To allay you anxiety, a book of museums
Has been published,
Tells you the story of the places where a
Lot of lambert ideas meet. In Pittsburgh we
Have a pre-dawn painting by Cy Gavin,
Black-brown and sterling aquamarine—
And an iceberg that no longer exists by
Frederic Edwin Church.
The white idea
Climbs the walls of heaven on all sides of
A curious ship. If the question was,
“Is it here, now?” the answer was yes.
“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.
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 up.
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.
