It’s a weird time to think of yourself as an individual—
To expose yourself to the otherness of safety, and
Count your fingers like money.
How holy they fall asleep in an ashtray.
Are you not on God’s ledge? Are you not drowning:
His Inhospitable water?
Why? Are you preoccupied with the color orange,
Or rain, or survival?
I see you running away from your
Problems. They got some of you before you were
Gunned down. Run, Beautiful.
Hell
Hell
Hell
Hell
Fortune and Hell. Della Robbia blue
And a room. Love, nude gods, gospel music means nothing
To you. I can see the black place where the torch
Started its work:
You go in, okay, and you tell them everything.
It isn’t writing, and it isn’t rewriting.
It’s the cogent way you couldn’t state your own comvictions.
You’re up to your knees. And
You ain’t gettin’ any taller.
This afternoon I reread Bret Harte’s ‘The Outcasts
Of Poker Flat’. And I couldn’t bring myself
To think of anyone but me.
How did we meet, you and me?
Did a tornado force us beneath the surface where
We had no other choice?
Or was it in clean air when you said your clean name
And my dirty hand caught it.
Blue wilderness bends—it withers
But I’ve never been understood.
