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Poems

After Making Love Read Poem

No one should ask the other
"What were you thinking?

"
No one, that is,
who doesn't want to hear about the past
and its inhabitants,
or the strange loneliness of the present
filled, even as it may be, with pleasure,
or those snapshots
of the future, different heads
on different bodies.

Some people actually desire honesty.

They must never have broken
into their own solitary houses
after having misplaced the key,
never seen with an intruder's eyes
what is theirs.

Allegory Of The Cave Read Poem

He climbed toward the blinding light
and when his eyes adjusted
he looked down and could see
his fellow prisoners captivated
by shadows; everything he had believed
was false.

And he was suddenly
in the 20th century, in the sunlight
and violence of history, encumbered
by knowledge.

Only a hero
would dare return with the truth.

So from the cave's upper reaches,
removed from harm, he called out
the disturbing news.

What lovely echoes, the prisoners said,
what a fine musical place to live.

He spelled it out, then, in clear prose
on paper scraps, which he floated down.

But in the semi-dark they read his words
with the indulgence of those who seldom read:
It's about my father's death, one of them said.

No, said the others, it's a joke.

By this time he no longer was sure
of what he'd seen.

Wasn't sunlight a shadow too?

Wasn't there always a source
behind a source?

He just stood there,
confused, a man who had moved
to larger errors, without a prayer.

Charlotte Bronte in Leeds Point Read Poem

From her window marshland stretched for miles.

If not for egrets and gulls, it reminded her of the moors
behind the parsonage, how the fog often hovered
and descended as if sheltering some sweet compulsion
the age was not ready to see.

On clear days the jagged
skyline of Atlantic City was visible—Atlantic City,
where all compulsions had a home.

“Everything’s too easy now," she said to her neighbor,
“nothing resisted, nothing gained.

” Once, at eighteen,
she dreamed of London’s proud salons glowing
with brilliant fires and dazzling chandeliers.

Already her own person—passionate, assertive—
soon she’d create a governess insistent on rights equal
to those above her rank.

“The dangerous picture
of a natural heart," one offended critic carped.

She’d failed, he said, to let religion reign
over the passions and, worse, she was a woman.

Now she was amazed at what women had,
doubly amazed at what they didn’t.

But she hadn’t come back to complain or haunt.

Her house on the bay was modest, adequate.

It need not accommodate brilliant sisters
or dissolute brothers, spirits lost or fallen.

Feminists would pay homage, praise her honesty
and courage.

Rarely was she pleased.

After all,
she was an artist; to speak of honesty in art,
she knew, was somewhat beside the point.

And she had married, had even learned to respect
the weakness in men, those qualities they called
their strengths.

Whatever the struggle, she wanted men
included.

Charlotte missed reading chapters to Emily,
Emily reading chapters to her.

As ever, though, she’d try
to convert present into presence, something unsung
sung, some uprush of desire frankly acknowledged,
even in this, her new excuse for a body.

From Local Visitations, 2003.

Here and Now Read Poem

for Barbara
There are words
I’ve had to save myself from,
like My Lord and Blessed Mother,
words I said and never meant,
though I admit a part of me misses
the ornamental stateliness
of High Mass, that smell
of incense.

Heaven did exist,
I discovered, but was reciprocal
and momentary, like lust
felt at exactly the same time—
two mortals, say, on a resilient bed,
making a small case for themselves.

You and I became the words
I’d say before I’d lay me down to sleep,
and again when I’d wake—wishful
words, no belief in them yet.

It seemed you’d been put on earth
to distract me
from what was doctrinal and dry.

Electricity may start things,
but if they’re to last
I’ve come to understand
a steady, low-voltage hum
of affection
must be arrived at.

How else to offset
the occasional slide
into neglect and ill temper?

I learned, in time, to let heaven
go its mythy way, to never again
be a supplicant
of any single idea.

For you and me
it’s here and now from here on in.

Nothing can save us, nor do we wish
to be saved.

Let night come
with its austere grandeur,
ancient superstitions and fears.

It can do us no harm.

We’ll put some music on,
open the curtains, let things darken
as they will.

from Here and Now, 2011.

I Come Home Wanting To Touch Everyone Read Poem

The dogs greet me, I descend
into their world of fur and tongues
and then my wife and I embrace
as if we'd just closed the door
in a motel, our two girls slip in
between us and we're all saying
each other's names and the dogs
Buster and Sundown are on their hind legs,
people-style, seeking more love.

