No reply for your question, but that’s understandable. All she had to do was lie.
Corky’s Car Keys
Despite, or because
Of its rambunctiousness, Kevin and Tracy—only appearances
Matter much—lingered in the not-night, red-painted brick background
Of festivals. And trees, old
Trees, like that one—sweet white dreams
Contain them, “in and out the windows.”
Are the sunsets faster, now in old age, now
That you are inundated with them, or with something
To know me better? Yet despite, or because of, that, we have
To live here, so we should fix
This place up. A long time ago, in some earlier revival,
It seemed one of many handsome, felicitous choices—
How quickly the years pass. How could we tell the sound
Of the city at night would grow up too? And in its uncomfortable
Maturity dictate pyramids, process orders? Yet we can regulate
Everything in a little while, if he is truly the steeple.
Night Life
I thought it was you but I couldn’t tell.
It’s so hard, working with people, you want them all
To like you and be happy, but they get in the way
Of their own predilections, it’s like a stone
Blocking the mouth of a cave. And when you say, come on let’s
Be individuals reveling in our separateness, yet twined
Together at the top by our hair, like branches, then it’s OK
To go down into the garden at night and smoke cigarettes,
Except that nothing cares about the obstacles, the gravity
You had to overcome to reach this admittedly unimpressive
Stage in the chain of delusions leading to your freedom,
Or is that just one more delusion? Yet I like the way
Your hair is cropped, it’s important, the husky fragrance
Breaking out of your voice, when I’ve talked too long
On the phone, addressing the traffic from my balcony
Again, launched far out over the thin ice once it begins to smile.
Written in the Dark
Telling it five, six, seven times a day,
Telling it like a bedtime story no one knows,
Telling it like a fortune, that happened a short time ago,
Like yesterday afternoon, so recently that it seems not to have
Quite happened yet…. All these and more were ways
Our love assumed to look like a state religion,
Like political wisdom. It’s too bad that the two hands
Clenched between us fail us in their concreteness,
That we need some slogan to transform it all into autumn
Banners streaming, into flutter of bronze oak leaves, a surface
As intense and inquisitive as that of the sea. We stayed home.
We drank table wine, yellow then violet, wormwood color,
Color of the sound of waves sweeping across a flat beach
Farther than ever before, taking greater liberties in the name
Of liberty. But it shouldn’t. Don’t you see how there can be
Exceptions, even to this, this firmament, graciousness that is home?
Caesura
Job sat in a corner of the dump eating asparagus
With one hand and scratching his unsightly eruptions
With the other. Pshaw, it’d blow over. In the office
They’d like discussing it. His thoughts
Were with the office now: how protected it was,
Though still a place to work. Sit up straight, the
Monitor inside said. It worked for a second
But didn’t improve the posture of his days, taken
As a cross section of the times. Correction: of our time.
And it was (it was again): “Have you made your list up?
I have one ambulance three nuns two (black-
And-white list) cops dressed as Keystone Kops lists, a red light
At leafy intersection list.” Then it goes blank, pulp-color.
Until at the end where they give out the list
Of awardees. The darkness and light have returned. It was still
The weather of the soul, vandalized, out-at-elbow. A blight. Spared, though.
The Leasing of September
The sleeping map lay green, and we who were never much
To begin with, except for what the attractiveness of youth
Contributed, stood around in the pastures of heaped-up, thickened
White light, convinced that the story was coming to a close,
Otherwise why all these figurines, the Latin freemasonry in the corners?
You stepped into a blue taxi, and as I swear my eyes were in keeping
With the beauty of you as they saw it, so a swallow perpetuated
In dove-gray dusk can be both the end and the exaltation of a new
Beginning, yet forever remain itself, as you
Seem to run alongside me as the car picks up speed. Is it
Your hand then? Will I always then return
To the tier upon tier of cloth layered in the closet
Against what departure? Even a departure from the normal?
So we are not recognized, under the metal. But to him
The love was a solid object, like a partly unpacked trunk,
As it was then, which is different now when remembered.
On the Terrace of Ingots
It was the bitterness of the last time
That only believers and fools take for the next time
Proposing itself as a chore against an expressionist
Backdrop of skylights and other believed finial nourishes, and
You wash your hands, become a duct to drain off
All the suffering of the age you thought you had
Put behind you in defining it, but the sense mounts
Slowly in the words as in a hygrometer—that day
You stood apart from the class in the photograph.
