Copy right Information

I

Immersion
For Mike Lynch
Let Him Who is Without Sin Cast the First Stone
War and Peace
Arch of Titus
Flames
In Waves
Richard II
Managed Grief
Meditations on Violence
Dance Music

II

Car Radio
Rest
Mountain Lion
Thelonius Monk Dancing
Late Quartet
Plainfield, Vermont, Rt. 2, Summer 1988
Law and Sensibility
The Old Ballerina
Dancing Lessons
The Religion of Art Revisited
Skinned Steer
The Stylist
Before Beethoven's Creation of Music as Personal Expression
Funeral Beginning with Bach

III

Lao Tzu Rebuked
Rediscovering Wonder
Point Lobos
After Leaving You
Mater Dolorosa
The Treading Loons
Song to a Porcupine in Mating Season
Letter to my Sister
The Natural
Elegy for Whit
Pieces for the Suicide of Paul Celan

IV

The Summer I Spent Screwing in the Back Seats of Station Wagons
Sweet Town
Apollo, Aphrodite and the Poet
After Yeats After Ronsard
Possession and the Law
Ancient City
Bottoming Out
Late
To Hollis Frampton
Repeats
Prayer
She, Tiresias
The Erotics of Reading
Firewood
The Swan and Leda
Dichterliebe, for Voice and Piano
Reunion

top | home

IMMERSION

It is easy to lose myself--
music can claim me entirely
when I drop the bar of forced
inattention that scatters
me all around the room
or by surprise as when
I walk off the track into woods,
but it is not music but loss
itself that claims me back
from what seems too busy, false,
clamoring me! me! me!

It is hard to attend to the lives
singing around me: frogs,
flies, leaves, birds,
woof of bear or owl
rolling across the lake
and the trill and howl of the loon.
Always a noise in my head--
the din of my body moving
as my shoulders roar in my ears
and my laboring, reeling breath
deafen me and enclose
my mind in a sensible cloud
of everything it knows
except for the voice that calls:
"Stop, stop, stop
this busy chatter and roar
and sit and be still and hear."

The lake is cold in its season.
A mist squats and is still
on the water, recently ice,
and the rising sun makes it glow,
a fire in a field of snow,
before it breathes it in
and leaves the mirror clear.
My daughter's afraid I will fall
out of my light canoe
in this icy water and die.
She knows there is something to fear:
even in midsummer heat
the thrill of danger swimming
on the warm surface above
the scrotum-and-nipple-tightening
depth of this bottomless lake
and the danger of the claim
its beauty makes on me.

Garish and magnanimous,
the sun descended in fire
in the whole western sky,
and the long sloping shoulders
of Monadnock and her clouds
diminished with distance
in my rear view mirror
until I saw entire
the profile of the mountain,
its black animal spine
against the lurid sky.

I needed the full view
and climbed out of the car
to see it face to face
then distance vanished inside me--
without moving at all
I was suddenly crouched on its flank
and buried my face in the leafmold,
sweet-smelling, delicate, moist,
my cheeks brushed by ferns,
and the outspread mass of the mountain,
embraced me as I shivered
in the cold, early spring,
cliffs, streams, falls,
boulders, trees, snow.

These are not dry leaves crunching
under my sandals but tiny snails,
so fragile, even to brush them kills them.
We laugh, stopped--with no place to set down
our feet in this flood of delicate souls.

I can't find the road
that curves into the woods
then into a dappled clearing,
the way to the red house
surrounded by four trees
between two ponds,
one large, one small,
and the music of their short
waterfalls and graceful
inner light with large
windows, rooms, and broad,
high hall. Now,
walking into town
to buy the Times the long,
early morning shadow
walking before me and sleep
still glazing my eyes I struggle
to separate the loss
of a real home from a dream
home and I can barely push
my shoulders through
the battering wall of air--
this too is dream.

Years ago, a long search through my house
for Les fleurs du mal, every room, the attic,
then later in a village where I knew
I could be myself without restraint, because
everyone knew everyone and everyone saw
all the enterings, withdrawals, visits by day or night,
I looked in the library and bookstore in vain
for an Italian dictionary to lead me
through a love poem--naked or veiled
in half-alien sounds by Montale I needed
to understand and could not.
This happened often, and I found myself
leaning against the wall of a house that shrank
to my size, then smaller, then me like a tiny ant
that walked the full length and back of every needle
of a spruce I studied closely for many days.

Counting breaths, my heartbeats, paces to the door,
steps on stairs up to the next floor,
feet in a line of verse, quartets, cantatas,
blows of the hammer, turns of the wrench and screw,
seconds it takes for the high wisp of cloud
to vapor away in sun,
even as I love pulling my body through water
swimming, counting strokes in the glacial lake
and laps in the tedious, eye stinging pool,
this minimal ordering of the world
lulls and steadies the mind's barrel, loose,
rolling thunder slamming below-decks against
the delicate hull of the storm-tumbling ship.

Who we were last spring, whose thigh
and whose mouth was opening and hands flowed,
we could not separate. You, opening your eyes,
slowly, taking hours, brown, with clear lines,
before I tumbled into them, I seem
to remember, though I cannot tell you
whether early or late.

It is winter now. Waking in our deep
bed under heavy blankets, the room crowded
with ghosts, whispering their terrible message,
that no one we love will ever be forgotten,
and seal us in archaic dreams of love--
Mother, Carlos, Deborah, Alice, Dan.

Curled tight around my wife
from the pulse in my face, across
the stubble field of my torso,
my happy prick asleep,
down to my cool feet,
everything touching at once
the skin and the heft behind it
and the shifting passage of breath.
How confusing the boundary of body!
In this confusion, delight.

FOR MIKE LYNCH

Coming out too late,
he lowered his head and charged
into the gay world,

after marriage and a son,
flagrant, committed, brave,
chanting the open and free.

Friends were merely astonished
with his sudden turn to outrage
that he wore with a mocking charm;

his wry timidity gone
in the politics of redemption,
that brought him back to his roots,

a low-church Baptist again.
But he scraped his South from the canvas
along with the old New Critics,

and their intricate manners and forms
and lapidary poems.
He was all bad boy,

raw dough, raw meat,
seed spattered buns,
wild apple pie.

And so he loved shocking
us liberal prudes with the fabulous--
descriptions of fist fucking

("Up past the wrist? Never!"
"You want to see?") and numbers
for promiscuity

beyond imagination,
beyond Don Giovanni,
Ma in Ispagna

son già mille e tre,
the bottom line. Even
our liberal comedian

who supported necrophilia
between consenting adults,
consented to be shocked.

His courage designed him precisely
for leadership of the Alliance,
and with careless extravagance,

for betrayal by the stern disorder--
to end, incontinent,
demented and dead from AIDS.

And because he died so young
not all his friends have died,
who together invoke his presence

with wine and Josquin des Prés,
recorders, rebec, drums,
in a suite of whirling dances

performed as we sit in a circle
to summon him out of his silence,
invoking him to contribute

viola d'amore or lute,
or his sweet, rough voice--
the pitch absolute.

