summer, they're out of the city.
To a Friend
I cannot give you much or ask you much.
Though I shore myself up until we meet,
The words we say are public as the street:
Your body is walled up against my touch.
Our ghosts bob and hug in the air where we meet,
My reason hinges on arcs you draw complete,
And yet you are walled up against my touch.
Your love for me is, in its way, complete,
Like alabaster apples angels eat,
But since it is in this world that we meet
I cannot give you much or ask you much.
You go your way, I mine, and when we meet,
Both half-distracted by the smells of the street,
Your body is walled up against my touch.
My body sings at your table, waits on the street
And you pass empty-handed, till when we meet
I have been so far, so deep, so cold, so much,
My hands, my eyes, my tongue are like bark to the touch.
Waiting
Ask, and let your words diminish your asking,
As your journal has diminished your days,
With the next day's vanity drying your blood,
The words you have lost in your notebooks.
Ask—do not be afraid. Praise Him for His silence.
What I love to ask is what I know,
Old thoughts that fit like a boot.
What I would hazard clings in my skull:
Pride intervenes, like an eyelid.
All sound slows down to a monstrous slow repetition,
Your times of reflection become a dark shop-window,
Your face up against your face.
You kneel, you see yourself see yourself kneel,
Revile your own looking down at your looking up;
Before the words form in the back of your head
You have said them over and answered, lives before.
O saints, more rollicking sunbeams, more birds about your heads!
Catherine, more Catherine-wheels!
Sic transit gloria mundi, The quick flax, the swollen globe of water. Sic transit John's coronation, mortal in celluloid. Underground roots and wires burn under us. John outlives the Journal's 4-color outsize portrait Suitable for Framing, flapping, no color, No love, in the rain on the side of the paper-shed. Into Thy hands, O Lord, I commit my soul. All Venice is sinking.
Let us dance on the head of a pin
And praise principalities!
Life is a joke and all things show it! Let us praise the night sounds in Connecticut, The Czechoslovak's parakeet, Whistling Idiot, Idiot!
The moon's disk singes a bucketing cloud
Lit by the sun lit by a burning sword
Pointing us out of the Garden.
Turn your back on the dark reflecting glass
Fogged up with the breath of old words:
You will not be forgiven if you ignore
The pillar of slow insistent snow
Framing the angel at the door,
Who will not speak and will not go,
Numbering our hairs, our bright blue feathers.
Sasha and the Poet
Sasha: I dreamed you and he
Sat under a tree being interviewed
By some invisible personage. You were saying
'They sound strange because they were lonely,
The seventeenth century,
That's why the poets sound strange today:
In the hope of some strange answer.'
Then you sang ‘hey nonny, nonny, no' and cried, And asked him to finish. ‘Quoth the potato-bug,' He said, and stood up slowly. ‘By Shakespeare.' And walked away.
The Second Dream
We all heard the alarm. The planes were out
And coming, from a friendly country. You, I thought,
Would know what to do. But you said,
‘There is nothing to do. Last time
The bodies were like charred trees.'
We had so many minutes. The leaves
Over the street left the light silver as dimes.
The children hung around in slow motion, loud,
Liquid as butterflies, with nothing to do.
A Bride's Hours
I. DAWN
I try to hold your face in my mind's million eyes
But nothing hangs together. My spirit lies
Around my will like an extra skin
I cannot fill or shake.
My eyes in Bachrach's rectangle look in.
I, who was once at the core of the world,
Whose childish outline held like a written word,
Am frozen in blur: my body, waiting, pours
Over its centaur dreams, and drowns, and wakes
To
