Each time I open it I feel like a Matsés girl
handed a parcel at the end of her seclusion,
my face pierced by jaguar whiskers
to make me brave.
I know what’s inside – that I must
unwrap the envelope of leaves
until all that’s left
squirming in my hands
is an electric eel.
The positive head, the negative tail,
the rows of batteries under the skin,
the small, almost blind eyes.
The day turns murky again,
I’m wading through the bottom of my life
when my father’s letter arrives. And keeps on arriving.
The charged fibres of paper
against my shaking fingers,
the thin electroplates of ink.
The messenger drags me up to the surface
to gulp air then flicks its anal fin.
Never before has a letter been so heavy,
growing to two metres in my room,
the address, the phone number, then the numbness –
I know you must be surprised, it says,
but I will die soon and want to make contact.
Song
Life is ours in vain
Lacking love, which never
Counts the loss or gain.
But remember, ever
Love is linked with pain.
Light and sister shade
Shape each mortal morrow
Seek not to evade
Love’s companion Sorrow,
And be not dismayed.
Grief is not in vain,
It’s for our completeness.
If the fates ordain
Love to bring life sweetness,
Welcome to its pain.
Grateful
The huge mauve jacaranda tree
down the street on South Tremaine
in full bloom
two stories high
It made me so happy
And then
the first cherries of the season
at the Palisades Farmers Market
Sunday morning
“What a blessing!”
I exclaimed to Anjani
And then the samples on waxed paper
of the banana cream cake
I am not a lover of pastry
but I recognized the genius of the baker
and touched my hat to her
A slight chill in the air
seemed to polish the sunlight
and confer the status of beauty
to every object I beheld
Faces bosoms fruits pickles green eggs
newborn babies
in clever expensive harnesses
I am so grateful
to my new anti-depressant
Goldfish Nation
In the pond
There are no bombs, no guns, no bullets.
There is no property and no television.
The pond is the territory not of humans
But of the goldfish.
He is better than you.
Goldfish play.
They do not work.
They do not set the alarm clock
And get up at half past seven
And get on a crowded commuter train
And go to the office.
They are playful creatures.
Goldfish play.
Their games are non-competitive –
Swimming into a space and twisting,
Looking for another space.
All day long it’s like PE
In a progressive infant school.
Goldfish are intelligent.
They answer to their names.
Go out and sprinkle
Just a pinch of fish food
As you call to them
And see them rising from the muddy depths
To greet you. Sunshine. Goldy.
Flipper. Bertrand Russell.
Maharishi. Name your goldfish
After holy men and sages.
It is appropriate.
‘Look on the goldfish,’ say the Inkuwala,
‘And be at peace.’
The Watatooki of Wideawake Bay
Have a different saying:
‘He who contemplates the goldfish
Will grow wiser than a frog.’
Albert Eames of Norwood Fish Society
Believes that his goldfish, Lucky,
Is a bringer of good fortune.
‘It’s a well-known fact,’ he says,
‘That many goldfish owners in South London
‘Have won prizes with their Premium Bonds.’
The sex life of the goldfish, it has to be admitted,
Is somewhat less exciting
Than the mating of whales.
The fact is goldfish do not have a sex life.
They breed without physical contact,
Shedding enormous quantities of sperms and eggs
Into the water.
Hundreds and hundreds of sperms are attracted
To each egg
And each one tries to bore its way through the shell
But only one succeeds in doing so.
After fertilization, the egg faces tremendous hazards,
Including the danger of being eaten
By the very fish who gave it life.
But some survive. The fry swim. They eat.
They grow. Their scales ripen to gold.
And they play.
Like Buddhists,
Goldfish are disinclined
To get into an argument.
They do not discuss interest rates
Or debate the ordination of women.
On these matters they seem to have no opinion.
They prefer to play.
Ludic, aureate creatures,
Silently chanting, Om,
Gazing at reality with round, unblinking eyes.
Water-angels, glinting in the sunlight.
It’s obvious that goldfish are better than people.
Goldfish are better than you.
Thoughts That Visit Me on City Streets
Faces.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
Each different, so we’re told,
from those that have been and will be.
But Nature—since who really understands her?—
may grow tired of her ceaseless labors
and so repeats earlier ideas
by supplying us
with preworn faces.
Those passersby might be Archimedes in jeans,
Catherine the Great draped in resale,
some pharaoh with briefcase and glasses.