LET HIM WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE

(Palma il Vecchio, L'Adultera)

She is not a great beauty for whom rules
bend and bend, but heavy, snouty, hair prim,
wanting always more and settling for less:
a husband duller and colder than herself
for whom the law of possession is firm as stone
and he wants her stoned by the law. So now she stands
trying to be bold at the side of the rabbi
who doodles in sand as the legal mob assembles
then looks up and offers the single sentence
that raises compassion above the law forever.

As the crowd disperses rich with new shame,
she believes that she has escaped at last
and dares a pursed grin. Now she rejoices
that she still possesses all the goods she planned--
the sated sexual hunger, the new excitement
underneath her heart, leaking forbidden seed,
as the first creature of the new law of love.

WAR AND PEACE
(from the memoirs of a Jewish officer in the Czar's army)

I was a scout and messenger. A shell
burst and I lost my horse, my gun, and woke
sunk in thick alders that bent under me
like a soft couch--unhurt, but nearly choked
by the strap of the leather pouch around my throat.
I crawled into the dusk, losing all
my boyhood faster than I could grasp
in the silence and stinging fog of
the bombed woods. Half the oaks
with their first small spring leaves
burst and burned. It smelled like a dead city,
smoky and abandoned. I found
the path that led to a spot on the river,
but too swift to cross on foot. Our cavalry
appeared with an old corporal who had turned
their rout into an orderly retreat.

He hung back, dismounted, and we talked
about the tasks we were assigned,
while high on their horses the troop filed across.
Nearing dark, a mist rose from the river.
His face, immobile, shone in the cold
like oiled jade--slabs of soft stone
you could mark with your fingernail;
flat cheeks, a broad nose and high forehead.
I was one of the chosen people--could not fail
my mission and thought of this only, he
of something else that I have struggled since then
to grasp. Was he one of the lamed vov,
the holy ones disguised, even from themselves,
scattered through the world who save us with wonders?

His horse had wandered off. He whistled
and it charged up from the river, dumb and eager.
A Golem. Could he have called up two that way?
He gave me the horse and I protested faintly.
Then he ordered me. I stopped my protest.
I was young and full of urgency
with front line messages that bore
on the success of war. He was firm,
that was all, and he leaned back on a hummock
of tall grass as I mounted and plunged through
the river, came up dry on the other side,
and galloped after the troops but kept him with me
as I reenact that ending, carrying both,
two horses, or two on one horse,
or me, or him, flying above the river
with a breast stroke through the air.

I accepted this order without question
as something due in the proper conduct of war
or all great affairs. Now he buries himself
inside me, the city of the dead endowing
the city of the living with its gods.

ARCH OF TITUS

Disregarding the curse
that god will remove your name
from the list of the Chosen People
for passing through the arch,
families of tourists,
People Not Chosen,
pass through blithely
as blithely conquering Romans
in the all-encircling frieze
destroy the Second Temple
and carry away their prize,
menorah and chained slaves
as beautiful as themselves.

Though I've no god to lose
nor community of Jews
and never shared the need
for community of faith
how could I stray through
in my usual careless way
and deny what I have lost?

FLAMES

Five women and a child
beside the lake, their naked
bodies in deep shade
of the tall, thick pines
where they fling a child in play
high in the air screaming
the hilarious pleasure of fear
and their bodies turn to flames,
red shadowed with blue,
and they all reach skyward
as his pulsing screams drive
the armed, vigilant osprey
from a high, fish-stinking nest
and he knows he will end in the arms
of laughing, comforting women
as the sky above them boils
in an ecstasy of clouds.

RICHARD II

When in the synagogue last
I was past thirty. My father
was younger by ten years
than the old men weaving in prayer.

We went to pray as we could
for my mother's buried soul.
She had died the week before,
but neither of us could recall

the prayers for the dead
and our sorrow was unconsoled
by the gabble and nodding and groans
that tasted alien and cold.

And then in a tiny theater
at Richard the Second a girl
at my elbow coiled to hold back
her sobs but the knot of restraint

uncurled at the queen's sorrows,
old, mumbling her words,
the king (played by a woman)
unconcerned, off guard

and my heart knew where sorrow
could find the faith to tear
open its long clenched throat
and sing out its prayer of tears.

MANAGED GRIEF

She accepts her grief, now that he is dead,
in miniscule doses. Her health demands
a touch of suffering. The soul expands--
Sophocles said so. Saint Paul agrees.

And what is healthy in her balance,
in that tall sturdy-to-elegant bearing
and coiled yellow hair,
makes me hate health. Boundaryless grief is our debt

to love, and the death of her man, my friend, at the height
of his strength will not, when tucked in the pocket
of an old coat in the closet,
keep her heart intact, but will freeze it and kill it.

MEDITATIONS ON VIOLENCE

Too near the ancient troughs of blood
Innocence is no earthly weapon.
Geoffrey Hill

Thou hast beat me out
Twelve several times, and I have nightly since
Dreamt of encounters twixt thyself and me--
We have been down together in my sleep
Unbuckling helms, twisting each others throat--
And wak't half dead with nothing.
Aufidius in Coriolanus

1

THE HISTORY OF DOVES IN OUR TIME
31 Dec 2000

The doves batter themselves against the big wind
but make no headway toward their nests in the eaves
and they circle and plunge and are driven back
above the roof like children trying to force
their bodies through a close police line
who are hurled back at every lunge and feint
and scramble up screaming and try again before
they scatter in terror as their parents cry out their names
from the other side of the line. The big storm
is racing across the wide plains where no trees
or hills slow its force, its wall of wind. It will be
an even worse time to be helpless and far from home.

2

DANCE MUSIC
I hear the hum of the body
perfectly still, the ear
pressed to the door jamb, buzzing,
the whisper of breath in the nose,
a distant voice that calls,
the knock and swoosh of plumbing
rising and falling through walls,
the thump of the heart, the slight
shake of the frame at the stroke,
the refrigerator gurgling
and grumbling tirelessly,
while I hold myself deathly still,
absent from house and body
and the music persists in its motions.

One dim bulb
in cheap fluted glass
a half flight above
and a presence very close
that climbs in step with me.
What kind of Judge is he?
I know that flat face
and shark's flat eye,
the smooth breath in the climb
and the effortless moves behind
as if he understood
all that sharked through my mind.
--You, are you kind? I know
with your steel rasp skin
and sudden irresistible plunge
and your glass eye grin--
You think what I really think,
grasp at the skull and dive.

This is the year that death
robed in shit and sable
finds the key to the door
and lays himself down on our table
then gleams and clicks and hums
all night while the wind drones,
or sits in the oak chair
and watches us flinch and veer
away from his part of the room
and his voice booms in our ears
and his snake eye stare
then both of us play possum,
cold, unresponsive, dumb,
while we plot our escape from here.
We are dead already, go home!

We separate in heat--not another
body sweating, another cold mind
grasping for warmth: all longing denied
to keep the mind clean at the work of ending,
having room for no attachment further.
You and the vague women pressing in dreams
I push away, for the sake of the housefly
shuffling on my arm, his house soon
when he lays maggots under the skin
and drives me to greater removal from myself,
the feeling for what is--nature persistent
and self-absorbed and making my mind its mirror.
You lean on your elbow with a smile
that in this climate is intolerable.

