They were the bread of life.
Now your lips are moving, now
your hands reach up at me.
I feel as if I might be one
or two thousand feet above you.
Your lips form something, a bubble,
which rises and rises into
my hand: inside it is a word:
Help. I would like to help,
believe me, but up here nothing
is possible, nothing is clear:
Help. Help me.
Prose Poem
I am surrounded by the pieces of this huge
puzzle: here’s a piece I call my wife, and
here’s an odd one I call convictions, here’s
conventions, here’s collisions, conflagrations,
congratulations. Such a puzzle this is! I
like to grease up all the pieces and pile
them in the center of the basement after
everyone else is asleep. Then I leap head-
first like a diver into the wretched confusion.
I kick like hell and strangle a few pieces,
bite them, spitting and snarling like a mongoose.
When I wake up in the morning, it’s all fixed!
My wife says she would not be caught dead at
that savage resurrection. I say she would.
Coda
Love is not worth so much;
I regret everything.
Now on our backs
in Fayetteville, Arkansas,
the stars are falling
into our cracked eyes.
With my good arm
I reach for the sky,
and let the air out of the moon.
It goes whizzing off
to shrivel and sink
in the ocean.
You cannot weep;
I cannot do anything
that once held an ounce
of meaning for us.
I cover you
with pine needles.
When morning comes,
I will build a cathedral
around our bodies.
And the crickets,
who sing with their knees,
will come there
in the night to be sad,
when they can sing no more.
The Tryst
In the early evening rain
I leave the vault
and walk into the city
of lamentations, and stand.
I think it is September, September.
Where are you, Josephine?
It is one minute until you must appear,
draped in a grass-green serape,
shorter than most people,
more beautiful, baleful …
pressing a hand to my forehead,
slipping into my famished pocket
the elixir, the silver needle.
Pity Ascending with the Fog
He had no past and he certainly
had no future. All the important
events were ending shortly before
they began. He says he told mama
earth what he would not accept: and I
keep thinking it had something to do
with her world. Nights expanding into
enormous parachutes of fire, his
eyes were little more than mercury.
Or sky-diving in the rain when there
was obviously no land beneath,
half-dead fish surfacing all over
his body. He knew all this too well.
And she who might at any time be
saying the word that would embrace all
he had let go, he let go of course.
I think the pain for him will end in
May or January, though the weather
is far too clear for me to think of
anything but august comedy.
Pride’s Crossing
Where the railroad meets the sea,
I recognize her hand.
Where the railroad meets the sea,
her hair is as intricate as a thumbprint.
Where the railroad meets the sea,
her name is the threshold of sleep.
Where the railroad meets the sea,
it takes all night to get there.
Where
