Collected Poems Read Online Free

hole
    even apples even hand grenades with indentations
    for our fingers and the detonations patterns finding us
    all this given and how ungrateful we are
    dreaming that someday we won’t touch anything
    that all this space will close on us
    the fire sprout through us and blossom and
    the tides
    dear father of the fire save me enough room please
    and dear water-mother I’d like two clear drops
    to float in brothers and sisters I’ll need
    your engines and computers I’ll need four tall buildings
    and heaters and strong-bulldozers with
    thick treads and switches and there must be
    uniforms
    there must be maps and hoses and
    tiled rooms to drain the blood off
    and will your voices
    come telling me you love me? and your mouths
    and hands? and your cold
    music? every inch of me? every
    hour of me?

After That
    Do you know how much pain is left
    in the world? One tiny bit of pain is left,
    braised on one cell like a toothmark.
    And how many sorrows there still are? Three sorrows:
    the last, the next to the last and this one.
    And there is one promise left, feeling
    its way through the poison, and one house
    and one gun and one shout of agony
    that wanders in the lost cities and the lost mountains.
    And so this morning, suffering the third sorrow
    from the last, feeling pain in my last gene,
    cracks in the struts, bubbles in the nitro,
    this morning for someone I’m not even sure exists
    I waste tears. I count down by fractions
    through the ash. I howl. I use everything up.

Ten Below
    It is bad enough crying for children
    suffering neglect and starvation in our world
    without having on a day like this
    to see an old cart horse covered with foam,
    quivering so hard that when he stops
    the wheels still rock slowly in place
    like gears in an engine.
    A man will do that, shiver where he stands,
    frozen with false starts,
    just staring,
    but with a man you can take his arm,
    talk him out of it, lead him away.
    What do you do when both hands
    and your voice are simply goads?
    When the eyes you solace see space,
    the wall behind you, the wisp of grass
    pushing up through the curb at your feet?
    I have thought that all the animals
    we kill and maim, if they wanted to
    could stare us down, wither us
    and turn us to smoke with their glances —
    they forbear because they pity us,
    like angels, and love of something else
    is why they suffer us and submit.
    But this is Pine Street, Philadelphia, 1965.
    You don’t believe
    in anything divine being here.
    There is an old plug with a worn blanket
    thrown on its haunches. There is a wagon
    full of junk — pipes and rotted sinks,
    the grates from furnaces — and there
    is a child walking beside the horse
    with sugar, and the mammoth head lowering,
    delicately nibbling from those vulnerable
    fingers. You can’t cut your heart out.
    Sometimes, just what is, is enough.

Tails
    there was this lady once she used to grow
    snakes in her lap
    they came up like tulips
    from her underpants and the tops
    of her stockings and she’d get us
    with candy and have us pet
    the damned things
    god they were horrible skinned
    snakes all dead
    it turned out she’d catch
    them in the garden and skin
    them and drive
    knitting needles up along the spines
    and sew them on
    it stank
    the skins rotting in the corner heads
    scattered all over the floor
    it turned out she loved
    children she wanted
    to do something
    for us we ate
    the candy of course we touched
    the snakes we
    hung around god
    we hated her she was
    terrible

Sky, Water
    for Bruce and Fox McGrew
    They can be fists punching the water —
    muskrats, their whole bodies plunging
    through weak reeds from the bank,
    or the heads of black and white ducks
    that usually flicker in quietly
    and come up pointing heavenwards.
    A man can lie off the brown scum of a slough
    and watch how they’ll go in like blades,
    deeply, to the bottom,
    and in his pale silence
    with the long field furrows strumming
    like distant music,
    he will wonder at and pity
    the creatures