“You can’t think about it too long; it’ll break your heart.”
Is it stressful for you to do two things at once?
Can you write with one hand and tap to a beat with
The other?
History moves forward and backward, That’s why
It smarts so bad. No time to stop and realize—
Tap to a beat with another
Is it stressful for you to do two things at once?
Love will forget you—even as it warms— tap—
Faithful.
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.
Light, light.
Naked light imposed on the brown
Fortress of Humankind, and expected
To grow,
Raise its own children.
Raise its own head out of God’s loss
I wouldn’t do that.
I wouldn’t believe in that.
Always the ant beholden to a timely hill.
Only so much its attendant.
The love story I’m going to tell you is short—
Surprisingly short, given the sprawl of time:
Each gauge corresponds with something on the ship we need.
And when we hit impracticalities we say
We’re all in the same boat.
I don’t want to dicker over class. I know who I am.
Everywhere I ever lived I hid five dollars in a paper
Football by the largest tree nearest the front door. Look
For a measure of pink yarn. You’ll find me.
You’ll never find me.
Everything about a haunted house
Feels certain when you’re afraid
In the dark you see something move;
It divides you. You adjust your
Focus helplessly.
Guts ecstasy
It’s kicking in.
Hemingway said bankruptcy takes place
In two stages: the first slow, the second fast.
When someone loves you and you touch their hair,
You feel yourself falling.
Nobody’s fingers in her hair need a god.
Verse one is mostly click-clack
Click. The second verse is click-clack
Click as well. Older, but no wiser.
Verse three opens on a scarecrow brilliantly
Colored by the sun. Click-clack
Click. Please keep my hand by your heart.
You’ll find as many gasps for air in THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV
As there are in all of Somerset County. A place on Earth
Relaxes into the dominion imposed upon it. We
Go out and see a jubilation of discredited greenery
Waiting to dazzle us.
As if all their lives depended on the success in
Our I wouldn’t quite say smiles.
People keep coming around.
When Alain Delon died I thought everything was garbage.But mostly because everything was already garbage when he died.
Duke Ellington died about sixteen months before I was born. Nabokov in Switzerland when I was two.
I like thinking about death this way, as a kind of ledger in which the shifting balance isn’t held to a generic standard:
Look at his eyes. His piscine, the only piscine of my dreams.
Laughter in the dark,
The explosive fire thar destroys you in the end
Owes itself to a single chemical.
Think of the red head of a match.
The sulphuric you smell is youth being languidly
Burned away.
The not smell of anything is a part of your heart
Sings.
The world of wonders has yet to be born.
I see young people at the pool taunting one another,
Screaming. The dry white grass prickles.
Their eyes bloom with heavenly rain.
I keep dreaming of myself in the eyes of
The lord.
I am young, swimming, I’m crying,
A loud child child begging the universe
For a sense of purpose. What do I get?
A galaxy of perverse silence. And maybe something else.
One thing minus the horse has to happen first.
Here you are. What are you thinking? Are you
Leaving so soon? Green joy. We love you. Have
Some stew before you move on. Rest.
The sons and daughters of the town wonder, too,
How you got here, your eyes on the ocean , your
Drawings of places they’ve never been and how you
Drew them.
Your feet on their fathers’ cliff.
They won’t talk about it, but what about you.
Looking down, now, did you ride here on a horse?
Okay, the weird glow of the thing is that
Love is permanent,
And it will last forever. But we don’t. It’s up to us to bring Colored yarn and tie our letters to the
Rail before it goes out to sea.
In Torquay, in 1997, in a fog and drunk on cider
I saw France. I mean, I know I saw it—
Which somehow makes it less than having been real.
Language must look back and
Miss the discipline of the type-
Writer.
There was a row you could watch
As it fell in on itself. A putty blue
Roller
Controlled everything—even the sea-
Foam of heaving errors, and a gull mis-
Taking
A period for its spot.
We’ve come so far—you and me.
The staircase, the creaking footbridge,
The murder mystery in Yorkshire.
You looked at me as if questioning my doubt,
As a reader.
I read Nabokov when I was still in school.
Look at all the sparkling things in the light between
Us.
My heart looks for love—
In salt, in lemons, in the way
People speak Hebrew against all odds.
I wonder if anyone will ever read this, ever catch up with me?
I am learning something Arabic, I am making dough. The charred fingers of my host extend.
This way.
There’s a hole inside of me.
I think everybody sees it, and they’re all waiting
For me to say something about it. Maybe, they
Think, that’ll be the start of something good for us.
A couple in the crowd, near the front, look at me as the
Footlight emphasizes my nervous sweat.
I look at the hole. (I will die with this weight on my lap.)
I look at the hole. (I gave away the brilliance of being alive.)
Sand around the edge and some trash
Begin to fall. Everything is reaching a natural
Conclusion.
Finally, my lamb of blood and wasted breath,
The splinter pricks the skin.
How long have these eyelids prevented me from understanding the abusive temperament of
Spring rain?