The blossoms compete for the bee,
the apple, plum, cherry,
require its provident yearning,
its hairy legs, its probe,
even the useless hawthorne,
flowering to mock us and sting,
blossoming, blossoming.

Et in arcadia ego.

As I stepped out of the car
before I reached the foggy
yellow globe of porchlight
I heard a low growl,
confident in menace,
a crash of brush, the scream
of a hare in three breaths
that stretched itself on the still
air its intense length
until a neck broke
and the bobcat bore away
through whispering uncut hay,
the grass the flesh is like,
the flesh that's like the grass--
enough for everyone here.

It is May 15th, the air
outside the house is now
in harmony with air
within. How equable,
how utterly without
boundary it feels, to douse
all the lights and walk
in a starless, moonless night,
the house empty of me
and empty. Dangerous,
this small experiment--
abandon to senseless trust
with no inside or out
and no distinguishable space.
I like it all too much.

--You remember the old story
where the servant or the master
meets death in the garden
and runs away to the city
where death plans to meet him?
Who meets death,
The servant or the master?
Who tells the story?

--Why does it matter,
The servant or the master?
She sighed and rolled over.
--The people don't matter.
The trick is everything.

Bathsheba

She is now mature in creases, at ease in shade
only, as she bathes the aging body. The light
is all in her face and it falls like death on skin.
Her smile is inward. The watcher hidden in night--
the king who eyes her from his roof, must murder
her husband first. Why does he love her? His sight
is inward too. He loves her. He'll get her.

She is buttoned to the throat
with a white, formal yoke.

The massive shutters are open
and fastened to the wall.

The espaliers around them
are hung with pears and plums.

She leans from the dark room
into the welcoming air

and showers the street with light,
with her gap-toothed naked smile.

The borders in borders keep
this human explosion contained.

When Sappho says, "asleep against the breast
of a friend," the breast is youthful, tender,
will not be pressed without a sudden moan
of dumbfounding pain, and the head that would rest
like air, like stone.

A hand is in there. My hand.
Swallowed by steel. It can hold
a lance. Nothing more. The delicate
fingers nervelessly within.

The Bat

On the stump of a torn wing
it planted itself in the driveway
and screeched to keep me away
from doing the merciful thing
and crushing it under my foot.
I scooped it up in my cap
and hid it away in a yew
to save it from the cat.
It would starve in a day or two.
I once heard a chipmunk scream
for hours in the slow jaws
of a king snake under the house,
but the human terrified dream
in the beast face of that thing
made me unable to kill
as it lingered in suffering.
Don't test me on anything close.

"Anyone incapable of deceit is incapable
of love." Stendhal

I was brought there to be read: the message
in the blank wall waiting to be called
into you, sweating on a sheet,
a string of twigs with a familiar face.
My mother, always steady, brushed your hair
and tied it with a red bow. You saw
my face and tried a feeble lie as I did:
a clench of mind, my coached face unmasked
smiling in terror. You asked for me
knowing you could read in my deceit,
brutal and incapable, the necessary fact.

The summer that their daughter Rachel (named
after my shining daughter) died
I paid the stern visit to the house.
Her toys and flip-flops, all the plastic colors
were scattered around the lush uncut lawn
and piled on the porch, lights in dark places,
as if she still were balancing the sphere,
unbroken, of herself, her rule, in all this space.
I felt the need to gather things, but all
I touched would stick to my hand in shrill silence,
screaming: dolls' clothes, a yellow plastic bowl,
shoes, magic marker, bubble wand.

I am no longer the child slashed by wire
who snaked back into the locked city
to warn Jews of the plan, the unsealing
of sealed trains, how they were killed, the camps,
the doctor-judge selecting who will die
with the flick of his white baton on the railway siding.
I screamed, Fly away! Escape! until
my throat closed, they thought me mad from loss,
everybody's loss, and brought me bread
to stop my raving. I was later seized by Germans
and pushed through all I had seen before, then killed.
Today I am a man in this dream
of new terror with a man's grave face
and they believe me that they now must kill.

I reach through and snatch them
as one strolls in beret,
one stands in a grey suit
waiting his turn and looks
in horror at my mouth,
its convulsion as I bolt
and swallow and then grope,
wasting no time to taste them,
back in the room for more.

When staring at the lake I died.
The blinding, light-scattering crushed
foil surface barrier vanished
and I saw clear to the bottom--the water
was brilliant air, boulders like houses
come to light that had been lost
in that buried world, and on the boulders
stood my parents, aunts and uncles,
many friends, waving their welcome to me
who now at last could see.

One shock, two shocks, a shock a shock a shock
and then the hook twists out your crooked tongue
and word all word is meaningless like shock.
Who died. You died. I died. All of us died.

top | home


II

CAR RADIO

It will do, the car radio, a random
set of chords above the road noise,
a tempo, the shape of a long phrase, a theme
entire and flash of something done so well
the mind constructs the whole above the ad campaign
for portable gas grills and a reading of Gogol's
Nose in French that over the crest of the hill
intrudes in longer intervals, but the music
thrives in the mind in touches, worn nubs,
like Cycladic idols, faint from much fondling
by the rolling earth and ocean and devoted hands,
and we make from these scratches folded arms,
and the whole body perfect in the mind.

REST

There were real ducks in the pond arched
by willows and even the Quakers
tolerated music in the service
(it seemed like pure lament and not
a brash display to false gods)
and I had an intense nostalgia
for the self deceiving dream order,
promises, prayers, gifts, bribes,
and all flesh will come to thee,
and all come home and home free all
as we gathered in the light around
the casket of this slight young
woman--beautiful even dead.
Her hair combed straight, she always
seemed a veiled Botticelli,
now with eyelids strictly closed.
From the sexual center cancer everywhere
closed her lungs though she lay very still
in the last days and tried to live
without breathing. And now her real
body remains with a cross in her hands
that beckons upward to the grand design.
And they sang Mozart's Requiem that
begins and ends with a prayer for them,
the dead, who need eternal rest,
perpetual light, but in the center
a soul pleads in terror for mercy
from the judgement at the world's end
that frightens even the just and the virgins.
Salva me, fons pietatis,
fountain of pity, save me.
We learned enough of dread in hope,
even thinking she beat it, that vital
body beat it. There was comfort
in remission for weeks that seemed
perpetual light. Now the cry
of terror takes on ritual fullness,
Salva me...non me perdas...
with music we wished her eternal rest
in the arms of her torturer and killer.
And for our grieving all these voices
in the large musical structure sufficed:
it wasn't overwrought, and the prayer,
not abject, loose talk
about the soul. For all the show
of theatrical emotion, there
was dignity and no shame
in this fear. It is the way, lost,
we want ourselves spoken of, sung of.

MOUNTAIN LION
for John Peck

He flattens his haunches deep
into the brown leaves--
invisible under the ferns
on the cool forest floor.
It is inescapably clear
he's here--his yellow eye
marks every step I take.

I carried my thirty-eight
for six months after I caught
sight of him crossing the road
until I felt foolish and stopped.

Like the stealthy Bengal tiger,
driven by hunger, not rage,
he's a merciful cat when he kills
with one spring from behind
and one bite to the neck.

