sensed that something fundamental had shifted,
or was done. As if, after a life of enchantment, he
had awakened, like Bottom, wearing the ears of an ass,
and the only light was a lanthorn, an ersatz moon.
It was not that the calendar hadn’ t numbered the days
with an orbital accuracy, its calculations
exact, but like a man who wants to hang a hammock
A pedal-pusher said to me
No braykaiser
No sterfput
A-stepping and a-stoumping cretin-wise
Could drive a man to madness
Just as no thousand Orphas all draped in damp peignoirs
Doing their great kochera
With the prima donna
Of Iquzegdamoda
It sweats into the tongue and groove
of redwood decks with a Tahoe view.
It slides under the truck where some knuckles
are getting banged up on a stuck nut.
It whirls in the egg whites. Among blacks
and whites spread evenly. Inside the chicken
factory, the Falcon 7x, and under the bridge.
There’ s death by taxi, by blood clot, by slippery rug.
Death by oops and flood, by drone and gun.
Death with honor derides death without.
Realpolitik and offshore accounts
are erased like a thumb drive lost in a fire.