I've come home wanting to touch
everyone, everything; usually I turn
the key and they're all lost
in food or homework, even the dogs
are preoccupied with themselves,
I desire only to ease
back in, the mail, a drink,
but tonight the body-hungers have sent out
their long-range signals
or love itself has risen
from its squalor of neglect.

Everytime the kids turn their backs
I touch my wife's breasts
and when she checks the dinner
the unfriendly cat on the dishwasher
wants to rub heads, starts to speak
with his little motor and violin--
everything, everyone is intelligible
in the language of touch,
and we sit down to dinner inarticulate
as blood, all difficulties postponed
because the weather is so good.

Mrs. Cavendish and the Dancer Read Poem

Mrs.

Cavendish desired the man in the fedora
who danced the tarantella without regard
for who might care.

All her life she had
a weakness for abandon, and, if the music
stopped, for anyone who could turn
a phrase.

The problem was
Mrs.

Cavendish wanted it all
to mean something in a world crazed
and splattered with the gook
of apparent significance, and meaning
had an affinity for being elsewhere.

The dancer studied philosophy, she told me,
knew the difference between a sophist
and a sophomore, despite my insistence
that hardly any existed.

It seemed everyone
but she knew that sadness awaits the needy.

Mr.

Cavendish, too, when he was alive,
was equally naïve, might invite a wolf
in man’s clothing to spend a night
at their house.

This was how the missus
mythologized her husband – a man of what
she called honor, no sense of marital danger,
scrupled  beyond all scrupulosity.

The tarantella man was gorgeous and oily,
and, let’s forgive her, Mrs.

Cavendish
was lonely.

His hair slicked back, he didn’t
resemble her deceased in the slightest,
which in the half-light of memory’s belittered
passageways made her ga-ga.

And I, as ever,
would cajole and warn, hoping history
and friendship might be on my side.

Mrs.

Cavendish, I’d implore, lie down
with this liar if it feels good, but, please,
when he smells most of sweetness, get a grip,
develop a gripe, try to breathe your own air.

written 2014, appeared in "Poem-A-Day"

Poem For People Who Are Understandably Too Busy to Read Poetry Read Poem

Relax.

This won't last long.

Or if it does, or if the lines
make you sleepy or bored,
give in to sleep, turn on
the T.

V.

, deal the cards.

This poem is built to withstand
such things.

Its feelings
cannot be hurt.

They exist
somewhere in the poet,
and I am far away.

Pick it up anytime.

Start it
in the middle if you wish.

It is as approachable as melodrama,
and can offer you violence
if it is violence you like.

Look,
there's a man on a sidewalk;
the way his leg is quivering
he'll never be the same again.

This is your poem
and I know you're busy at the office
or the kids are into your last nerve.

Maybe it's sex you've always wanted.

Well, they lie together
like the party's unbuttoned coats,
slumped on the bed
waiting for drunken arms to move them.

I don't think you want me to go on;
everyone has his expectations, but this
is a poem for the entire family.

Right now, Budweiser
is dripping from a waterfall,
deodorants are hissing into armpits
of people you resemble,
and the two lovers are dressing now,
saying farewell.

I don't know what music this poem
can come up with, but clearly
it's needed.

For it's apparent
they will never see each other again
and we need music for this
because there was never music when he or she
left you standing on the corner.

You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life.

I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I'll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.

The poem is saying that to you now.

But don't give anything for this poem.

It doesn't expect much.

It will never say more
than listening can explain.

Just keep it in your attache case
or in your house.

And if you're not asleep
by now, or bored beyond sense,
the poem wants you to laugh.

Laugh at
yourself, laugh at this poem, at all poetry.

Come on:
Good.

Now here's what poetry can do.

Imagine yourself a caterpillar.

There's an awful shrug and, suddenly,
You're beautiful for as long as you live.

The Kiss Read Poem

She pressed her lips to mind.

—a typo
How many years I must have yearned
for someone’s lips against mind.

Pheromones, newly born, were floating
between us.

There was hardly any air.

She kissed me again, reaching that place
that sends messages to toes and fingertips,
then all the way to something like home.

Some music was playing on its own.

Nothing like a woman who knows
to kiss the right thing at the right time,
then kisses the things she’s missed.

How had I ever settled for less?