Bengali woodcutters wear
a backward facing mask
which baffles the tiger's spring
while the woodcutter walks to safety
praying and trembling--the tiger,
impotent, stalking behind him.

I'm resigned to the reign of the cat.
He allows my trek through these woods
with provisional forbearance
but I shake in his real presence,
wait for him to learn
my desperate masquerade
and walk with a double face,
the one in front that ignores him,
that pokes my way through the trees,
and the one facing back that sees.

LATE QUARTET

The second violin is a beautiful woman, Korean,
in a skin tight black dress, whose entire
body expresses every note she plays
but the real action, alas, is in the square
suit named Pigeon, the first violin.
The passion that pours from him leaves
him looking unmoved, untouched. His thin
face is pinched into a dead smile while she heaves
and lunges through her dull repeats, repeats.
How contained this storm is, in its little crock.
But this crock contains, however, seven oceans
and all the continents except ice-locked
Antarctica, with its penguins, its fabulous narwhal,
its dull walrus, all deplorably unmusical.

PLAINFIELD, VT, RT.2, SUMMER 1988

It flew over a bank
straight into the windshield
then lightly up in the air--

I thought it was a sheet
of brown wrapping paper
but it fell too heavily

and as my car approached
I saw it lift its head
and wave its legs in air.

The van it hit pulled over,
its windshield shattered and gone.
A dazed tourist couple

and a frightened child climbed out--
they bled from light scratches
over their faces and arms

and I helped to pick away
the glittering splinters. The child
had been in back and whimpered

at the sight of her grandparents' blood
and hardly noticed her own.
A car stopped and a pair

in coveralls with wispy
hair, bandannas, sandals,
saw the travellers covered with blood

and the doe crushed in the road.
The young couple fell
into the lotus position

to comfort the doe with prayer
and usher its soul to where
it might go next on its journey.

I was overwhelmed with what felt
like an infinite number of wounds
and nothing to stanch the blood

and where to fix the car
and get them clean and whole
and mocked by spiritual beauty,

their solicitude for the soul
of that sack of bloodshot meat
that was twitching its last on the road.

LAW AND SENSIBILITY

My mother understood that she only
was the model of true feeling, of delicacy.
She remembered as a student, still a girl,
the foul mouth of the insane Nijinsky
and white asylum pitchers jammed full--
purple loosestrife, fireweed, bracken, aster.
He flew with one leap from the back wall
to the new electric footlights at the Met.
With precise care and curses that could kill
for her wavering pirouettes, he sent her
to Massine as a principal dancer. It mattered,
the view one took of wavering.

My sister and I learned at this difficult school
the principled boundary of love, its precise
irregular discriminations--the nuance
for giving and for listening and sweetness.
(Mother was good at the first two and wavered
on the third.) She taught us leaps of tough sympathy
for the flagrant outcast style. Artists are mad.
Love them! There were even acceptable forms
of success at business, for she loved her brothers-in-law
as well as her sisters. These were her gifts to us.
We could not deserve it but the wave of her
generosity could break over us with wild
astonishment as when in a sonnet we love the lines
that cut open the heart can inflict
their pain with a perpetual surprise.

THE OLD BALLERINA

As confidante of all the tortured
gay dancers, a mother they could speak with
when their own mothers closed and wanted
to know nothing of their lives,
her house was full of stars
who dazzled her own silenced children
with gossip about the perils of dance

and the heart. She understood exactly
the brilliance of ruined lives
shining in the darkened rooms, heavy curtains,
and all voices dropped to whispers
as the children entered the room
whose questions about the flagrant
style of her friends were never asked.

Mysterious astonishment was normal.
She told them once: of all her partners,
only one was straight...and explained
what that meant. How did she know
so much about secret lives? The children
needed to know so they could keep
their own lives secret from her.

DANCING LESSONS: for a thirteen year old boy
Wanting her virginal son to disappear
into her own dance, my mother pushed ballet:
the harp string body, bound feet,
rigid balance, purity of line,
astonishing stunts of joint punishing control,
the mincing steps that lead to great leaps,
antiseptic touching, sexual denial,
and the music, tippy-tippy-tippy-tippy, tip-tip.
To protect my soul, my crotch pushed the rumba--
the cat's arched back, sinuous tail,
the throbbing boy's chance to seize and turn
a bare arm, bare midriff girl,
undulant hips, eye-darkening pleasure,
fluent hilarity, courtship and public caress,
the discipline of deferral, invitation, denial,
the chaste, reluctant, sun-tanned, dentist's daughter
and the dreamer who knows that he's dreaming.

THE RELIGION OF ART REVISITED
Memorial Chapel, Union College

During a performance tempest
by a girl with whirling hair
whose eyes and skull and whole
body convulsed and writhed
around her cello, playing
the first Bach Suite
for cello solo wildly,
making a blur of her body
in order to show us a world
as passionate as herself
in which her passion was real,
and I heard this wild girl
as a penitent lashing devotion
into a body renounced
and too distant to feel.
I remembered another music
whose clear structure embodied
neat articulate bones
moving in their sockets,
muscles and tendons in place,
every nerve strung
through its groove and channel
and vessels with blood and air
bringing life to the whole
and the whole skin alive
with its own passionate form
and the whole form dancing.

SKINNED STEER

With all the slow, simplicity of gesture
and steadiness of hand with which he raised it
from birth, he led it through the fence
to the barn door with a bowl of grain, doused
with molasses, and as it bent its mouth
soft and eager and moist to the lowered bowl
he shot it where the eyes and ears cross
and killed the black steer sweetly with skill.

Then we fell on it and cut it wide open.
The hot, crushed apple, earth-smelling guts
tumbled out, eager to enter the cool world
from the steamy, clean hollow of its body,
pale bowel, brown liver, heart, lungs.
We roped the hind legs wide with tackle
to a beam, skinned it and let it hang
to ripen for a few days in autumn air
and fill the barn with the smell of blood and fat,
the streaked red flag of our hunger.
That night we left the offal for eagles.

On the rear stair into the barn loft
a young girl sits, maybe twelve, thirteen,
struggling with the fear of her need to know
this pungent interior, the state writ large,
the spread of its muscle and bone, rivers of nerves,
steaks and stews in the rank house of the body.

THE STYLIST

He filled a room like a great Brown Bear.
Air thickened with his presence; breath, raw
meat and blood, stinging, bracing; fur,
rancid fat; and that glittering hunger
focussed tightly on his favorite subjects.

His conversation was pronouncement--
even the growls were rehearsed. The self evident
truths assembled their power as a marble column
manoeuvered into position, too tall
and perilous to lean against, tilt, slant.

Opinions not sharpened in debate
were honed in his mind, its oiled stone
in constant whisper. And because he wanted razor
teeth he chose the right school and friends
to sharpen them and keep them sharp.

He could shine like polished stone, gleaming, opaque,
a sphere deploying inner light upon
its geometric surface, or else like diamond,
each incision studied before it is struck,
its many facets juggling light and blinding.

He lacked a lively voice and quick wit
and would frighten with a flash of bare teeth,
but we could not help but love and worship him--
his enormous eyes and ears and curled beard--
and squander on him the word "genius."

