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Where does such sadness in wood come
from? How could longing live in these
wires? The box looks like the most fragile
coffin tuned for sound. And laid
across the knees of this woman
it looks less like a baby nursed
than some symbolic Pietà,
and the stretched body on her lap
yields modalities of lament
and blood, yields sacrifice and sliding
chants of grief that dance and dance toward
a new measure, a new threshold,
a new instant and new year which
we always celebrate by
remembering the old and by

Cutlery clatters into the sink.
But always the characters, uniquely themselves,
only some decades older. They search
for their coats. You were, she reminds him,
our resident nomad, come to pitch your tent
here, sidewalks for sand, unaccustomed taboos:
Morningside Heights, one of your lives.
Thirty years
since the awkward goodbye? Before he goes —

it’ s iron, the bottle
crouched on its white pedestal,
long beak spout and wide open handle
you could see starry sky through.

Everybody was doing that new stitch,
it had spread far west, oh yes,
said Mrs. ______ at Knit & Purl,
but how many hats can one person wear?

I’ d like to be more useful — say
apprentice to a bung fitter, or make
chipped ice, to hit something (not live)
on the head, directly,

with the medicinal poppies of June
nor with Celan’ s bloom-fest of dredged stone,
not with history’ s choo-choo train of corpses,
not with Nottingham’ s Robin Hood
nor Antwerp’ s Diamondland.

Hunched in the bath, four ibuprofen gulped
too late to dull the muscle cramping
to sate a god who thirsts
monthly for his slake of iron,
I am just a body bleeding in bad light.

And then came the ten moons
Full in the sun’ s glare, and the seraphim,
And it was light all night in the orchards
And on the plains and even in the towns
And mankind rejoiced, because it was now the case
That the wrecking and equivocating could carry on
The pale night long. Mankind rejoiced
And went forth to those places twelve hours of light
Had not made it worth the while to despoil
And gamboled collectively on the cliff tops
And regarded the night-broiling of the sea
Hitherto forbidden, but now opened in festival.

Never anymore in a wash of sweetness and awe
does the summer when I was seventeen come back
to mind against my will, like a bird crossing

my vision. Summer of moist nights full of girls
and boys ripened, holy drunkenness and violation
of the comic boundaries, defiances that never

I like the generosity of numbers.
The way, for example,
they are willing to count
anything or anyone:
two pickles, one door to the room,
eight dancers dressed as swans.

I like the domesticity of addition —
add two cups of milk and stir —
the sense of plenty: six plums
on the ground, three more
falling from the tree.

And multiplication’ s school
of fish times fish,
whose silver bodies breed
beneath the shadow
of a boat.

Surfeit of distance and the wracked mind waiting,
nipping at itself, snarling inwardly at strangers.
If I had a car in this town I'd
rig it up with a rear bumper horn,
something to blast back at the jackasses
who honk the second the light turns green.
If you could gather up all the hornhonks
of just one day in New York City,
tie them together in a big brassy knot
high above the city and honk
them all at once it would shiver
the skyscrapers to nothingness, as if
they were made of sand, and usher