An unshod shoemaker’s widow
from a still pint-sized Warsaw,
the master from the cave at Altamira
taking his grandkids to the zoo,
a shaggy Vandal en route to the museum
to gasp at past masters.
The fallen from two hundred centuries ago,
five centuries ago,
half a century ago.
One brought here in a golden carriage,
another conveyed by extermination transport,
Montezuma, Confucius, Nebuchadnezzar,
their nannies, their laundresses, and Semiramida
who speaks only English.
Billions of faces on the earth’s surface.
My face, yours, whose—
you’ll never know.
Maybe nature has to shortchange us,
and to keep up, meet demand,
she fishes up what’s been sunk
in the mirror of oblivion.
Self-Portrait as So Much Potential
Dreaming of one day being as fearless as a mango.
As friendly as a tomato. Merciless to chin & shirtfront.
Realizing I hate the word “sip.”
But that’s all I do.
I drink. So slowly.
& say I’m tasting it. When I’m just bad at taking in liquid.
I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic.
Come amble & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter.
I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised me to be.
I am a gay sipper, & my mother has placed what’s left of her hope on my brothers.
She wants them to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible grandchildren ready to gobble.
They will be better than mangoes, my brothers.
Though I have trouble imagining what that could be.
Flying mangoes, perhaps. Flying mango-tomato hybrids. Beautiful sons.
Dysphoria
liberate love
into dust
shifting, self-gearing
love them all
credit me
do what makes you happy she says
but doesn’t mean it in the way my mum says
the desire to take clothes off
to take them off but also take
off another layer underneath
peel away those expectations
get closer to my truth
I love my mind but I haven’t come to terms with this
I catch you in an embrace with another part of me
looking backwards
into dust
Fleeting Beauty
Single blossom
upon cherry tree,
how lonely it must be
to lie awake
through the night
wondering
if there is another
for you.
Bracing cold and wind,
awaiting tender touch,
and the blush
of cheeks like plums.
To lament the fragile,
familiar petals,
never met
and ever
missed.
To know
that your day
will soon come
and to bloom
anyway.
As Sweet
It’s all because we’re so alike —
Twin souls, we two.
We smile at the expression, yes,
And know it’s true.
I told the shrink. He gave our love
A different name.
But he can call it what he likes —
It’s still the same.
I long to see you, hear your voice,
My narcissistic object-choice.
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
CXVI
Our two heads on one pillow, I awake
to hear impediments scratch in the room
like rats.
I let you sleep, dream on.
Your face
is summer, cloudless, innocent; it blooms.
My kiss, a dying bee grazing a rose.
Something is wrong.
Or let a sonnet prove
the star we followed more than failing light
from time long gone.
Love is not love.
Your heart on mine, I feel, a marriage rite —
but on the floor there lie no wedding clothes.
Don’t stir.
The curtains won’t permit the sun.
Our minds are distant; sullen earth, cold moon.
Out of the corner of my eye,
I see them flit,
dark inklings, verminous.
Let me admit…
The Resurrected
Praying down the gulley,
Slowed by the rainy mire,
I will discern, across the void,
Two flies winding a fire,
And a long thick leaf
Hanging on another,
And a leg of root and leg
Of bough twining together.
That will be she forever:
Lightning bugs for eyes,
That see no farther in the dark
Than my own blind eyes;
A limp left for a cheek,
Cracking before it slips;
Tendril and twig for ankle bones,
And nothing at all for lips
But the unbodied mark
My mouth makes on the dark.
Your heart
Your heart
still remains unsettled
like the wavering of a cosmos flower
after the bee is gone
A Song Of Hope
Look up, my people,
The dawn is breaking,
The world is waking
To a new bright day,
When none defame us,
No restriction tame us,
Nor colour shame us,
Nor sneer dismay.
Now brood no more
On the years behind you,
The hope assigned you
Shall the past replace,
When a juster justice
Grown wise and stronger
Points the bone no longer
At a darker race.
So long we waited
Bound and frustrated,
Till hate be hated
And caste deposed;
Now light shall guide us,
No goal denied us,
And all doors open
That long were closed.
See plain the promise,
Dark freedom-lover!
Night’s nearly over,
And though long the climb,
New rights will greet us,
New mateship meet us,
And joy complete us
In our new Dream Time.
To our fathers’ fathers
The pain, the sorrow;
To our children’s children
The glad tomorrow.
