returning to the parent shock.
You've read this far, you might as well
have been there too. Your eyes accuse
me of false chase. Come off it,
you're the one who thought it wouldn't
matter what we found.
Though we came with lights
and tongues thick in our heads,
the issue was a human life.
The child was still
alive. Admit you're glad.
Psychoanalysis
Everything is
luxurious; there is no past,
only an oceanic present.
You troll along in your glass-
bottomed boat.
Parents and siblings lurk
among the coral with thick eyes,
they will not eat you
if you understand them
well enough. Stop,
you whisper to the ingratiating
pilot, here we are,
maybe this means an end
to all those hours listlessly improvising.
Letting down
the line you think maybe
now you have it,
it will come up slick
with significance, laden
with the sweet guilt you can name.
Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41
Although my house floats on a lawn
as plush as a starlet's body
and my sons sleep easily,
I think of death's salmon breath
leaping back up the saxophone
with its wet kiss.
Hearing him dead,
I feel it in my feet
as if the house were rocked
by waves from a soundless speedboat
planing by, full throttle.
Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP
As if that sax
were made of bone wrenched from his wrist
he urged through it dank music
of his breath. When he blew ballads
you knew one use of force:
withholding it.
This was a river of muscles.
Old dimes oily from handling,
eggs scrambled just right in a diner
after eight gigs in nine nights,
a New Yorker profile, a new Leica
for the fun of having one.
Gasps and twitches. It's like having the breath
knocked out of me
and wearing the lost air for a leash.
I snuffle home.
I hate it that he's dead.
Jealousy
1
Now I have this smoking coal
I'm growing from carbon
in my gut,
a snake hoping to sleep off
his meal of fire.
My heart enters a half-life
of sludged pumping.
2
This lump, this pearl I am making
sometimes jumps
like a burning bee.
Black honey!
This way love dies
somewhere else,
like an arm wriggled out of its sling.
4
If I rasp like a crashing plane,
like a ground-down spine
made into a rhythm instrument,
it is because I am knitting
a fern of bone for your thigh,
Oh
I wish it were so,
I'd take my stubbled tongue
and file these words
down
to their nub of curse.
5
In the dewy grass, first July light,
I blurt damp balls of breath up,
suck them back in.
Well hell
I shall be warm
by my own fire
though the sun come.
When we spurt off
in the invalid Volvo
flying its pennant of blue fumes,
the neighbors group and watch.
We twist away like a released balloon.
Lust
It is a squad car idling
through my eyes, bored,
looking for a crime to crush.
Two tough cops drive it,
three years on the same beat,
sick of each other.
To it I am no better
than a radish.
I hear its indolent engine
grump along in second gear,
feel both cops watch me
walk with stiff ankles,
a nun among drunks.
Faith of Our Fathers
Now it is time to see what's left:
not much.
Gulls above the scrub pine, the tufted dunes—
though nothing visible emits that low, slurred moan—,
the graves in rows like a tray full of type.
What we have lost
you may guess by what we have kept.
We rise to sing
like beach grass swaying in the wind.
O hymn of salt, the pages of the hymnal
riffling, turning
at last by themselves.
Why We Are Truly a Nation
Because we rage inside
the old boundaries,
like a young girl leaving the Church,
scared of her parents.
Because we all dream of saving
the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,
shielding the herd with our bodies.
Because grief unites us,
like the locked antlers of moose
who die on their knees in pairs.
On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen
Fog has sealed in the house
like a ship in a bottle.
All the people of the house
are dreaming of his future;
only the Puritans
and he aren't sleeping.
They watch him lie too long in bed,
the fog's moist nose at his ear.
Now the muzzle pokes his tiny mouth,
prying it open. They love him;
he's in danger; but it's too late.
His perfect body is still there
but clearly empty. The fog
rolls back to its own place
and the fishermen scrape back
from breakfast and go out to work.
Driving All Night
My complicated past is an anthology,
a long line painted on the plains.
I feel like literary history
about to startle the professors.
But it's not true.
Days ahead, snow heaps up
in the mountains
like undelivered mail.
After driving all night
I guess what it's like
to fly over them.
For the first time you see
how close things are together,
how the foothills push up
just past where you quit
driving. Urgencies
sputter in the exaltation
of chill air.
Your heart
begins to fall like snow
inside a paperweight.
Oh when in your long damn life,
I ask myself, when will
you seek not a truce,
but peace?
Oh Yes
My hands, my fists, my small bells
of exact joy,
clappers cut out
because they have lied.
And your tongue:
like a burnt string
it holds its shape until
you try to lift it.
We're sewn into each other
like money in a miser's coat.
Don't cry. Your wounds are
beautiful if you'll love mine.
Old Girlfriends
I thrust my impudent
cock into them
like a hand raised in class.
What they
knew that I didn't learn
was not to ask:
one participates.
To say one is "in love"
says everything:
the tongue depressor breaks
into flame.
To say "one" is in love
means me, hero of all these poems,
in love as in a well
I am the water of.
What You Need
Suppose you want to leave your life,
that old ring in the tub,
behind?
It closes cozily
as a clerk's hand,
a coin with fingers.
You hate it
the same way the drunken son
loves Mother.
You will need pain
heaving under you
like frost ruining the new road.
Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959
for Dave Curry
After each rain the workers
bring the eroded soil
back up the slope in baskets.
When the freezing ground heaves
rocks up, they are gathered,
shattered, the pieces
strewn among the vines.
The sun reflects from them.
In the Moselle the sun
is a broken bottle of light,
same color as the wine.
When you drink it,
you pass through your body
a beloved piece of earth.
You are like the worm,
except you know it.
A door in the earth opens
and you go in, as guest.
Yes!
You come home loved and troubled,
tired,
and lay your body down before me
like new bread.
It is the same body I have always loved,
and in it your eyes shine
like light still traveling from a dead star.
I give you my love to use
and shake with fear you can't.
A sleep like a long swim
and dreams of things growing,
shuddering, wrenched,
giant kelp 100 ft. high in the ocean,
sage and yarrow,
the ferny lace of hair
around your cunt, marrow
in mending bones.
There is no way to stop growing.
Sleep is a simple faith.
I wake, wanting
the moist pull into you,
your face easing,
love growing in sweet violence.
And then you wake,
still tired, tentative
but languorous.
I know that love is life's best work.
Sleek for the Long Flight (1972)
Directions
The new road runs into
the old road, turn
west when your ankles hurt.
The wind will be thinning itself
in the grass. Listen, those thuds
are bees drunk with plunder
falling from the minarets of flowers
like ripe prayers.
Follow the path
their bodies make. Faster.
The dirt in that wineglass
came from Chateau d'Yquem.
You're getting closer.
That pile of clothes
is where some women
enter the river. Hurry up.
The last hill is called
Sleep's Kneecap, nobody
remembers why.
This is where the wind turns
back. From the ridge
you can see the light.
It's more like a bright soot,
really, or the dust
a moth's wing leaves
on the thumb and forefinger.
This is where I turn
back—you go the rest of the way
by eating the light until
there is none and the next one
eats along the glow
of your extinguished hunger and turns
to the living.
Sleeping Alone
A man is a necessity. A girl's mother says so by the way her hands come together after certain conversations, like a diary being closed.
But a boy's mother tells him a woman is a luxury. Maybe when he graduates his mother hugs him and forgets herself, she bites his earlobe! She remembers the hockey skates she gave him for Christmas when he was eight; the stiff flaps in back of the ankles resembled monks' cowls. The year before, the road froze over—they seemed to be what he should want.
Meanwhile the girl grows older, she hasn't been eight for ten years, her father is cruel to her mother. She'll always have a man, the way she likes to have in her room, even when visiting, a sandalwood box for her rings and coins, and a hand-painted mug showing two geese racing their reflections across a lake.
Maybe she will meet the boy, maybe not. The story does not depend on them. In a dark room a couple undress. She has always liked men's backs and holds on with her fingertips, like suction cups, turning one cheek up to him and staring through the dark across the rippled sheet. He breathes in her ear—some women like that. Or maybe they've loved each other for years and the lights are on. It doesn't matter; soon they will be sleeping.
Why do we say we slept with someone? The eyelids fall. It isn't the one you love or anyone else you recognize who says the only words you will remember from the dream. It must be the dream speaking, or the pope of all dreams speaking for the church. It says, It's OK, we're only dying.
Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night
I remember asking
where does my shadow go at night?
I thought it went home,
it grew so sleek at dusk.
They said, you just don't
notice it, the way you don't tell yourself
how to walk or hear
a noise that doesn't stop.
But one wrong wobble
in the socket and inside the knee
chalk is falling, school
is over.
As if the ground were a rung
suddenly gone from a ladder,
the self, the shoulders bunched
against the road's each bump, the penis
with its stupid grin,
the whole rank slum of cells
collapses.
I feel the steering wheel
tug a little, testing.
For as long as that takes
the car is a sack of kittens
weighed down by stones.
The headlights chase a dark ripple
across some birch trunks.
I know it's there, water
hurrying over the shadow of water.
Another Beer
The first one was for the clock
and its one song
which is the song's name.
Then a beer for the scars in the table,
all healed in the shape of initials.
Then a beer for the thirst
and its one song we keep forgetting.
And a beer for the hands
we are keeping to ourselves.
The body's dogs, they lie
by the ashtray and thump
suddenly in their sleep.
And a beer for our reticence,
the true tongue, the one song,
the fire made of air.
Then a beer for the juke box.
I wish it had the recording
of a Marcel Marceau mime performance:
28 minutes of silence,
2 of applause.
And a beer for the phone booth.
In this confessional you can sit.
You sing it your one song.
And let's have a beer for whoever goes home
and sprawls, like the remaining sock,
in the drawer of his bed and repeats
the funny joke and pulls it
sh
ut and sleeps.
And a beer for anyone
who can't tell the difference between
death and a good cry
with its one song.
None of us will rest enough.
The last beer is always for the road.
The road is what the car drinks
traveling on its tongue of light
all the way home.
Night Driving
You follow into their dark tips
those two skewed tunnels of light.
Ahead of you, they seem to meet.
When you blink, it is the future.
The Needle's Eye, the Lens
Here comes the blind thread to sew it shut.
An Egg in the Corner of One Eye
I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teenager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my death, leaking. In this way weeping resembles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.