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We are losing the intensive care unit waiting room war
We were doing so well
So well we got sleepy
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
Whereas my eyes land on the shoreline of “the arrival of Europeans in North America
opened a new chapter in the history of Native Peoples.” Because in others, I hate the act
anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
Come when the nights are bright with stars
Or when the moon is mellow;
Come when the sun his golden bars
Drops on the hay-field yellow.
Come in the twilight soft and gray,
It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
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It’s the first day of summer and we’re so happy
To see the sun and the satchel of colours it schleps
All those dark kilometres. The sky is so blue
And the sea is blue and the small islands in the sea
During two hours on the train
I rerun the film of my life
Two minutes per year on average
Half an hour for childhood
Another half-hour for prison
Love, books, wandering
take up the rest
I threw away your letters.
Years ago, just like that.
The tight black swirls,
circles and strokes
filling fine sheets —
I would not see them again.
The last items I had left.
An ars poetica
I remember the death, in Russia,
of postage stamps
1
an urban image from the eighties
when we hung out at Chez Madame Arthur
You ran naked out the door. The neighbours laughed; I chased you down. I hardly see you anymore.
We cannot know this statue, this satyr
with his head propped on a wineskin;
we cannot know if he dreams. In fact,
He totaled his blue truck —
slowly spun out on an icy bridge,
rammed it into a guard rail.
We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
We can never be with loss too long.
Behind the warped door that sticks,
the wood thrush calls to the monks,
creation stories are lullabies for grown-ups
they remind us of all the possible ways & means
that worlds…
We have each tried to read to him, with no success, except for James,
who read him all of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Travels with a Donkey in the
Cévennes
Your father worked Drumheller while you ate and slept at home.
He travelled the badlands, squatted below rocks, read books
Coin Exhibit, British Museum.
Their misshapenness strikes the table in tiny splashes,
like still-cooling splatters of silver. Stater and shekel,
GOODLOOKING BOY wasn’t he / yes/ blond /
yes / I do vaguely
/ you never liked
Sometimes we are led through the doorway
by a child, sometimes
by a stranger, always a matter of grace changing
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again — flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
Very loud a mad frenzy The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared
(I first wrote “road”)
Now I set out across a minefield,
space having taken all I owned, I’m starting over
from a point where every pebble may explode
beneath my shoe and the flowers blaze up
behind my body as I gasp for air,
sometimes I find myself
weeping
at the oddest moment
you are unaware of your obscure sources
but you are explicitly sure of the vast sea
as your final destination
No, nothing much has changed.
A year later, the world is still one you’d recognize —
no winged cars to clog the air,
To Kristin Lems
We miss something now
as we think about it
My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates…
Breathe dust like you breathe wind so strong in your face
little grains of dirt which pock around the cheeks peddling
against a dust-storm…
At the beginning I noticed
the huge stones on my path
I knew instinctively
Hidden in wonder and snow, or sudden with summer,
This land stares at the sun in a huge silence
Endlessly repeating something we cannot…
a glass tube
for my leg says Hugo Ball
my hat a cylinder
There are things you have words for, things you do not
have words for. There are words that encompass all your
feelings & words that…
I was ready for a new experience.
All the old ones had burned out.
They lay in little ashy heaps along the roadside
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
My bands of silk and miniver
Momently grew heavier;
The black gauze was beggarly thin;
Go, lovely rose!
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
Oh, Hope! thou soother sweet of human woes!
How shall I lure thee to my haunts forlorn!
For me wilt thou renew the withered rose,
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, — mud from a muddy spring;
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows
Not marble nor the gilded monuments
Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme,
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;
So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
Our life is like a forest, where the sun
Glints down upon us through the throbbing leaves;
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
