The dove-white gulls
on the wet lawn in Washington Square
in the early morning fog
each a little ghost in the gloaming
Souls transmigrated maybe
from Hudson’ s shrouded shores
across all the silent years —
Which one’ s my maybe mafioso father
in his so white suit and black shoes
in his real estate office Forty-second Street
or at the front table wherever he went —
Which my dear lost mother with faded smile
London
crossfigured
creeping with trams
and the artists on sundays
in the summer
all ‘tracking Nature’
in the suburbs
People getting divorced
riding around with their clothes in the car
and wondering what happened
to everyone and everything
including their other
pair of shoes
And if you spy one
then who knows what happened
Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
to wake to winter in the coming out of the time of year
when they release
the masterpieces,
but to be still in the other night.
some drown in movies.
some prefer the unfinished
ungovernable recital,
a mystical ecology
where one dies in a camp,
or rolls out with the dice
on the sidewalk among boys with
cardboard shields
and plays dead in white crinoline.
what if paradise was only lifting the veil to flirt.
no one perfect, but perfection inserts
us so, Pascal
the archive dance of
frank gehry crumples
to the sky its finger
and walking bridge.
the mummers disappear
my city sounds.
dance crumples to
the archive sky of fela.
the breaking public crush
a lot and pilgrimage from
greenville (to farmville) to ruleville up the road.
let me place Mrs. Hamer, who
crush like an architect outside, like
broke composition, in parchman.
lula and helena strayed
to the dock, founded the hiding
republic of the westside trucks to come
I gave you sorrow to hang on your wall
Like a calendar in one color.
I wear a torn place on my sleeve.
It isn't as simple as that.
Between no place of mine and no place of yours
You'd have thought I'd know the way by now
Just from thinking it over.
Oh I know
I've no excuse to be stuck here turning
Like a mirror on a string,
Except it's hardly credible how
It all keeps changing.
Loss has a wider choice of directions
Than the other thing.
as if it were a scene made-up by the mind,
that is not mine, but is a made place,
that is mine, it is so near to the heart,
an eternal pasture folded in all thought
so that there is a hall therein
that is a made place, created by light
wherefrom the shadows that are forms fall.
Through the branches of the Japanese cherry
Blooming like a cloud which will rain
A rain white as the sun
The living room across the roadway
Cuts its square of light
And in it fight
Two figures, hot, irate,
Stuck between sink and sofa in that golden cage.
Come out into the night, walk in the night,
It is for you, not me.
The cherry flowers will rain their rain as white
Cool as the moon.
Listen how they surround.
You swing among them in your cage of light.
I am merely posing for a photograph.
Remember, when the Nomenclature
stops you, tell them that — “Sirs, he was posing
for my camera, that is all.”... yes, that may just work.