The trees seemed to make a little sense, more precious
Than anything on earth. For the clamor
Was drawing it all away, as in a parade; you saw
How much smaller it all kept getting. And the fathers
Failed. I don’t think it would be different today
If we are alone up here. The flares of today
Aren’t like suffering either, yet are almost everyone.
Tide Music
Again in the autumn there is a case for it,
The tastelessness that just curls up and sometimes dies
At the edge of certain thoughtful, uneventful sidewalks.
In the afternoon you can hear what you can’t see, all around,
The patterns of distress settling into rings
Of warm self-satisfaction and disbelief, as though
The whole surface of the air and the morrow were scored
Over and over with a nail as heavy rains
Pounded the area, until underneath all was revealed as mild,
Transient shining, the way a cloud dissolves
Around the light that is of its own making, hard as it is
To believe, and as though the welcoming host in you had
For some reason left the door to the street open and all
Kinds of amiable boors had taken advantage of it, though the mat
Isn’t out. All the sky, each ragged leaf, have been thoroughly gone over
And every inch is accounted for in the tune, the wallpaper of dreams.
Unusual Precautions
“We, we children, why our lives are circumscribed, circumferential;
Close, too close to the center, we are haunted by perimeters
And our lives seem to go in and out, in and out all the time,
As though yours were diagonal, vertical, shallow, chopped off
At the root like the voice of the famous gadfly: ‘Oh! Aho!’ it
Sits in the middle of the roadway. That’s it. Worry and brown desk
Stain it by infusion. There aren’t enough tags at the end,
And the grove is blind, blossoming, but we are too porous to hear it.
It’s like watching a movie of a nightmare, the many episodes
That defuse the thrust of what comes to us. The girl who juggled Indian clubs
Belongs again to the paper space that backs the black
Curtain, as though there were a reason to have paid for these seats.
Tomorrow you’ll be walking in a white park. Our interests
Are too close for us to see. There seems to be no
Necessity for it, yet in walking, we too, around, and all around
We’ll come to one, where the street crosses your name, and feet run up it.”
Flow Blue
It may sound like a lot of odds and cloud-filled
Ends—at best, a thinking man’s charmed fragment, perhaps
A house. And it could be that father and sky—
Moments so far gone into decay, as well as barely
Rating entry into a stonemason’s yard—from the very first moment
Need no persuading: we know that the sky sits,
That these are sculptures of singular detail
Separate to a particular society. The black jell-like
Substance pours from the eye into the tower in the field,
Making uneasy acceptance. There were differences when
Only you knew them, and the grass was gray, escaping the houses,
The septic tank and the fields. Lost, I found the small stand
In the wood. It was funny and quiet there. And I know now how
This is not a place where I could stay. The endless ladder being carried
Past our affairs, like strings in a hop-field, decants
A piano-tuning we feed on as it dances us to the edge.
Hard Times
Trust me. The world is run on a shoestring.
They have no time to return the calls in hell
And pay dearly for those wasted minutes. Somewhere
In the future it will filter down through all the proceedings
But by then it will be too late, the festive ambience
Will linger on but it won’t matter. More or less
Succinctly they will tell you what we’ve all known for years:
That the power of this climate is only to conserve itself.
Whatever twists around it is decoration and can never
Be looked at as something isolated, apart. Get it? And
He flashed a mouthful of aluminum teeth there in the darkness
To tell however it gets down, that it does, at last.
Once they made the great trip to California
And came out of it flushed. And now every day
Will have to dispel the notion of being like all the others.
In time, it gets to stand with the wind, but by then the night is closed off.
“Moi, je suis la tulipe…”
And you get two of everything. Twin tunics, the blue
And the faded. And are wise for today, allowing as how people,
Dressing up in their way, will repeat your blunder out of kindness
So it won’t happen again. Seriously, the magazines speak of you,
Mention you, a lot. I have seen the articles and the ads recently.
Your name is on everyone’s lips. Nobody comes to see us, because
You have to forget yourself in order to forget other people,
At which point the game is under way. My personality fades away
As dreams evaporate by day, which stays, with the dream
Materials in solution, cast out in a fiery precipitate
Later with people on their way, on parade in a way, and all kinds
Of things. All men are ambiguous and
They sometimes have hairy chests, in a long line
Of decayed and decaying ancestors. Fine in my time, I
Know that I am still, but that there is a blur around
The hole that hatches me into reason, surprised, somewhat, but sure.