Hoki Mai
…
Then together they would move to the empty plot of ancestral land forgotten by the sea and have little brown babies that she would make sure to stuff fat with potatoes and wobbly mutton. And her children would slurp kina in the summer. Collect driftwood for the fires on their way home from school. And their father would take up a good job in Gisborne. Return home, with sacks of boiled sweets and powdery jam-filled treats, and maybe, on special occasions, a European perfume or powder that she would keep but never use. And already she could smell the florals and the meat. Feel them turning inside her. Sensations so visceral that she cried out from her chest but when the sun lit the day and the train started pulling away, with every salute, march and funeral wave farewell she felt the world changing. The lump in her throat swelled like the seas that threatened to take him from her, and she had to swallow hard. But she promised that every day she would be the first to check the mail and that was the only vow she took.
…
When I am among the trees
When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.
I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.
Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, “Stay awhile.”
The light flows from their branches.
And they call again, “It’s simple,” they say,
“and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine.”
Football
I take the snap from the center, fake to the right, fade back…
I’ve got protection. I’ve got a receiver open downfield…
What the hell is this? This isn’t a football, it’s a shoe, a man’s
brown leather oxford. A cousin to a football maybe, the same
skin, but not the same, a thing made for the earth, not the air.
I realize that this is a world where anything is possible and I
understand, also, that one often has to make do with what one
has. I have eaten pancakes, for instance, with that clear corn
syrup on them because there was no maple syrup and they
weren’t very good. Well, anyway, this is different. (My man
downfield is waving his arms.) One has certain responsibilities,
one has to make choices. This isn’t right and I’m not going
to throw it.
Once
And I adored you.
So in those hours
when the sun once
rolled out a silver walkway on the sea,
when the orchard once
opened its woody fists
to juggle blossom over our heads,
or I once knelt
to steal the rain
from your hands —
which remorse,
as we weep it now,
might remind us of —
once was enough.
A Prayer for My Son
The low river flows like smoked glass.
Small bass guard their nest. Next
To our house, the cardinals in their
Crabapple feed two open mouths.
Parents and offspring, we flex
And swing in this future’s coming,
Mirror we look into only darkly.
My youngest is boarding an airplane
To a New York he’s never seen.
Raised in such slumberous innocence
Of Bible schools and lemonade,
I adjust poorly to this thirst for
Fame, this electronic buzz prizing
brilliance and murderers. Oh son,
Know that the psyche has its own
Fame, whether known or not, that
Soul can flame like feathers of a bird.
Grow into your own plumage, brightly,
So that any tree is a marvelous city.
I wave from here by this Indian Eno,
Whose lonely name I make known.
Grappa in September
The mornings run their course, clear and deserted
along the river’s banks, which at dawn turn foggy,
darkening their green, while they wait for the sun.
In the last house, still damp, at the field’s edge,
they sell tobacco, which is blackish in color
and tastes of sugar: it gives off a bluish haze.
They also have grappa there, the color of water.
There comes a moment when everything is still
and ripens. The trees in the distance are quiet
and their darkness deepens, concealing fruit so ripe
it would drop at a touch. The occasional clouds
are swollen and ripe. Far away, in city streets,
every house is mellowing in the mild air.
This early, you see only women. The women don’t smoke,
or drink. All they know is standing in the sun,
letting it warm their bodies, as though they were fruit.
The air, raw with fog, has to be swallowed in sips,
like grappa. Everything here distills its own fragrance.
Even the water in the river has absorbed the banks,
steeping them to their depths in the soft air. The streets
are like the women. They ripen by standing still.
This is the time when every man should stand
still in the street and see how everything ripens.
There is even a breeze, which does not move the clouds
but somehow succeeds in maneuvering the bluish haze
without scattering it. The smell drifting by is a new smell.
The tobacco is tinged with grappa. So it seems
the women are not alone in enjoying the morning.
Let me hide at least a petal
Let me hide at least a petal
In the sleeve of my flower-viewing robe,
That I may remember the spring.
X
Yet, love, mere love, is beautiful indeed
And worthy of acceptation. Fire is bright,
Let temple burn, or flax; an equal light
Leaps in the flame from cedar-plank or weed:
And love is fire. And when I say at need
I love thee—mark!—I love thee—in thy sight
I stand transfigured, glorified aright,
With conscience of the new rays that proceed
Out of my face toward thine. There’s nothing low
In love, when love the lowest: meanest creatures
Who love God, God accepts while loving so.