BEFORE BEETHOVEN'S CREATION OF MUSIC AS PERSONAL EXPRESSION
-a vigil for Lorrie

At her bedside all day and she unconscious--
tubes in, tubes out, tape and bruises,
clamps, catheters to the heart, something
breathing for her, monitors murmuring, knowing
that nothing was yet out of control of the doctors.

And then home and music and collapse
and Beethoven's Quartet in G,
very classical, impersonal,
before his revolution made everything
Beethoven! Beethoven! and my outstretched nerves
the strings they played sweet repetitive
symmetrical structures on--clear, small surprises
that carried me away from myself into myself.

Nothing was yet out of control of the doctors,
the team, their exquisite machines for reading the heart,
breathing for her, monitors murmuring, knowing
this is a vigil I did not keep for my mother,
years ago, she also unconscious,
so neither woman knew whether I kept it or not.

FUNERAL BEGINNING WITH BACH

Not another bumbling folksong dressed
in concert black and white, but the austere
purely formal exercise, turning
through the permutations, all possible
fugues, caring nothing for the language
of the throat burning with the heart's acid,
or the acid heart itself, spewing itself.
It is the time for stripped sound itself,
simply in order, order itself in order.

But after music tempers the breath
and drives the body to throb and shake,
according to its firm domination
thus drenches the mind,

language stumbles in,
with pants around his knees, shirt twisted,
shaking, unaware of the trouble he makes
as he fumbles to straighten his feet
with a too elaborate deliberation
(--Is he drunk?--He looks drunk.)
yet he cannot ever stop trying
to disentangle himself from his own deceit
to tell us the story we really need to know,
lying his way further into confusion
and just what it means in every single detail.
(--Look at that convoluted brain!)

top | home

III

LAO TZU REBUKED

When Lao Tzu warns against the fetishism of commodities
He means to warn us against the false desires
Aroused by fancy food, cars, wine, fancy women, watches, men, trophy people
Aroused by women with bodies who must therefore cover themselves to their toes
And walk without making noise and forswear white socks
(Women without bodies may swim naked through the air),

Aroused by men muscled like ex-cons in tank tops, swaggering,
Inarticulate with sincerity, bold, tender,
By slender, doe-eyed, articulate pattern-weavers
(Men without bodies may swim naked through the air),

About all which a Jewish divine remarked, that the scheme
Of satisfying our needs by lopping off our desires
Is like cutting off our feet when we need shoes,
Signifying that the revolution in desire will not occur among the Jews.

REDISCOVERING WONDER: Santa Cruz Mts, California, 1989

I am harder to rouse now and struggle to see these hills
with new wonder. I am slower, and no longer
possess the eyes of the boyish lover who floated
and dove through here engraving them in mind
and in my first camera, a small point-and-shoot thing,
trying to hold this world by grabbing, snatching,
with the body's faith in that sudden spurt of vision.

Now the unwieldy mounting on a tripod,
composing slowly on the ground glass
of an old view camera, no more fast work
but to see the great curves, delicate ferns
in the deep shadow and each tree precisely,
backlit by fog and set free of background,
clear in the air of its proper distance,
not leaf masses only and the mess of green.
Now the meditative timeless play
with light and the discrimination of planes,
the sodden leaf clinging to pebbles in a clear pool,
and another leaf floating on its surface
along with bright dust and the sky quivering
in ripples through the reflected trees
and trees' shadows.

Now to walk with eyes open
and keep them open, not drift inward
with the strong tide that pulls and pulls.

I climbed for the wide view of the slope to the sea,
its lines voluptuous, fragmented, with the faint gold
wash of ripe grass grain that waves over the deep green,
and set the camera up to stop the passionate
advance of the hills' curves on one another
as I climbed, where the hill above had raised its bulk
over the lower, nearer hill that lay
like the back and buttocks of someone at hand.
And the steep hills no longer plunged and dove
around me (how else could I see
but by stopping to compose with slow control,
when the world races in a dream of one green passion
one fertile surface covering everything?)
the whole body lying naked and open
beneath me inviting wonder with a fierce buzz
at every move I made that seemed to come
from my own ears--no cars, no planes--just me
breathless from climbing. "My heart! my heart!" I thought
but it was not inside me and I saw a nervous cloud
of flies rise in alarm from their platter of fresh dung
whose rich odor encompassed us all.

A red tailed hawk swung above me and I turned
the camera to the cliff's edge to wait
till he dove to the place he belonged in the design,
before the warm body of the land and the glare
of the sea. Oh, Love, this patience with the world,
the black draped seclusion as light gathered
on ground glass, sky down, hills
with each intricate tree and the sea above--
easing into focus as the back and lens
tilt and swing and the blue-eyed grass comes clear,
then the dolphin's back as it sinks for air into light,
as the loved body rises from her depths in my mind,
and enters the world to be seen with open eyes
who could so easily blind me with her touch.

POINT LOBOS

1

I saw it with my own eyes
before I saw the photographs.
We were the rare visitors
before the paths were roped in place
and a mule deer fawn crouched
in the brush as we approached
and hardly breathed though it shone
like the orange lichen
on the cypresses the shore winds
lined and twisted like human faces.
I climbed above the coves
a hundred feet above the rocks
and violent surf to be immersed
in the calligraphy engraved
on tree and stone by blast and sea.

2

And then I found a book of Weston
and learned to see photographs
where natural light revealed the natural world,
the minute graduations of the world's skin,
sand dunes, decaying peppers, bodies
of women folding on themselves
or opening as they do not
when they are arranged as art,
a world, sexual, formal in its folds
and the sensuous geometry of its textures,
water, sand, stone, as living forms
and light discovering the force
that disorders and orders them all.

3

What design! Photographs, writing with light,
the world's light as an act of pure vision,
the maker's hand changing nothing;
no Vermeer applying light to a wall
to silhouette the shaded side of a girl's face,
pouring it on loaves of bread, a girl's arms,
a pitcher from whose dark she pours light.
Light in the pearl chambers of the nautilus,
not scattering but held within it,
on the sea in a dark cove, flashes of foam
arranged as if we could see the lines between them,
a woman's body, shaded and lit,
resting on sand with its light rising to greet her.

AFTER LEAVING YOU

After a night of spiels, exhortations,
feeling my way along the wall to the john,
formal speeches to you spoken and sobbed
to myself in a hot shower, at the edge of my bed
the screech of a train as it pulls into the station,
loads and unloads shouting travellers
urgent steadily again proceeds--
a drunk lady screaming in widow's black
into the window of an empty parked cab
build to a steady throbbing all night.

My God! who in this crowd
battering in my head said go! go! go!
this reflex of abandon and betrayal.
Gray-faced in the morning to explain
I pounded my way to your place for pardon.
In my ignorance is panic: it buzzes, lands
like a fly at my mouth and won't be blown away.

Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner.
How god-like that tout! To comprehend
all, hidden from myself, and you, and pardon
for me, blind. Pardon alone will suffice.
At your sunlit window whom did I see--
you, inside at your easel as you paint,
or on the window's surface, me, staring?

