Poetry

Six P.M.

Trouvere at night, grammarian in the morning,
ruefully architecting syllables—
but in the afternoon my ivory tower falls.
I take a place in the bus among people returning
to love (domesticated) and the smell of onions burning
and women reaping the washlines as the Angelus tolls.

But I—where am I bound?
My garden, my four walls
and you project strange shores upon my yearning:
Atlantis? the Caribbeans? Or Cathay?
Conductor, do I get off at Sinai?
Apocalypse awaits me: urgent my sorrow
towards the undiscovered world that I
roam warm responding flesh for a while shall borrow:
conquistador tonight, clockpuncher tomorrow.


The Innocence of Solomon

Sheba, Sheba, open your eyes!
the apes defile the ivory temple,
the peacocks chant dark blasphemies;
but I take your body for mine to trample,
I laugh where once I bent the knees.
Yea, I take your mouth for mine to crumple,
drunk with the wisdom of your flesh.

But wisdom never was content
and flesh when ripened falls at last:
what will I have when the seasons mint
your golden breasts into golden dust?

Let me arise and follow the river
back to its source. I would bathe my bones
among the chaste rivulets that quiver
out of the clean primeval stones.

Yea, bathe me again in the early vision
my soul tongued forth before your mouth
made of a kiss a fierce contrition,
salting the waters of my youth!

Sheba, Sheba, close my eyes!
The apes have ravished the inner temple,
the peacocks rend the sacred veil
and on the manna feast their fill—
but chaliced drowsily in your ample
arms, with its brief bliss that dies,
my own deep sepulchre I seal.



From Bye Bye Blackbird

1.
A death in the family. Relatives
you haven’t seen since the last
death in the family reappear
like furniture from your past
reassembled for a movie about it;
reassembling now only as props:
footlight (as it were) and backdrops,
to celebrate not a death but the family
here having one of its final stops,
here it continues where it stops.

2.
No one is here as a person,
only as the correct representative
of his branch of the line. Only
the man that’s dead is here as himself,
is discussed as such. “Rather lonely,
his last days.” “Well, he was on the shelf
all of these years.” “He was renting
that crummy apartment?” “No, just a part
of it, the upstairs.” “Collapsed, alone
with his cats—whom someone should be representing.
They were so dear to him.” “From the start
of the stroke, unconscious.” “Four o’clock dawn.”
“Died like his father, cerebral hemorrhage.”
The crowd wake was a lively tone.