I was thinking this is intelligence,
this is the wisest tongue
since the Oracle got into a Greek’s ear,
speaking sense.

It’s the Good,
defining itself.

I was out of my mind.

She was in.

We married as soon as we could.

from Everything Else in the World, 2007.

The Routine Things Around The House Read Poem

When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.

That was unforgivable.

Yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.

I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are
in the sweet revisions of memory.

It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,
but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.

I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
If I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room
without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.

Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer
feel blessed again.

What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts
when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck
she didn't doom me
with too much or too little.

Had I asked to touch,
Perhaps to suck them,
What would she have done?

Mother, dead woman
Who I think permits me
to love women easily
this poem
is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient
and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

Welcome Read Poem

if you believe nothing is always what's left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies-
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal, like a voice,
If you believe there's no correct response
to death, as I do; that even in grief
(where I've sat making plans)
there are small corners of joy
If your body sometimes is a light switch
in a house of insomniacs
If you can feel yourself straining
to be yourself every waking minute
If, as I am, you are almost smiling .

.

.

What Goes On Read Poem

After the affair and the moving out,
after the destructive revivifying passion,
we watched her life quiet
into a new one, her lover more and more
on its periphery.

She spent many nights
alone, happy for the narcosis
of the television.

When she got cancer
she kept it to herself until she couldn’t
keep it from anyone.

The chemo debilitated
and saved her, and one day
her husband asked her to come back —
his wife, who after all had only fallen
in love as anyone might
who hadn’t been in love in a while —
and he held her, so different now,
so thin, her hair just partially
grown back.

He held her like a new woman
and what she felt
felt almost as good as love had,
and each of them called it love
because precision didn’t matter anymore.

And we who’d been part of it,
often rejoicing with one
and consoling the other,
we who had seen her truly alive
and then merely alive,
what could we do but revise
our phone book, our hearts,
offer a little toast to what goes on.

from What Goes On, 2009

Why I Think I'm a Writer Read Poem

God was listening, but even so
I never told the truth
in confession.

If rd stolen candy
from Woolworth's, I'd say I took
the Lords name
in vain eleven times, Father,
since my last confession.

If I'd
been good,
I'd say I took the Lord's name
six or seven times.

I knew the priest
depended on sins
to feel good about his job,
but most of all I wanted to get back
to the religion
of the schoolyard as fast as possible,
to epiphanous spin moves off the post
and soft reverse layups.

Thus I never properly did penance
at the altar, two Hail Marys
instead of four,
a fast Our Father, maybe half
an Act of Contrition or Apostles
Creed.

I don't know why I never was afraid

Always Something More Beautiful Read Poem

This time I came to the starting place
with my best running shoes, and pure speed
held back for the finish, came with only love
of the clock and the underfooting
and the other runners.

Each of us would
be testing excellence and endurance

in the other, though in the past I’d often
veer off to follow some feral distraction
down a side path, allowing myself
to pursue something odd or beautiful,
becoming acquainted with a few of the ways
not to blame myself for failing to succeed.

I had come to believe what’s beautiful
had more to do with daring
to take yourself seriously, to stay
the course, whatever the course might be.

The person in front seemed ready to fade,
his long, graceful stride shortening

as I came up along his side.

I was sure now
I’d at least exceed my best time.

But the man with the famous final kick
already had begun his move.

Beautiful, I heard
a spectator say, as if something inevitable
about to come from nowhere was again on its way.

Beyond Hammonton Read Poem

The back roads I’ve traveled late
at night, alone, a little drunk,
wishing I were someone
on whom nothing is lost,

are the roads by day I take
to the car wash in Hammonton
or to Blue Anchor’s
lawnmower repair shop
when the self-propel mechanism goes.

Fascinating how the lamplight
that’s beckoned
from solitary windows
gives way to white shutters
and occasionally a woman
in her yard, bending over
something conspicuously in bloom.

So much then is duty, duty, duty,
and so much
with the sun visor tilted
and destination known
can be endured.

But at night .

.

.

no, even at night
so much can be endured.

I’ve known only one man
who left the road,
followed an intriguing light
to its source.

He told me
that he knocked many times
before it became clear to him
he must break down the door.

Checklist Read Poem

The housework, the factory work, the work
that takes from the body
and does not put back.