Catalpas
All around us an extraordinary effort is being made.
Something is in the air. The tops of trees are trying
To speak to this. The audience for these events is amazed,
Can’t believe them, yet is walking in its sleep,
By twos and threes, on the ramparts in the moonlight.
Understanding must be introduced now, at no matter what cost.
Nature wants us to understand in many ways
That the age of noyades is over, although danger still lurks
In the enormous effrontery that appearances put on things,
And will continue to for some time. But all this comes as no surprise;
You knew the plot before, and expected to arrive in this place
At the appointed time, and now it’s almost over, even
As it’s erupting in huge blankets of forms and solemn,
Candy-colored ideas that you recognize as your own,
Only they look so strange up there on the stage, like the light
That shines through sleep. And the third day ends.
We Hesitate
The days to come are a watershed.
You have to improve your portrait of God
To make it plain. It is on the list,
You and your bodies are on the line.
The new past now unfurls like a great somber hope
Above the treeline, like a giant’s hand
Placed tentatively on the hurrying clouds.
The basins come to be full and complex
But it is not enough. Concern and embarrassment
Grow rank. Once they have come home there is no cursing.
Fires disturb the evening. No one can hear the story.
Like a child. It took me months
To get that discipline banned, and what is the use,
To ban that? You remain a sane, yet sophisticated, person:
Rooted in twilight, dreaming, a piece of traffic.
The Desperado
What kind of life is this that we are leading
That so much strong vagary can slip by unnoticed?
Is there a future? It seems that all we’d planned
To find in it is rolling around now, spending itself.
You step aside, and the rock invasion from the fifties
Dissipates in afternoon smoke. And disco
Retreats a little, wiping large brown eyes.
They come along here. Now, all will be gone.
I am the shadowed, widower, the unconsoled.
But if it weren’t for me I should also be the schoolmaster
Coaching, pruning young spring thoughts
Surprised to be here, in this air.
But their barely restrained look suits the gray
Importance of what we expect to be confronted with
Any day. Send the odious one a rebuke. Can one deny
Any longer that it is, and going to be?
The Image of the Shark Confronts the Image of the Little Match Girl
With a stool on your head you
Again find yourself in that narrow alley
That threads the whole center of the city.
“They’re not nice people today is not nice”
Is the austere bleat and the helpful hints
On the back are overlooked, just as before.
I know whose agents have set feet on this way,
This time. And the sky is unforgettable.
Take a sip of your mother’s drink. It was told
Long ago in the Borodin string quartet how the mists
And certain other parts of antediluvian forests still
Hassle this downtown mysteriously, and somet
imes
The voice of reason is heard for a hard, clear moment,
Then falls still, if for no other reason than
That the sheriff’s deputies have suddenly coincided
With a collective notion of romance, and the minute has absconded.
Songs Without Words
Yes, we had gone down to the shore
That year and were waiting for the expected to happen
According to a preordained system of its own devising.
Its people were there for decoration,
Like notes arranged on a staff. What you made of them
Depended on your ability to read music and to hear more
In the night behind them. It gave us
A kind of amplitude. And the watchmen were praying
So long before rosy-fingered dawn began to mess around
With the horizon that you wondered, yet
It made a convenient bridge to pass over, from starlight
To the daylit kingdom. I don’t think it would have been any different
If the ships hadn’t been there, poised, flexing their muscles,
Ready to take us where they pleased and that country had been
Rehabilitated and the sirens, la la, stopped singing
And canceled our melting protection from the sun.
Indelible, Inedible
Work had been proceeding at a snail’s pace
Along the river, and now that the spring torrents had begun
We kept our distance from the mitered flashing,
The easy spoke-movement of the hopeless expanse
Caught, way out in the distance, with a thread of meaning
Which was fear. Some things are always left undecided
And regroup, to reappear next year in a new light,
The light of change. And the moods are similar
Too the second time around, only more easy of access.
You can talk to each other, sheltered now,
As though just inside the flap of a big circus tent
And leave whenever you want to. Nothing could be easier.
That was then. And its enduring lasted through many