And what I feel, across the inferior features
Of what I am, doth flash itself, and show
How that great work of Love enhances Nature’s.
In Praise of Dreams
In my dreams
I paint like Vermeer van Delft.
I speak fluent Greek
and not only with the living.
I drive a car
which obeys me.
I am talented
I write long, great poems.
I hear voices
no less than the major saints.
You would be amazed
at my virtuosity on the piano.
I fly through the air as is proper,
that is, all by myself.
Falling from the roof
I can softly land on green grass.
I don’t find it hard
to breathe under water.
I can’t complain:
I’ve succeeded in discovering Atlantis.
I’m delighted that just before dying
I always manage to wake.
Right after the outbreak of war
I turn over on my favourite side.
I am but I need not
be a child of my age.
A few years ago
I saw two suns.
And the day before yesterday a penguin.
With the utmost clarity.
The Hound Puss
I have a cat: I call him Pumpkin,
A great fat furry purry lumpkin.
Hi-dee-diddle
hi-diddle
dumpkin.
He sleeps within my bed at night,
His eyes are Mephistopheles-bright:
I dare not look upon their blight.
He stalks me like my angry God,
His gaze is like a fiery rod:
He dines exclusively on cod.
Avaunt, you creeping savior-devil,
Away with thy angelical evil!
A Warning
Little animals from cartoons, talking rabbits, doggies, squirrels, as well as ladybugs, bees, grasshoppers. They have as much in common with real animals as our notions of the world have with the real world. Think of this, and tremble.
Today
Today I’m flying low and I’m
not saying a word.
I’m letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep.
The world goes on as it must,
the bees in the garden rumbling a little,
the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten.
And so forth.
But I’m taking the day off.
Quiet as a feather.
I hardly move though really I’m traveling
a terrific distance.
Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.
The Orange
At lunchtime I bought a huge orange—
The size of it made us all laugh.
I peeled it and shared it with Robert and Dave—
They got quarters and I had a half.
And that orange, it made me so happy,
As ordinary things often do
Just lately. The shopping. A walk in the park.
This is peace and contentment. It’s new.
The rest of the day was quite easy.
I did all the jobs on my list
And enjoyed them and had some time over.
I love you. I’m glad I exist.
Ode to my socks
Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.
Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.
The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.
Hummingbirds
The female, and the two chicks,
each no bigger than my thumb,
scattered,
shimmering
in their pale-green dresses;
then they rose, tiny fireworks,
into the leaves
and hovered;
then they sat down,
each one with dainty, charcoal feet –
each one on a slender branch –
and looked at me.
I had meant no harm
I had simply
climbed the tree
for something to do
on a summer day,
not knowing they were there,
ready to burst the ledges
of their mossy nest
and to fly, for the first time,
in their sea-green helmets,
with brisk, metallic tails –
each tulled wing,
with every dollop of flight,
drawing a perfect wheel
across the air.
then, with a series of jerks,
they paused in front of me
and, dark-eyed, stared –
as though I were a flower –
and then,
like three tosses of silvery water,
they were gone.
Alone,
in the crown of the tree,
I went to China,
I went to Prague;
I died, and was born in the spring;
I found you, and loved you, again.
Later the darkness fell
and the solid moon
like a white pond rose.
But I wasn’t in any hurry.
Likely I visited all
the shimmering, heart-stabbing
questions without answers
before I climbed down.
The One Who Is At Home
Each day I long so much to see
The true teacher. And each time
At dusk when I open the cabin
Door and empty the teapot,
I think I know where he is:
West of us in the forest.
Or perhaps I am the one
Who is out in the night,
The forest sand wet under
My feet, moonlight shining
On the sides of the birch trees,
The sea far off gleaming.
And he is the one who is
At home. He sits in my chair
Calmly; he reads and prays
All night. He loves to feel
His own body around him;
He does not leave the house.
The Storm
There came a wind like a bugle;
It quivered through the grass,
And a green chill upon the heat
So ominous did pass
We barred the windows and the doors
As from an emerald ghost;
The doom’s electric moccason
That very instant passed.
On a strange mob of panting trees,
And fences fled away,
And rivers where the houses ran
The living looked that day.
The bell within the steeple wild
The flying tidings whirled.
How much can come
And much can go,
And yet abide the world!
Microcosmos
When we first started looking through microscopes
a cold fear blew and it’s still blowing.
