Collected Poems Read Online Free Page B

skies and Mediterranean constantly. No trees.
    Me cleaning squid. Linda getting up from a chair.
TRYING TO BE MARRIED
    Watching my wife out in the full moon,
    the sea bright behind her across the field
    and through the trees. Eight years
    and her love for me quieted away.
    How fine she is. How hard we struggle.
REGISTRATION
    Where the worms had opened the owl’s chest,
    he could see, inside her frail ribs,
    the city of Byzantium. Exquisitely made
    of ironwood and brass. The pear trees around
    the harem and the warships were perfectly detailed.
    No wonder they make that mewing sound, he thought,
    calling to each other among the dark arbors
    while the cocks crow and answer and a farther
    rooster answers that: the sound proceeding
    up the mountain, paling and thinning until
    it is transparent, like the faint baying of hounds.
MORE THAN FRIENDS
    I was walking through the harvested fields
    tonight and got thinking about age.
    Began wondering if my balance was gone.
    So there I was out in the starlight
    on one foot, swaying, and cheating.
THAT TENOR OF WHICH THE NIGHT BIRDS ARE A VEHICLE
    The great light within the blackness shines out
    as the cry of owls and tranced signaling of nightjars.
    Birds who are vast cloud-chambers of the place I am
    in my bright condition, a neighborhood I am the darkness of.
    It should come from me as song and new flying
    between the pale olive trees. But the calling of birds
    in the silent dim fields is a translation I fail at,
    despite the steady gladness where I have made landfall.
    I go without audible music, flying heavily
    from stone to stone in order to nest in marble.
    Failing the harking, missing the hawking. Not managing
    as a bird. Struggling through my career, blindly testing
    the odor of all that whiteness night after night:
    not sure if the old piss-smell is the scent of gods,
    and knowing even that faint clue is fading as I hesitate.
WALKING HOME ACROSS THE ISLAND
    Walking home across the plain in the dark.
    And Linda crying. Again we have come
    to a place where I rail and she suffers and the moon
    does not rise. We have only each other,
    but I am shouting inside the rain
    and she is crying like a wounded animal,
    knowing there is no place to turn. It is hard
    to understand how we could be brought here by love.
MISTRUST OF BRONZE
    The sun is perfect, but it makes no nightingales sing.
    The violence of light suppresses color in these fields,
    its glare masking the green of the white grapes
    and masking the heavy purple. Just as the moon now
    finds no tinge in the giant oleander. Perhaps it is
    bronze models for the spirit that endanger us.
    I think of my years on the Greyhound bus, living with
    the blank earth under the American sun day after day.
    Leaking away into those distances. Waxing again
    in the night while everyone slept and I watched
    the old snow by the fences just after the headlights.
    I used to blur in the dark thinking of the long counter
    at Rock Springs day after tomorrow, my pleasure
    of hunger merging with the bad food.
    Memories make me grainy and distinct somewhere. Where
    night shudders with a black fire of which Dante tells.
    I begin the long inaccuracy alone.
    Loneliness, they report, is a man’s fate.
    A man’s fate, said Heraclitus, is his character.
    I sit masturbating in the moonlight,
    trying to find means for all of it.
    The sea collapses, again and again, faintly behind me.
    I walk down the dirt road, touch the cold Aegean,
    and come back slowly. My hand drying in the night air.
ANGELUS
    Obsidian. Sturgeon. Infatuated angels.
    Which only we can translate into flesh.
    The language to which we alone are native.
    Our own bait. We are spirits housed in meat,
    instantly opaque to the Lord. As Jesus.
    We go into the deadfall of the body,
    our hearts in their marvelous cases,
    and discover new belfries everywhere.
    I continued toward the Minotaur to keep
    the thread taut. And suddenly, now,
    immense flowers are coloring all
    my stalked body. Making wine of me.
    As