U.S.

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,

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...

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.

My father’ s been dead for thirty years
but when he appears behind my shoulder
offering advice, or condemnation, or a quiet pride
in something I’ ve done that isn’ t even thistledown
or tiny shavings of balsa wood in the eyes of the world
— “Albie, grip in the middle and turn
with a steady pressure” — it’ s measurable,
if not the way the wind is in a sock,
or ohms, or net-and-gross, it registers the way
an absence sometimes does, and I listen to him
with a care I never exhibited when he was a presence,

When Clifford wasn’ t back to camp by nine,
I went to look among the fields of dead
before we lost him to a common grave.
But I kept tripping over living men
and had to stop and carry them to help
or carry them until they died,
which happened more than once upon my back.
And I got angry with those men because

I worked the river’ s slick banks, grabbling
in mud holes underneath tree roots.
You’ d think it would be dangerous,
but I never came up with a cooter
or cottonmouth hung on my fingertips.
Occasionally, though, I leapt upright,
my fingers hooked through the red gills
of a mudcat. And then I thrilled
the thrill my father felt when he

Today I’ m thinking of St. Paul — St. Paul,
who orders us, Be perfect. He could have said,
Touch your elbow to your ears, except
that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck,
you might could manage it. The death inside
the flawed hard currency of what we touch
bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw,

For a long time the Spanish from Spain
Who came here became slightly insane
In a special way and just a little.
You can try this yourself.
Walk farther than you can into the forest in New York
So it’ s a toss-up whether or not you know the way back.
For you there’ s going to be a smidge of confusion, a glow of fear

I tell her I love her like not killing
or ten minutes of sleep
beneath the low rooftop wall
on which my rifle rests.

I tell her in a letter that will stink,
when she opens it,
of bolt oil and burned powder
and the things it says.

Because with alarming accuracy
she’ d been identifying patterns
I was unaware of — this tic, that
tendency, like the way I’ ve mastered
the language of intimacy
in order to conceal how I felt —

I knew I was in danger
of being terribly understood.