There was a time when i would say something
Preposterous and you would kinda believe me.
We’ve gone beyond that now. Now,
Look into my eyes. Swirling. The weather is mixed,
Your plans are on hold for a while. I ought
To be wearing a sailor’s cap, which makes me
Want to apologize for hijacking things. Dumb bell,
You were here. I was there.
Water.
Nobody explicitly
Said not to, so I just sorta became the sea, chopping up
The tender parts of the Earth just to get to the good parts.
It will look at you, the Sun—
And that head with its wild strawberry eyes will tilt
As if imagining you’re a sinking ship,
The horizon tethered to its cruel orbit,
Which is why your ferocity is so
Important to our survival.
I was born in a swamp of glitter. No
One knew quite what to do. Gale
I loved urgently, and I stabbed a guy
Near the corner of his eye, blinding him.
He had kids or a dog. Something.
When I think of it like weather I think
Gale—makes it sound linear and trackable.
Go ahead, wash it all off me,
Producers.
I’m getting ahead of this
And telling you now
The list will have my name on it. Everybody’s
Sweating it. The things they’ve done swing before their eyes,
As if acting out the opposite of hypnosis.
In the grass and all the wrong, mowing, stars.
The rabbit, quietly, because it didn’t want anyone to know.
No anesthetic, please. I should just
Face it head on,
Undiagnosed.
The grass and all the wrong. You know, the world can be divided into two sorts:
The ruined beneficiaries of science and the rabbits.
(For Wayne Thiebaud)
A curse will eventually jinx
The poor,
The dead
Will get unburied, while the sun
Unsets and there’s an opposite
Of a sparrow, too.
Of looking. Of classification.
When we think about Victorian science
It’s with bravado.
Nobody wants to associate with a passing version of
What happened.
Isn’t it funny how memory is presented in memory?
It is given from the past.
Ever forward, ever on: a body falls deep within itself:
Will I be pretty, will I be rich?
Shall I be the shell on top of
Beauty, this time when it comes up?
Meanwhile, electricity is famous.
If you’re gonna have a cat, then
Go on and have a cat.
Let your body fall backwards throughout itself,
Clean, out the window:
Dreamily to the ground and your
Certain death. No
Recourse. But
By
All
Means
Fall,
And have a cat near your heart for all life is sacred.
A lifetime of behavioral analysis suggests that when
A cat scrubs his ear with his paw
The ear is the problem.
Anytime I get up from a bedridden sickness I
Look at everything as a conglomeration of
Ideas
In which I’m never what’s wrong.
If the song wasn’t such a spell,
If the garden wasn’t too brief to be
Tended to by fleeting hands
If the stars were alive
If I didn’t fuck things up so miserably
The half-shell would yet rise with
My idea of conciliatory beauty
In its humble arm, just
Like a baby about to cry itself alive.
What dream of life do we fulfill when we carry this bride
Of possibility across the threshold?
Will we finally be safe? Will the snake finally
Speaky English?
Teach them, if you
Must, though it can’t be taught.
Learn with them, but fair warning,
You will learn alone.
You will walk yourself into circles, thinking,
Blue.
Explain this to me,
Two things that seem so innocuously
Similar in my mind, but set
Loose in the world of ideas,
They evolve in discord.
I tried to write a poem about the sun—
It was going to be apocalyptic, with children staring into
The vocal point of the volcanic Earth.
A robin blushing in opposition
But I began to think of a painting
John Singer Sargent did of leisure class
Children holding paper lamps after dark.
A robin, somewhere, against the might of a volcano
And suddenly I was cutting my heart in pieces
Against the grain. You see
I was trying to divide it equally.
The crest is bound to be covered with
Liars. No cameras on them.
Everybody is looking down from
Their orange spots
At the terrifying volcano, wondering,
How do we fix love without bothering
The heat we believe in?
I think of you anytime
I come across old score keepings
From card games, folded newspapers saved
For the crossword puzzle
In different states of completion. It’s
Hard
To remember in this state of grace that
We could ever gain so freely from nothing
And give so benevolently to it, as well.
Look at the numbers, blue and random now. Look at the
Clues as they bury the dead elsewhere.
The problem with our
Connectivity is that we’re never lost anymore.
Or it’s a different kind of lost. One without
Depth.
The compass is hypersensitive, outfitted with
Expertise on how to
Survive. The leaves that are shaped like almonds
Are poisonous—the earth is edible and specific to
Its place. You could open a sandwich shop with it.
Wildlife has been managed. Lest we wander there
Are adults with flashlights out there,
Grooming the Cezanne-like confusion
To greater effect. The snacks.
The movie begins at seven—silence.
Inside the smallest things
Beat the hearts of gods. Predators
Come with their vast
Ambitions and
They look as the clock of love tells
Time in microscopic, if unromantic, syllables.
No resentment in their ticking towers, but
Neither is there anything like sympathy.
They’re just looking for sugar.
