Collected Poems Read Online Free Page A

conversation, with no future.
    But I must explain that I will probably cry.
    It is important you ignore it. I am fine.
    I am not interested in discussing it.
    It is complicated and not amiable.
    The sort of thing our arrangements provide against.
    There should be a fireplace. Brandy, and some cigars.
    Or cheese with warm crackers. Anything that permits
    the exercise of incidental decorum:
    deferring to the other’s preceding, asking
    for a light. Vintages. It does not matter what.
    The fireplace is to allow a different grace.
    And there will be darkness above new snow outside.
    Even if we agree on a late afternoon,
    there would still be snow. Inside, the dining room must
    have a desolate quality. So we can talk
    without raising our voices. Finally, I hope
    it is understood we are not to meet again.
    And that both of us are men, so all that other
    is avoided. We can speak and preserve borders.
    The tears are nothing. The real sorrow is for that
    old dream of nobility. All those gentlemen.
BARTLEBY AT THE WALL
    The wall
    is the side of a building.
    Maybe seventy-five feet high.
    The rope is tied
    below the top
    and hangs down thirty feet.
    Just hangs down.
    Above the slum lot.
    It’s been there a long time.
    One part
    below the middle
    is frayed.
    I’ve been at this all month.
    Trying to see the rope.
    The wall.
    Carefully looking
    at the bricks.
    Seeing they are
    umber and soot
    and the color of tongue.
    Even counting them.
    But it’s like Poussin.
    Too clear.
    The way things aren’t.
    So I try not staring.
    Not grabbing.
    Allowing it to come.
    But just at the point
    where I’d see,
    the mind gives a little
    skip
    and I’m already past.
    To all this sorrow again.
    Considering
    the skip between wildness
    and affection,
    where everything is.

TWO—[MONOLITHOS]—1982
ALL THE WAY FROM THERE TO HERE
    From my hill I look down on the freeway and over
    to a gull lifting black against the gray ridge.
    It lifts slowly higher and enters the bright sky.
    Surely our long, steady dying brings us to a state
    of grace. What else can I call this bafflement?
    From here I deal with my irrelevance to love.
    With the bewildering tenderness of which I am
    composed. The sun goes down and comes up again.
    The moon comes up and goes down. I live
    with the morning air and the different airs of night.
    I begin to grow old.
    The ships put out and are lost.
    Put out and are lost.
    Leaving me with their haunting awkwardness
    and the imperfection of birds. While all the time
    I work to understand this happiness I have come into.
    What I remember of my nine-story fall
    down through the great fir is the rush of green.
    And the softness of my regret in the ambulance going
    to my nearby death, looking out at the trees leaving me.
    What I remember of my crushed spine
    is seeing Linda faint again and again,
    sliding down the white X‑ray room wall
    as my sweet body flailed on the steel table
    unable to manage the bulk of pain. That
    and waiting in the years after for the burning
    in my fingertips, which would announce,
    the doctors said, the beginning of paralysis.
    What I remember best of the four years of watching
    in Greece and Denmark and London and Greece is Linda
    making lunch. Her blondeness and ivory coming up
    out of the blue Aegean. Linda walking with me daily
    across the island from Monolithos to Thíra and back.
    That’s what I remember most of death:
    the gentleness of us in that bare Greek Eden,
    the beauty as the marriage steadily failed.
NOT PART OF LITERATURE
    Monolithos was four fisherman huts along the water,
    a miniature villa closed for years, and our farmhouse
    a hundred feet behind. Hot fields of barley, grapes,
    and tomatoes stretching away three flat miles
    to where the rest of the island used to be.
    Where the few people live above the great cliffs.
    A low mountain to the south and beyond that the earth
    filled with pictures of Atlantis. On our wrong side
    of the island were no people, cars, plumbing, or lights.
    The summer