Your Name Here: Poems Read Online Free

Portraits of Old Goriot.”
    The way a piece of candy seems to flutter
    in the prismatic light above a clothesline, stops,
    removes all its clothes.
    There was a bucket
    of water
    to wash in,
    fingerposts pointing the way to the next phenomenon:
    sugar falling gently on strawberries, snow on a pile of red eggs.
    None of us was really satisfied,
    but none of us wanted to go away, either.
    The shadows of an industrial park loomed below us,
    the brass sky above.
    “Get off your duff,” Reuel commanded.
    (He was our commander.)
    “You are like the poet Lenz, who ran from house to forest
    to rosy firmament and back
    and nobody ever saw his legs move.”
    Ah,
    it is good
    to be back
    in the muck.

INVASIVE PROCEDURES
    I flee from those who are gifted with understanding, fearing that all their great and illuminating invasions of my being still won’t satisfy me.
    —Robert Walser, “The One of Fairy Tales”
    Massachusetts rests its feet
    in Rhode Island,
    as crows rest in cowslips
    and cows slip in crowshit.
    I may have been called upon to write
    a poem different from this one.
    OK, let’s go. I want to please everybody
    and this is my song:
    In Beethoven Street I handed you a melon.
    Round and pronged it was, and full of secret juice.
    You, in turn, handed me over to the police
    who thought (correctly) that I was the spy
    they had been looking for these past seven months.
    They led me down to their station, you need to know,
    where they questioned me for days on end.
    But my answers were always questions, and so they let me go,
    exasperated by their inability to answer.
    I was a free man!
    I walked up Rilke Street
    chattering a little hymn to myself.
    It went something like this:
    “Beware the monsters, but take care
    that you are not yourself one.
    Time is kind to them
    and will take care of you,
    asleep on your grandmother’s couch, sipping cherry juice.”
    How did the pigs get through the window screens at night?
    By morning it was all over.
    I had never sung to you, you never coaxed me to
    from your balcony, and all trains run into night
    that collects them like paper streamers, and lays them in a drawer.
    Unable to leave the sight of you
    I draw little crow’s feet in my notebook, in the sunlight
    that comes at the end of a sudden day of tears
    waiting to be reconciled to the fascinating madness of the dark.
    My mistress’ hands are nothing like these,
    collecting silken cords for a day when the wet wind plunges
    through colossal apertures.
    Suddenly I was out of hope. I crawled out on the ledge.
    The air there was frank and pure,
    not like the frayed December night.

PAPERWORK
    Waste time on these riddles?
    Because what would I lecture on then?
    The master that comes after, after all,
    brushes them aside or burns them.
    Am I therefore not very strong?
    Will my arch be built, strung along the sand
    within sight of olive trees? No,
    I am cut of plainer cloth, but it dazzles me
    in the evening by the moonlight.
    L’heureuse, they called her.
    Day after day she gazed at the blue gazing globe
    in her sunlit garden, saying nothing.
    Noticing this, the old stump said nothing too.
    Finally it couldn’t stand it any longer:
    “Can’t you be something? You have the required manners
    and your dress is a shifting of pea-green shot with sea-foam.”
    I know I shall one day come to the reason
    for manners and intercourse with persons.
    Therefore I launch my hat on this peg.
    Here, there are two of us. Take two.
    Turning and turning in the demented sky,
    the sugar-mill gushes forth poems and plainer twists.
    It can’t account for the roses in our furnace.
    A motherly chimp leads us away
    to a table overflowing with silverware and crystal,
    crystal smudgepots so the old man could see through tears:
    He is the one you ought to have invited.

THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE
    Once upon a time there were two brothers.
    Then there was only one: myself.
    I grew up fast, before learning to drive,
    even. There was I: a stinking adult.
    I