Life hitherto had been frantic enough
in all its shapes and dimensions.
Which is why it created small-scale creatures,
assorted tiny worms and flies,
but at least the naked human eye
could see them.
But then suddenly beneath the glass,
foreign to a fault
and so petite,
that what they occupy in space
can only charitably be called a spot.
The glass doesn’t even touch them,
they double and triple unobstructed,
with room to spare, willy-nilly.
To say they’re many isn’t saying much.
The stronger the microscope
the more exactly, avidly they’re multiplied.
They don’t even have decent innards.
They don’t know gender, childhood, age.
They may not even know they are—or aren’t.
Still they decide our life and death.
Some freeze in momentary stasis,
although we don’t know what their moment is.
Since they’re so minuscule themselves,
their duration may be
pulverized accordingly.
A windborne speck of dust is a meteor
from deepest space,
a fingerprint is a farflung labyrinth
where they may gather
for their mute parades,
their blind iliads and upanishads.
I’ve wanted to write about them for a long while,
but it’s a tricky subject,
always put off for later
and perhaps worthy of a better poet,
even more stunned by the world than I.
But time is short. I write.
the tree pulled down
The wagtail’s sweet switch of sound
stripes the darkness beyond my window,
praise of starlings
bubbles up in cool springs, the fallen tree
whose rotten branches cluster round
to comfort her ruin still falls
soundlessly, the rush of descent riffling her leaves.
The tractor with its capable steel cable
sleeps in its shed. Its dream
are pure diesel.
Ants sip thoughtfully
the amber sap, and soon morning will offer
an invisibly-mended sky,
a greater quietness of wind, and children
trailing over the hill with the smaller limbs.
On The School Bus
The little girls in the velvet collars
(twins, we thought) had lost their mother:
the ambulance men had had to scrape her
off the road, said the sickening whispers.
Horror’s catching. The safe procedure
to ward it off, or so we gathered,
was a homeopathic dose of torture.
So we pulled their hair, like all the others.
Don’t Hesitate
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,
don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty
of lives and whole towns destroyed or about
to be. We are not wise, and not very often
kind. And much can never be redeemed.
Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this
is its way of fighting back, that sometimes
something happens better than all the riches
or power in the world. It could be anything,
but very likely you notice it in the instant
when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the case.
Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid
of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
The Mistake
With the mistake your life goes in reverse.
Now you can see exactly what you did
Wrong yesterday and wrong the day before
And each mistake leads back to something worse
And every nuance of your hypocrisy
Towards yourself and every excuse
Stands solidly on the perspective lines
And there is perfect visibility.
What an enlightenment. The colonnade
Rolls past on either side. You needn’t move.
The statues of your errors brush your sleeve.
You watch the tale turn back – and you’re dismayed.
And this dismay at this, this big mistake
Is made worse by the sight of all those who
Knew all along where these mistakes would lead –
Those frozen friends who watched the crisis break.
Why didn’t they say? Oh but they did indeed –
Said with a murmur when the time was wrong
Or by a mild refusal to assent
Or told you plainly but you would not heed.
Yes, you can hear them now. It hurts. It’s worse
Than any sneer from an enemy.
Take this dismay. Lay claim to this mistake.
Look straight along the lines of this reverse.
Literary Editor
He sits rejecting poems,
saying too much no,
a black pen in his hand
to score their lack of lo!
but then a magic word stands up
off the page: candelaborough –
it throws him out of kilter.
I’ve been too fine a filter.
Now see: the name of my true home.
It calls me! My native rococo!
Snug in his stamped envelope,
folds grimed like those in verses,
he rejects himself, bites a wet lip
and steering with his paperclip
lifts off for their rendezvous:
You edit me! You are my due!
Above the cirrus he traverses
we hear his fading blip.
Trouble with the soul at morning calisthenics
Lying down I lift my legs,
my soul by mistake jumps into my legs.
This is not convenient for her,
besides, she must branch,
for the legs are two.
When I stand on my head
my soul sinks down to my head.
She is then in her place.
But how long can you stand on your head,
especially if you do not know
how to stand on your head.
The Mystery of Pain
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
At the zoo (two poems)
an antelope
that doesn’t gallop
and a man who doesn’t hunt
understand each other
and avert their eyes
black leopard
a little overweight
scampers onto a tree
with no killing to perform
her daily life obscene
Opal
You are ice and fire,
The touch of you burns my hands like snow.