The white-collar work and the dirt
of its profits, the terrible politeness
of the office worker, the work that robs
the viscera to pay the cool
surfaces of the brain.

All the work
that makes love difficult, brings on
sleep, drops the body off
at the liquor cabinet.

All the work
that reaches the intestines and sprawls.

And the compulsive work after the work
is done, those unfillable spaces
of the Calvinist, or certain marriage beds.

Connubial Read Poem

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.

Dismantling the House Read Poem

Rent a flatbed with a winch.

With the right leverage
anything can be hoisted, driven off.

Or the man with a Bobcat comes in,
then the hauler with his enormous truck.

A leveler or a lawyer does the rest;

experts always are willing to help.

The structure was old, rotten in spots.

Hadn't it already begun to implode?

Believe you've just sped the process up.

Photographs, toys, the things that break
your heart—let's trust

they would have been removed,
perhaps are safe with the children
who soon will have children of their own.

It's over.

It's time for loss to build
its tower in the yard where you
are merely a spectator now.

Admit you'd like to find something
discarded or damaged, even gone,
and lift it back into the world.

In Love, His Grammar Grew Read Poem

In love, his grammar grew
rich with intensifiers, and adverbs fell
madly from the sky like pheasants
for the peasantry, and he, as sated
as they were, lolled under shade trees
until roused by moonlight
and the beautiful fraternal twins
andandbut.

Oh that was when
he knew he couldn’t resist
a conjunction of any kind.

One saidaccumulate, the other
was a doubter who loved the wind
and the mind that cleans up after it.

For love
he wanted to break all the rules,
light a candle behind a sentence
named Sheila, always running on
and wishing to be stopped
by the hard button of a period.

Sometimes, in desperation, he’d look
toward a mannequin or a window dresser
with a penchant for parsing.

But mostly he wanted you, Sheila,
and the adjectives that could precede
and change you:bluesy,fly-by-night,
queen of all that is and might be.

Mary Shelley in Brigantine Read Poem

Because the ostracized experience the world
in ways peculiar to themselves, often seeing it
clearly yet with such anger and longing
that they sometimes enlarge what they see,
she at first saw Brigantine as a paradise for gulls.

She must be a horseshoe crab washed ashore.

How startling, though, no one knew about her past,
the scandal with Percy, the tragic early deaths,
yet sad that her Frankenstein had become
just a name, like Dracula or Satan, something
that stood for a kind of scariness, good for a laugh.

She found herself welcome everywhere.

People would tell her about Brigantine Castle,
turned into a house of horror.

They thought
she'd be pleased that her monster roamed
its dark corridors, making children scream.

They lamented the day it was razed.

Thus Mary Shelley found herself accepted

by those who had no monster in them —
the most frightening people alive, she thought.

Didn't they know Frankenstein had abandoned
his creation, set him loose without guidance
or a name?

Didn't they know what it feels like
to be lost, freaky, forever seeking who you are?

She was amazed now that people believed
you could shop for everything you might need.

She loved that in the dunes you could almost hide.

At the computer store she asked an expert
if there was such a thing as too much knowledge,
or going too far?

He directed her to a website

where he thought the answers were.

Yet Mary Shelley realized that the pain she felt
all her life was gone.

Could her children, dead so young,
be alive somewhere, too?

She couldn't know
that only her famous mother had such a chance.

She was almost ready to praise this awful world.

Plaisir Read Poem

Diarrhea: what nobody likes,
though a word the French love to pronounce.

They surround it with lips and tongue;
it pleases, like sayingcellar doordoes.

Once I gave a pair of tweezers
to anau pairgirl who couldn’t extract
a splinter from her foot.

It was a pleasure
for both of us to see that little thing come out.

Propositions Read Poem

Anyone who begins a sentence with, “In all honesty .

.

.

”
is about to tell a lie.

Anyone who says, “This is how I feel”
had better love form more than disclosure.

Same for anyone
who thinks he thinks well because he had a thought.

If  you say, “You’re ugly” to an ugly person — no credit
for honesty, which must always be a discovery, an act
that qualifies as an achievement.

If  you persist
you’re just a cruel bastard, a pig without a mirror,

somebody who hasn’t examined himself enough.

A hesitation hints at an attempt to be honest, suggests
a difficulty is present.

A good sentence needs
a clause or two, interruptions, set off  by commas,

evidence of a slowing down, a rethinking.