MATER DOLOROSA

She remembers with stare and sigh
her small face between
her mother's breasts, the twin
scrolls of the law naked,
sunk in the break of them,
milky, round, perfumed,
bathing her cheeks and lips,
exploding sweets in her mouth

as if it were still her mother's
warmth of body that warmed her
after she was divided
as love and law divide,
and came to know herself only
against the bodies of others.

THE TREADING LOONS

Every year as I fish
by the small island in the lake
I see the loons mate.
These bird-gods of the water
whose songs in the bowl of the lake
fill the surrounding hills
begin with an amorous coo--
not the gentle coo of the dove
but the impassioned sotto voce
of a coloratura. One thinks
of the wedding vows of Callas:
I dooo, I dooo, I dooo.

The female loon leaves
the cold lake and climbs
to shore at the water's edge
to where she will make her nest.
The male climbs after her
to the only place on land
that he will ever inhabit,
and onto her, and he seems
as if he waddles and waddles
without moving forward,
a bird designed to shoot
like a torpedo through water
but incompetent on land
and without their wild cries
they mate in silence, clumsily.

SONG TO A PORCUPINE IN MATING SEASON

Knowing from the way I wave my arms
when talking to you that I mean no harm
you consent to walk me down the middle
of our dirt road, your fierce quills
relax and swish faintly, full of charm

as you feel, serene, invulnerable,
circled with weapons, with your deep, settled,
companionable, unwary habit of mind.
The longest of your black daggers end
gravely in white, and your solemn, steady waddle

makes me think you're stable, old, older,
in a disciplined, domestic sexual order,
an adult balance befitting and so on, yet
you scream with lust in the middle of the night
in mating season like a lost child in terror

deep in the woods, as if your leg was gripped
and torn to the bone by the teeth of a steel trap--
or like a man young as my son chained to a post
in fire, who strains for air, knows he's lost,
and screams to his own sons to cover their eyes.

LETTER TO MY SISTER

In our Father's schoolteacher hand,
on the margins of disinterred snapshots,
nineteen forty-three and forty-four,
the World War murderous still, incinerating
people in cities, remote, unknown,
opposed to us ("And when you've killed
enough they stop fighting" said LeMay),

yet here with Aunt Gert and Uncle Irv
in Williamsport, Pa, American peace
in the family embrace, staring children
propped in front of bleak trees
Thanksgiving, Easter break and one July,
an apple tree in leaf and in it me
in the branches grinning, dreaming I was a cat.

You were two and three, my toy still,
to tickle till you fought for breath,
a miniature person, your suits like an adult's,
fine embroidered shirts and polished shoes.
At seven I wore a tie swung off center.

In one family portrait a leafless road
Father looked stern, his arms enclosed
Mother before her nose job and sweet Gert,
in front Renee, a child jewel, me smiling,
dully, and you too young for Uncle Irv
to keep in order, staring off, straining
to swallow your fist. And floating on point
above these family groupings, Mother as Giselle
in a long chiffon dress with a ruffled hem.

This was the Home Front. I collected papers
in a red flyer wagon from the neighbors
for our soldier uncles and the War Effort.
During the war I was chased down, even here,
by four older boys yelling "He killed Jesus."
They threw stones but all missed. One boy,
when they caught me, prevented real mischief
by insisting that "Jesus was a Jew."
His passionate logic prevailed.

These loving sisters and their husbands
all died in their beds surrounded by love,
and because the tribal terrors bred in that old world
were blurred and weakened in this heartland,
no one here imagined the powers abroad:
gas chambers, fire storms, the committed merciless soul.

THE NATURAL, BROOKLYN, 1950
for Hal Wohl

He was so far beyond anything we dreamed
in strength, speed or skill

by our bodies for ourselves, I knew
he was designed for marvels.

He seemed beautiful. It would be years before
we connected that to girls.

We were unaware of them and still very pure.
No point playing ball

with him, since he won everything effortlessly
in the natural course, like nightfall

waiting sweetly, lightly, in the end-zone
after scoring a goal.

He was shy and seldom spoke, and I was wordy
but could not imagine him dull.

I don't recall his face but I remember his thigh,
the shock of seeing it swell

with a man's strength under strain, no longer a boy's,
alien, beautiful, fearful.

ELEGY FOR WHIT
for George Whitman Ladd, 1936-1992

With babies wobbling, strapped in their seats we pedalled
heavily out along the thin peninsula
to the picnic grove while you circled us
with Schubert song in your high tenor, perfect pitch,
perfectly transposed, veering and skidding on the gravel--
to wander is the miller's lust--and weave
and swoop delight in that bright, early Spring
before the leaves broke out and sun was everywhere.

I drove you to the Holy Cross Order,
a sumptuous haven up the Hudson, glass
lawns, Episcopalian gothic,
and moved your bags and books to a dark cell
with only room to squeeze past the cot
to a slit window that opened onto deep shade.
I was hurried outside by your host
and waited on a stone bench till he came
to tell me you weren't free to say farewell.
Once when I referred to this you blamed
God's demands, untimely and abrupt.
I let it pass, not having noticed God,
only his priest, imperious and rude.

In a cancer clinic in Toronto for lost cases
among the patients white-faced with their cures
while some dozed on the chrome and plastic chairs
as they waited for another session with the needle
and others drifted and swished on the tile floor
in paper slippers to not jar loose the sob
gripped uncertainly in every throat, you spoke,
rapid, mocking the task imposed on you
by the latest fashion of dying, of dying well,
and a cold stream swerved
around the boulders and I struggled to hold it and drink
as it ran through my numb fingers.
It was you and not your words I couldn't hold.

It has been slow, these battles to say goodbye.
When we spoke last, tumors had reached your brain
and I wound up speaking like a child to a child.
You recognized my voice but not my meaning,
perhaps my real meaning, and were full of the pleasure
of the moment's part lucidity.

At a funeral shortly after yours,
Episcopalian too, the priest's grasp
of grief's vagary seemed flawless, and for some,
not comfortless, persuading us with consolations
that he knew we knew, knowing us all so well.
You were never cool, never suave
but always intense, urgent, heated,
pushing against a wall of thick lenses.
You were such a musical prodigy no one noticed
you were nearly blind until you went to school,
and you never lost the high tenor drama
that could not drone, could only sing.
Music flourished in your ministry, not as ornament
but as the most true voice to company Christ
toward tragedy and other infidel dances
and would sing a soft shoe for me to dance
when talk got too intense and we needed to laugh.

I need to speak of your soul, now you are dead--
to your soul. But my Jewish ear is tone deaf
to the soul's survival. It is not
the fate of my soul after I am dead
that I dread when I read Dante. I asked Anne,
vivid and unique, long a Buddhist, where she would be
after death. She doubted being a person
was the most important task for her soul to do--
it needed to bear witness to our massacres
and cry and cry out against the betrayal of soul.
Tanya, deep skeptic, died for a long moment
and revived to understand the self
can not be destroyed, and emerged a witness,
not only of the soul, but its tormented world.

And I am left with a bafflement you understand
is not put on for argument. Atheist and Jew,
atheist and Jew, what could be worse to follow a hearse
than atheist and Jew. You respected--
even admired--both, and had the grace
not to despair of me. And I do not despair
of your just life, driven by a faith
I can not understand and an intense love I can.

