Collected Poems Read Online Free Page B

me about my life again, where it is now.

Faint Praise
    for Jim Moss, 1935–1961
    Whatever last slump of flesh
    rolls like a tongue in the mouth of your grave,
    whatever thin rags of your underwear
    are melting in slow, tiny stomachs,
    I am still here; I have survived.
    I thought when you died that your angels,
    stern, dangerous bats with cameras and laws,
    would swarm like bees
    and that the silences flaming from you
    would fuse me like stone.
    There were no new landscapes I could prepare for you.
    I let you go.
    And tonight, again, I will eat, read,
    and my wife and I will move into love
    in the swells of each other like ships.
    The loose aerial outside will snap,
    the traffic lights blink and change,
    the dried lives of autumn crackle like cellophane.
    And I will have my life still.
    In the darkness, it will lie over against me,
    it will whisper, and somehow,
    after everything, open to me again.

Halves
    I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces
    because there is something in me that is neither
    the right half nor the left half nor between them.
    It is what I see when I close my eyes, and what I see.
    As in this room there is something neither ceiling
    nor floor, not space, light, heat or even
    the deep skies of pictures, but something that beats softly
    against others when they’re here and others not here,
    that leans on me like a woman,
    curls up in my lap and walks
    with me to the kitchen or out of the house altogether
    to the street — I don’t feel it, but it beats and beats;
    so my life: there is this, neither before me
    nor after, not up, down, backwards nor forwards from me.
    It is like the dense, sensory petals in a breast
    that sway and touch back. It is like the mouth of a season,
    the cool speculations bricks murmur, the shriek in orange,
    and though it is neither true nor false, it tells me
    that it is quietly here, and, like a creature, is in pain;
    that when I ripen it will crack open the locks, it will love me.

Penance
    I only regret the days wasted in no pain.
    I am sorry for having touched bottom
    and loved again.
    I am sorry for the torn sidewalks
    and the ecstasy underneath, for the cars,
    the old flower-lady watching her fingers,
    my one shoe in the morning
    with death on its tongue.
    In the next yard a dog whines
    and whines for his lost master
    and for the children who have gone
    without him. I am sorry
    because his teeth click on my neck,
    because my chest shudders and the owl cries
    in the tug of its fierce sacrament.
    I repent God and children,
    the white talons of peace and my jubilance.
    Everything wheels
    in the iron rain, smiling and lying.
    Forgive me, please.

It Is Teeming
    In rain like this what you want is an open barn door
    to look out from. You want to see the deep hoofprints
    in the yard fill and overflow, to smell the hay and hear
    the stock chewing and stamping and their droppings pattering.
    Of course the messengers would come away. A wet mutt,
    his underlip still crisp with last night’s chicken blood,
    will drift through the gate and whine and nuzzle
    your knee with a bad look like a secret drinker,
    and you will wish for the lions, the claws that erected
    and slashed back, because you are tired of lording it,
    of caving ribs in, of swinging axes and firing.
    Where are the angels with trucks who pulled the trees down?
    Now it is pure muck, half cowshit, half mud and blood, seething.
    You have to go out back, dragging it, of course. No one
    sees you with it. The rain — you throw wakes up like a giant.
    The way you wanted it, the way it would be, of course.

From Now On
    for Murray Dessner
    this knowledge so innocently it goes this sin
    it dies without looking back it ripens
    and dissolves and behind it behind
    january behind bread and trenches there
    are rooms with no gods in them there are breasts
    with no deaths anymore and no promises
    I knew mercy would leave me and turn
    back I knew things in their small nests would
    want me and say Come and things