Before I asked my wife to marry me, I told her
I’d never be fully honest.

No one, she said,
had ever said that to her.

I was trying

to be radically honest, I said, but in fact
had another motive.

A claim without a “but” in it
is, at best, only half  true.

In all honesty,
I was asking in advance to be forgiven.

Salvation Read Poem

Finally, I gave up on obeisance,
and refused to welcome
either retribution or the tease

of sunny days.

As for the can’t-be-
seen, the sum-of-all-details,
the One—oh, when it came

to salvation I was only sure
I needed to be spared
someone else’s version of it.

The small prayers I devised
had in them the hard sounds
ofsplitandfrost.

I wanted them to speak
as if it made sense to speak
to what isn’t there

in the beaconless dark.

I wanted them to startle
by how little they asked.

Sweetness Read Poem

Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear
one more friend
waking with a tumor, one more maniac

with a perfect reason, often a sweetness
has come
and changed nothing in the world

except the way I stumbled through it,
for a while lost
in the ignorance of loving

someone or something, the world shrunk
to mouth-size,
hand-size, and never seeming small.

I acknowledge there is no sweetness
that doesn’t leave a stain,
no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet .

.

.

.

Tonight a friend called to say his lover
was killed in a car
he was driving.

His voice was low

and guttural, he repeated what he needed
to repeat, and I repeated
the one or two words we have for such grief

until we were speaking only in tones.

Often a sweetness comes
as if on loan, stays just long enough

to make sense of what it means to be alive,
then returns to its dark
source.

As for me, I don’t care

where it’s been, or what bitter road
it’s traveled
to come so far, to taste so good.

The Snowmass Cycle Read Poem

for Laure-Anne Bosselaar and Kurt Brown







1.

RETREAT

The sailor dreamt of loss,

but it was I who dreamt the sailor.

I was landlocked, sea-poor.

The sailor dreamt of a woman

who stared at the sea, then tired

of it, advertised her freedom.

She said to her friend: I want

all the fire one can have

without being consumed by it.

Clearly, I dreamt the woman too.

I was surrounded by mountains

suddenly green after a long winter,

a chosen uprootedness, soul shake-up,

every day a lesson about the vastness

between ecstasy and repose.

I drank coffee called Black Forest

at the local cafe.

I took long walks

and tried to love the earth

and hate its desecrations.

All the Golden Retrievers wore red

bandannas on those muttless streets.

All the birches, I think, were aspens.

I do not often remember my dreams,

or dream of dreamers in them.

To be without some of the things

you want, a wise man said,

is an indispensable part of happiness.

2.

MOUNTAIN, SKY

I’ve been paying attention

to the sky again.

I’ve seen a ravine up there,

and a narrow, black gorge.

Not to worry, I tell myself,

about tricks the mind plays,

as long as you know they’re tricks.

If the rich are casually cruel

perhaps it’s because

they can stare at the sky

and never see an indictment

in the shape of clouds.

The frown, for example,

in a thunderhead.

The fist.

That big mountain

I’ve been looking at—

I love how it borrows purple

from the filtered light,

sometimes red.

Like any of us

it’s all of its appearances.

It’s good that the rich

have to die,

a peasant saying goes,

otherwise they’d live forever.

Here in this rented house,

high up, I understand.

I’m one of the rich

for a while.

The earth feels

mine and the air I breathe

is rarefied, if thin.

Dusk now is making its last claim.

I love the confluence

of dark mountain, dark sky.

Soon I won’t know the beginning

from the end.

3.

HIM

Those empty celebrations of the half-believer

along for the ride.

Those secret words repeated in mirrors—

someone’s personal fog.

A man’s heart ransomed for comfort

or a few extra bucks, his soul in rags.

I have been him and him and him.

Was it nobility or senility

when my old grandmother tried to drown

artificial flowers in the bathtub?

Can only saints carry the load

without talking about the burden?

I want to lean into life,

catch the faintest perfume.

In every boy child an old man is dying.

By middle age

he begins to stink, complain.

I want to have gifts for him

when we finally meet.

I want him to go out like an ancient

Egyptian, surrounded

by what is his, desiring nothing.

4.

DELINEATION AT DUSK

A lost hour, and that animal lassitude

after a vanished afternoon.

Outside: joggers, cyclists.

Motion, the great purifier, is theirs.

If this were Europe someone in a tower

might be ringing a bell.