PIECES FOR THE SUICIDE OF PAUL CELAN

When Celan asked Heidegger, who was Rector of the
University of Freiberg in the early Hitler years,
about his post war silence concerning his Nazi past,
Heidegger either refused to answer or was evasive. George
Steiner says, "Either way, the effect on Celan can be felt to have been calamitous."

Roundness of eyes between bars
greets
the snake in the spine
the wolf in the heart

That mind is so naked
and the room is dark

you are allowed to touch it

that appearance of nakedness
under an impenetrable code

He cannot speak to you
not even tell you this
it would tell too much
and all of it wrong

the hesitations badly
out of place, distorted phrasing

Illegible, this
world, it all doubles

He asked the Rector:
Why did you assist
the cursed marriage
of the mutable state
to the immutable spirit--it drives
the one mad as the other dies
it drives them both mad
blind and violent

The Rector was
so committed to unity
of the whole, the body
was the state, the lovely
discordant University
allowed one voice only,
under the single will of the state

the whole as meaningless
to itself as a tree

to overcome the insult
of diversity

(Look at them sullen
on their bunks, some
facing left, some right,
or staring at your eyes, your throat)

and answered the aphorist
of image with silence

locked in his own depths
and climbing out
forever

August:

Is that a bird?
No, it is the brightest of the leaves
falling early

The last interrogation was unclear
the translator belonged to the court
and prosecutor, no one
understood what he really said--
he was carrion in a dog's mouth,
eaten, puked and eaten

Why are you waiting? Sew,
sew it on, he's torn
away his face, if you wait
too long the face will rot
and not stay on
you know why he did it
and why he wants it back

top | home

IV

THE SUMMER I SPENT SCREWING IN THE BACK SEATS OF STATION WAGONS
was the last summer that lasted all summer.
This was not--do not misread the title--
screwing the seats in, but climbing in
the back seats and screwing as fast as I could.
It was always the same, open the back and fling
in the power driver and the big tool
box with the braces and screws as the tall Pole
pressed the window firmly into place,
as I would drill the holes, line up the clamps,
and screw them in. If the clamps sat too tight
the window cracked and then a flurry of work
as we swarmed ahead of our spot on the line,
the tall Pole and I at Fisher Bodies
in Euclid, Ohio, and rushed to return to our place.
I kept bashing my hands and my nights were crushed,
and in all that soul exhausting work
the cars were as rotten as we could make them.
There was nothing of ourselves we wanted to see
in what we did to Chevy Kingswood and Nomad
and Pontiac Safari with pubescent tailfins.
This was in Euclid, who looked on Beauty bare,
Ohio, whose three long syllables danced
in only four letters, pronounced Ah-hah,
by my fellow workers who wrenched, torqued, and screwed
on the assembly line with me in Euclid, Ohio.
At the end of the day all we had was numbers,
corporate totals. It brought to mind
the boast of Wilt the Stilt that he had fucked
twenty thousand women in his time,
and never, never, the same woman twice.
And as we looked, wearied, at our line of cars
we wondered, how could he tell?

SWEET TOWN

When she reached her hand out of the car window
to greet me I surprised myself with the hunger
with which I kissed it. I surprised her too.
Her car stopped at an angle at the corner
and her small yellow trailer stopped a fleet
of trucks which backed up all the cars on State Street.

Oh pardon, I beg the horn-wielding driver
(yelling "Ball her!") for causing all this strain
(I will kiss her hand only!) in sweet Montpelier
that uses the scramble system at State and Main
for getting us safely across for my (see above)
disorderly stun at untimely love.

APOLLO, APHRODITE AND THE POET

The gods in heavy squabble make the
poet choose which is greater, poetry
or sex

Choose poetry, you are rewarded with
a winged horse you can not dismount,
choose sex, you are rewarded with

sexual fulfillment with a mannequin
of celotex, frigid, stupid, stiff and thin,
choose poetry, you are rewarded with

wings of your own and can not land,
touch, stop, fall, no arm, no hand,
choose sex, you are rewarded with

heart's enslavement to a prince-
ess, astonished worship, impotence,
choose poetry, you are rewarded with

sexual enslavement to a mannequin
of celotex, frigid, stupid, stiff and thin,
choose sex, you are rewarded with

sexual enslavement to a horse,
winged, that cannot dismount or cease,
chose poetry, you are rewarded with

that choice, the double pointed knife you knew
you could not grasp, that curse when you
choose poetry you are rewarded with,
choose sex you are rewarded with.

AFTER YEATS AFTER RONSARD

Now that you are going gray and skin
is creasing with its customary hate
your face and neck and you lean over the fire
to rake another twinkle from the grate,

take down my book decaying on the shelf.
You loved it once, unerringly misread
every word. You never saw yourself
ridiculed, abused and vivisected

by one who saw the transient soul in you
as you danced around the edges of your art
eager to blow, acoustically or non-
whatever horn would sound, in whole or part,

your sacred name. The stars, disgraced,
seduced and blinded you and burned your face.

POSSESSION AND THE LAW

With a view of her inverted heart shaped ass
in clinging slacks he squeezed between a Subaru
and Jeep in a mountain parking lot and followed
the contained explosion of his wife
to a recital by their daughter at a rural
musical college in Vermont's southern tier.

The way he held her, every step was drama,
as he played gangland boss, nervous
violence restrained, a little furtive,
the smile uneasy, his grip on her arm too tight,
as if she would fly off with any man around,
and he, her anchor, kept her on the ground

from which her strength comes and she comes,
reliably. It's a mess, marrying beauty--
the fear always denied that disarranges men.
Women learn early so she knows her power
and laughs about his consternation
as she swings it up the stairs into the crowd,

to keep the terror of possession in his mind,
his half-shame half-delight in her brief
round-trip flights within his slow hands.
And now they enter early together through
the heavy doors into the hall and the chatter.

ANCIENT CITY

The tough testicular fruit and broad leaves
of strangler figs and smothering vines cancel
all light, and poisonous moss eats stone
and the delicious flesh of stone bodies that fill
the temple walls with attitudes of sexual ecstasy
(disciplined abandon, poise and measure
in their bodies' perfect balance, faces
in joyful contemplation of their pleasure)
and here I first learned to incarnate
those stone women in my arms or climbing
up my trunk to form the great sexual tree.

And from their dreaming faces--
among them one face with an open-mouthed smile
(and all the while
I applied my studies
to warm bodies)
in that face, and in the faces in my hands, with my whole
body I entered the struggle for true feeling
(and all the while
I strolled in the broad streets
losing myself in music, rapt by theater)
among the ornate walls built my own inner life, set out
its real boundaries, within the civic space,
the porch, cafe, temple, the temple wall,
the need to understand the masquerade of faces,
to fight careless or willful decomposition of words.

My city, after a few human lifetimes, was reabsorbed
by the wildness it walled out, and it remains as words.