You are cold and flame.
You are the crimson of amaryllis,
The wilver of moon-touched magnolias.
When I am with you,
My heart is a frozen pond
Gleaming with agitated torches.
The Cobweb
A few minutes ago, I stepped onto the deck
of the house. From there I could see and hear the water,
and everything that’s happened to me all these years.
It was hot and still. The tide was out.
No birds sang. As I leaned against the railing
a cobweb touched my forehead.
It caught in my hair. No one can blame me that I turned
and went inside. There was no wind. The sea
was dead calm. I hung the cobweb from the lampshade.
Where I watch it shudder now and then when my breath
touches it. A fine thread. Intricate.
Before long, before anyone realizes,
I’ll be gone from here.
Here are Girls like Lions
Here are girls like lions,
here are girls like howling wolves.
Here are girls with such big teeth!
Here are girls who’ll play tug o’ war
with your heart or your wishbone
Or your throat, oh.
Oh, here are girls
with cold bright eyes and claws
like dragons. Here are girls who
can’t breathe air, only fire.
Here are girls who carry kindness
And katanas in their rucksacks
because they never know which they’ll need.
How do you tame girls with wildfire limbs?
How do you hold down girls with hurricane hands?
Oh you can’t. Humble hungerer,
you’ve just got to help them rise.
The Mosquito Knows
The mosquito knows full well, small as he is
he’s a beast of prey.
But after all
he only takes his bellyful,
he doesn’t put my blood in the bank.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
The Kiss
I hoped that he would love me,
And he has kissed my mouth,
But I am like a stricken bird
And cannot reach the south.
For though I know he loves me,
Tonight my heart is sad;
His kiss was not so wonderful
As all the dreams I had.
Cocoon
Brunhnhilde in a duffle coat
strides down the jetty,
grace submerged
under bulky cablestitch,
baggy pants
and boots with ‘attitude’.
Straight fall of Nordic hair
grants scarce a glimpse
of finely sculpted bones.
Her pockets may be deep enough
for daily needs and secrets.
She carries on a coathanger
the dormant shape of elegance,
a subtle understatement
svelte, silky black.
Doc Martens squarely planted
on the gently shifting wharf
she waits to be transported
across the dusking harbour,
holds promises
of moonlight
and moody saxophones
and all the piquant hazards
of tomorrow’s languourous wakening.
letting go of things
Beautiful, ah always so
– this letting go of things, this
kneeling, no, prostration of the spirit,
in rehearsal of our last
mysterious release, the sacrament of death,
drifting now as then at evening’s end,
consciousness calling quits, the body’s abrupt
mechanism slowing, slowing, workmen going home,
acquiescence of limbs at the approach of Id,
the garrulous old night-watchman, taking over,
settling down among the weird
luminosities of sleep, guardian of the shadow-factory,
God’s confederate I trust, and must.
Beautiful, O beautiful to be thus
a source of pleasure, if involuntary,
something for an old man to doze over,
to be young again in the dark warm with voices
alive with quicksilver kisses, tears,
tigers running through dream-woods
and impossible poetry.
Much Madness is divinest Sense
Much Madness is divinest Sense –
To a discerning Eye –
Much sense – the starkest Madness –
‘Tis the Majority
In this, as All, prevail –
Assent – and you are sane –
Demur – you’re straightway dangerous –
And handled with a Chain –
Loving Hitler
There they were around the wireless
waiting to listen to Lord Haw-Haw.
‘Quiet now, children!’ they said as usual:
‘Ssh, be quiet! We’re trying to listen.’
‘Germany calling!’ said Lord Haw-Haw.
I came out with it: ‘I love Hitler.’
They turned on me: ‘You can’t love Hitler!
Dreadful, wicked –’ (mutter, mutter,
the shocked voices buzzing together)–
‘Don’t be silly. You don’t mean it.’
I held out for perhaps five minutes,
a mini-proto-neo-Nazi,
six years old and wanting attention.
Hitler always got their attention;
now I had it, for five minutes.
Everyone at school loved someone,
and it had to be a boy or a man
if you were a girl. So why not Hitler?
Of course, you couldn’t love Lord Haw-Haw;
but Hitler–well, he was famous!
It might be easier to love Albert,
the boy who came to help with the milking,
but Albert laughed at me. Hitler wouldn’t:
one thing you could say for Hitler,
you never heard him laugh at people.
All the same, I settled for Albert.