People hearing it would know

similar truths, might even know

exactly who they are.

It’s getting near drinking time.

It’s getting near getting near;

a person alone conjures rules

or can liquefy, fall apart.

That woman with the bouffant—

chewing gum, waiting for the bus—

someone thinks she’s beautiful.

It’s beautiful someone does.

The sky’s murmuring, the storm

that calls you up,

makes promises, never comes.

Somewhere else, no doubt,

a happy man slicing a tomato,

a woman with a measuring cup.

Somewhere else: the foreclosure

of a feeling or a promise,

followed by silence or shouts.

Here, the slow dance of contingency,

an afternoon connected to an evening

by a slender wish.

Sometimes absence

makes the heart grow sluggish

and desire only one person, or one thing.

I am closing the curtains.

I am helping the night.

5.

SOLITUDE

A few days ago I stopped looking

at the photographs

clustered on the wall, nudes,

which had become dull to me,

like a tourist’s collection of smooth rocks.

I turned away from the view

and conjured a plague of starlings.

Oh how they darkened the landscape.

Surely such beauty had been waiting for its elegy.

I felt like crushing a rhododendron.

Now and again I feel the astonishment

of being alive like this, in this body,

the ventricles and the small bones

in the hand, the intricacies of digestion .

.

.

.

When the radio said parents in California

gave birth to another child

so that their older child might have

a bone-marrow transplant and live,

I found myself weeping

for such complicated beauty.

How wonderful the radio

and its distant, human voices.

The rain now is quite without consequence

coming down.

I suppose I’ve come to the limits

of my paltry resources, this hankering

for people and for massive disturbance,

then high pressure,

the sequence that’s been promised for days.

I will long to be alone

when my friends arrive.

6.

THE BODY WIDENS

The body widens, and people are welcomed

into it, many at a time.

This must be

what happens when we learn to be generous

when we’re not in love, or otherwise charmed.

I’ve been examining yesterday’s ashes.

I’ve visited

my own candleless altar.

Little by little,

the old selfish parts of me are loosening.

I have a plan for becoming lean: to use

all my fat in service of expansion.

Have women

always known this?

Loveliness and fear

when they open and let in and give away?

The mountains here pierce the sky,

and the sky, bountiful, closes in around them.

7.

A NEW MOUTH

Give me a new mouth; I want to talk.

I’ve been watching the spider mend its web.

I think I’ve learned something

about architecture from a swallow.

Excuse me while I separate the nettles

from the flowers, while I put my nose

to the black moist smell of earth

and come up smiling.

Somewhere in the world

is the secret name

for God, many-lettered, unpronounceable.

There’s a speakable grace

in the fields and even in the cities.

The grapes ripen, someone refuses to become

a machine.

And yet I want to talk

about the worn-out husks of men and women

returning from the factories,

the venereal streets, the bruise history

passes down to its forlorn children.

I need a new mouth to acknowledge

that piety will keep us small, imprisoned,

that it’s all right to be ridiculous

and sway first to the left, then to the right,

in order to find our balance.

I’ve been watching

an evening star quiver.

I’ve been trying

to identify the word before its utterance.

Give me a new mouth and I’ll be

a guardian against forgetfulness.

I’ve noticed the wind doesn’t discriminate

between sycamore and cypress.

I want to find the cool, precise language

for how passion gives rise to passion.

8.

STRANGER

The wind gone.

I can hear my breathing.

I can hear the lateness of the hour

by what isn’t moving.

Woodrun Slope.

Snowmass Village.

These are winter names, and it’s summer.

The water from the mountains

rushes down man-made gullies.

Serious phantoms with their black tears

are out tonight.

I’m close—my other delusion goes—

to the heart of things.

A young man with a young man’s itch

would rise and go out prowling.

Tomorrow I’ll choose a mountain

that’s a hill, take the slowest horse

at the Lazy-7, slow and old,

sure to know its trail.

I knew a man who said he could dominate

solitude.

In other ways, too,

he was a fool.

Once I wanted to be

one of those fabulous strangers

who appear and disappear.

Now I arrive only by invitation,

stay long enough to earn my fare.

Outside my window, clouds from the west

erasing the stars.

A coyote howling its singular news.

At whatever pace,

isn’t there an imperative to live?

Before a person dies he should experience

the double fire,

of what he wants and shouldn’t have.