BOTTOMING OUT

After the curtain and the flurry
of hug, snub, gush,
and the sharp snarl of velcro,
he slides his bulk from the cluster
of all the beautiful ones,
removes the tufts of hair,
his galluses, sabots,
a large, warty nose
that left his own to flame
in the air of his undressing-
redressing room, fighting
to make real in his mind
the body that was not his body
bathing in Titania,
a flush of warm air,
as if he were really there
in memory, not a dream,
from a fresh time before,
and not a barrel of actor
closing his long career
by rolling among the leapers
who are graceful in neck and arm
and who kiss and stroke him and titter,
this lieutenant of the nothing
with nothing to laugh at but loss.

LATE

I forgot you, I remembered, late,
among the chatter, cheese, paté,
and ran to my car to bring you
to this brilliant dinner, late, not too late
for the genial, noisy circle, and raced away
to your small rooms to retrieve you.

You opened the door at the head of the narrow stairs,
bed-warm, drowsy, tucking in loose hairs:
your lover, in red bandanna like a pirate,
refused to notice me, a boring diversion
breathless to abscond with you.
He towered in post-coital possession.

Why am I, old poet and professor,
quietly shamed by jealousy and rage,
blood hammered eye and iced groin?
You were never mine to possess, not daughter,
not lover. I buy this pain with honest coin—
the clamoring, chill indignity of age.

TO HOLLIS FRAMPTON
(1936-1984)

Breaking out of long wordlessness,
Pound lugged his blood red portable
one sun-white morning in Rapallo
to a table in the garden and typed all day.
Behind the blinds in the dim house
the family stared and whispered.
He addressed a handful of envelopes,
puttered through the rooms for stamps,
and walked, enfeebled but erect,
into town and mailed them. He had spoken
hardly a single word to anyone except
the stoned Allen Ginsberg in ten years.

The letters trickled back from the long dead
friends in distant cities: London--Eliot
and Wyndham Lewis, Ketchum--Hemingway,
Paris--James Joyce, Dublin--Yeats,
and Ford Madox Ford and others I forget.
I said to you, who heard this story
from the family, "A letter
to a dead friend is an artful gesture."
"But you don't mail them," you said
sadly, so I don't.

PRAYER

Jammed on a double seat on the "D" train
into the city from Brighton Beach,
three Orthodox girls--white blouses, black curls,
heavy navy skirts, socks to their knees,
clunky shoes, wool shawls, prayer books
raised to their faces to different pages--
race through, mouth the words to drive them home.

Their eyes are large, and though they wear
no make-up, they look like mascara is smeared
around the hollows. They fight yawns,
and each peeks over to see how far
the other girls have gotten in their prayers.
They shiver with boredom. My hometown Bible station
that drifts in to drive out NPR
celebrates god all day and commands us to revel in him.

Five hundred prayers from the pious
bless the creator every day.
Could my profane romance invite,
with this excess, sparks of the divine
in this city itself, as I rattle full speed
beneath the churches and towers along its rivers?

SHE, TIRESIAS

The snakes disentangled and sliced through the whispering grasses.
When I reached out my hand the rings fell off.

Unaccustomed masses of my body. Unaccustomed motions.

I have entered a woman's body as myself
and someone else: a man
discovering himself a woman, a woman
remembering she was a man. All these.

Constrained by gentle breeding and discretion
a man of my class does not take. He is given
and suddenly I can give, and by giving, take. Dere hart,
I say, how like you this? Another power,
in body and mind, new beauty--
that boy looking over his shoulder, avid.

This red dress--the way it sweeps the floor
will reveal me utterly and confess
to my abandon, to my gravity.

No longer moving outside my body
for pleasure, it flows now from inside,
stays inside, suffuses, like hunger
satisfied, and the child I carry
reconnects me to the world I had been studying
to leave, after the deaths. The man
remaining within me remains astonished.

This child invisible within me,
frightens the man within me less and less.
He grows satisfied not to see
with his own eyes. We are a mode
of refused self-revelation, an instinctive pluralist.

THE EROTICS OF READING

Huddled against the door in the half shelter
afforded by the high columns and the short cornice
from the rain, my glasses mist, my bald spot ices,
and I'm eight minutes early. Through streaks of water
I see in plain sight the librarian
and he has me and the clock in plain sight.
I must soak while he putters around his desk
straightening pencils, putting cards in line,
and chill till the library opens. Precise
about his blessed tasks, but once inside--
inviting, urgent, deep, the labial books,
promiscuous and abundant, open for me.

FIREWOOD

Despite the chainsaw and muscle and joint jamming labor
as I poke my way between erratic boulders
and part the saplings and slip through smoothly
with the long breath of wind in the dry trees
and lake water slapping a nearby dock,
I'm ten years old again, stone-age, iron-age,
the knife and the arrow, deadly aim and force,
the silent stalking, the spring and scream of the panther,
murder in the service of my tribe,
Deerslayer or the last Mohican hunter
as the boy overtakes the man in a wilderness dream
of manly power at play and not anymore
the plodder's task, cutting, splitting and stacking
maple, beech, and birch to heat the house.

THE SWAN AND LEDA

She stares with an infant's adoration
at an unsuspecting male, vain enough
to think he has deserved the gift
of her goggle-eyed, goggle-mouthed attention.
Is she Sincere? Yes! Yes! Authentic?
Yes! She has no idea where she learned
to manage this harpoon aimed at the heart.
Harpoon? No! A noose? No!

The trick
is to keep him virile and fully intact to serve
the carnal ache, the life career, to nurture
and swell a tribe. You must envy this oaf
his goofy smile, his eagerness for capture.
The hand inching across the table is intimate. The intent,
the power, the means, entirely indifferent.

DICHTERLIEBE, FOR VOICE AND PIANO

Before the notes of the piano, all
exact, well-tempered, many-voiced and pure,
so precise in pitch and time and phrase,
so many that they climb the scales or fall
in chords, retard, advance and order
each note's attack and fade with such control
that when the voice enters, groping about,
searching for notes to match, laboring
against perfection, huffing its words, those mischance
bodies, and swells to reach, rises then sinks
to its own note and always the piano,
clear, as the coarse voice modulates
against it, croons, grunts and roars (with pauses
and wavers that show the singer thinks his life
and feelings matter to us, should matter)
as it stumbles like a dancing bear before
the dulcimer and flute in the gypsy's hands
and lumbers off balance in rancid fur
and pants out its garbage eating breath,
stands in its yellow hat and bulging pants,
then lifts one heavy foot and lets it fall,
then lifts the other, and faster, and dances Bear--
and bears at last this trying-to-say-with-words--
transfixing that it means or moves at all.

REUNION, a Fragment

Through stone door and brass ring, the hive
opened downward and a crossed escalator
sank and rose. I sank just as The Five

Hot Spots rose to the top step with their
stage smile and broke into "The Musk-
rat Ramble," weaving the high throaty then clear

horn into the crunch of the rest. In neon dusk I
followed the rich smell seeking heat,
the smell of body in its own heat. A husk

of old Prez rose, his love-me grin in sweet
pink, trying a samba on a cramped step
with a propeller hat and flip-flops on his feet.

On my side, descending, a tense rope
of humorless comedians, rational men about
their daylight lives, on that slow moving slope

keeping a sense of balance, sensible doubt,
ir