Collected Poems (56 page)

Although he’s apparently the youngest (his little Rasta-beard is barely

Although I’m apparently alone, with a pleasant but unextraordinary feel-

Although the lamp is out, and although it’s dusk, late, dull, stifling sum-

Always in the dream I seemed conscious of myself having the dream

a man decided once to go steal truth

a man hammers viciously

A man who’s married an attractive, somewhat younger woman conceives

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and somewhat

A much-beaten-upon-looking, bedraggled blackbird, not a starling, with

A mysterious didactic urgency informs the compelling bedtime stories

An ax-shattered

An erratic, complicated shape, like a tool for some obsolete task

An insistence in dream on a succession of seemingly urgent but possibly

An old hill town in northern Pennsylvania, a missed connection for a

Another burst of the interminable, intermittently torrential dark after-

A pair of battered white shoes have been left out all night on a sill across

A pair of red leaves spinning on one another

a room all the way across america

As a child, in the half-dark, as you wait on the edge of her bed for her to

As I’m reading Tsvetaeva’s essays

As in a thousand novels but I’ll never as long as I live get used to this

As long as they trample the sad smiles of guitars

As one would praise a child or dog, or punish it

As on the rim of a cup crusted with rancid honey a host of hornets sud-

A species of thistle no one had ever seen before appeared almost

A squalid wayside inn, reeking barn-brewed vodka

As she reads, she rolls something around in her mouth, hard candy it

As soon as the old man knew he was actually dying, even before anyone

As the garbage truck is backing up, one of the garbagemen is absorbed

As though it were the very soul of rational human intercourse which had

As though the skin had been stripped and pulled back onto the skull like

A student, a young woman, in a fourth floor hallway of her
lycée

A summer cold. No rash. No fever. Nothing. But a dozen times during

A tall, handsome black man, bearded, an artist, in nineteen sixty-eight

A tall-masted white sailboat works laboriously across a wave-tossed bay

At almost the very moment an exterminator’s panel truck

At last he’s being allowed to play in his mother’s car the way he always

At the United States Out of Central America rally at a run-down commu-

A whole section of the city I live in has been urban renewed, some of it

A young tourist with a two-thousand-dollar Leica and a nice-looking girl

Because he was always the good-hearted one, the ingenuous one, the

Beds squalling, squealing, muffled in hush; beds pitching, leaping, im-

Beyond anything else, he dwells on what might inhabit his mind at the

Blocks of time fall upon me, adhere for a moment, then move astonish-

Bound with baling wire to the tubular jerry-built bumper of a beat-up

Bulging overnight bags on both shoulders, in one hand a sack with extra

By tucking her chin in toward her chest, she can look up darkly through

Catherine shrieks

chances are we will sink quietly back

Children love gravel, kneeling to play in gravel

Deciphering and encoding, to translate, fabricate, revise; the abstract

Deep asleep, perfect immobility, no apparent evidence of consciousness

Difficult to know whether humans are inordinately anxious

Doesn’t, when we touch it, that sheen of infinitesimally pebbled steel

Do you know how much pain is left

do you remember learning to tie your shoes

Do you remember when we dreamed about the owl

Each movement of the Mozart has a soloist and as each appears the con-

Even here, in a forest in the foothills of a range of mountains, lucent air

Even when the rain falls relatively hard

Except for the dog, that she wouldn’t have him put away, wouldn’t let

Except for the little girl

Except for the undeniable flash of envy I feel, the reflexive competitive-

Face in her hands, bike

First he finishes
The Chief,
“New York’s Civil Employee’s Weekly,” then

For long decades the guitar lay disregarded in its case, unplucked and

From beneath the bank

Furiously a crane

Glorious morning, the sun still mild on the eastward hills, the hills still

God was an accident of language, a quirk of the unconscious mind, but

Gone now, after the days of desperate, unconscious gasping, the reflexive

Hammer, hammer, hammer, the wasp

Have I told you, love, about the experience

He’d been a clod, he knew, yes, always aiming toward his vision of the

He drives, she mostly sleeps; when she’s awake, they quarrel, and now, in

He’d tried for years to leave her, then only months ago he finally had

He has his lips pressed solidly against her cheek, his eyes are wide open

He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since we walked in, although you seem

He lets the lunch bag fall, he doesn’t mean to, really, but there it is, on

He must be her grandson: they’re both very dark, she with high, broad

Herds of goats puttering by on the rock-strewn path in what sounded like

Here I am, walking along your eyelid again

Here was my relation with the woman who lived all last autumn and

Her five horrid, deformed little dogs, who incessantly yap on the roof

Her friend’s lover was dying, or not “friend,” they weren’t that yet, if they

Her shipboard lover had sent her ahead

He’s not sure how to get the jack on — he must have recently bought the

He’s the half-respectable wino who keeps to himself, camping with his

He was very much the less attractive of the two: heavyset, part punk, part

how come when grandpa is teaching the little boy

How did money get into the soul; how did base dollars and cents ascend

Howl after pitiful, aching howl: an enormous, efficiently muscular

How nearly unfeasible they make it for the rest of us, those who, with

How well I have repressed the dream of death I had after the war when I

I always knew him as “Bobby the poet” though whether he ever was one

I am afraid for you a little, for your sense of shame; I feel you are accus-

I am going to rip myself down the middle into two pieces

I am your garbage man. What you leave

I’d have thought by now it would have stopped

I didn’t know that the burly old man who lived in a small house like ours

I’d like every girl in the world to have a poem of her own

I don’t know what day or year of their secret cycle this blazing golden

I dreamed of an instrument of political torture

I feel terribly strong today

if only we weren’t so small next to the stars

If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with

If you put in enough hours in bars, sooner or later you get to hear every

I have been saying what I have to say

I have escaped in the dream; I was in danger, at peril, at immediate, furi-

I have found what pleases my friend’s chubby, rosy, gloriously shining-

I hook my fingers into the old tennis court fence

I just don’t want to feel put down; If she decides she wants to sleep with

I keep rereading an article I found recently about how Mayan scribes

I killed the bee for no reason except that it was there and you were

I look onto an alley here

I’m a long way from that place

I’m not sure whether it was Hiawatha or a real Indian who so impressed

I’m on a parapet looking down

I’m on my way to the doctor to get the result of chest X-rays because I

I’m scribbling suggestions on a copy of the next-to-final draft of my

I’m trying to pray; one of the voices of my mind says, “God, please help

In a book about war, tyranny, oppression, political insanity and corruption

In a tray of dried fixative in a photographer friend’s darkroom

In how many of the miserable little life dramas I play out in my mind am

In my dream of unspecific anxiety, nothing is what it should be, nothing

In my unlikeliest dream, my dead are with me again, companions again

In rain like this what you want is an open barn door

In that oblivious, concentrated, fiercely fetal decontraction peculiar to

In that stage of psychosexual development called latency, when not that

In the Boston Public Library on Boylston Street, where all the bums

In the Colonial Luncheonette on Sixth Street they know everything

In the dark with an old song

In the dream of death where I listen, the voices of the dream keep dimin-

In the dumbest movie they can play it on us with a sunrise and a passage

In the Mercedes station wagon with diplomatic plates the mother has

In the preface of a translation of a German writer

In this day and age Lord

In those days, those days which exist for me only as the most elusive

I once met a guitarist

I only regret the days wasted in no pain

I put my face inches from his

I recognize the once-notorious radical theater director, now suffering

I saw a man strike a beggar

I saw a spider on a library cornice snatch a plump

I stand on the first step under the torn mouths of hours

I think most people are relieved the first time they actually know some-

It is an age

It is bad enough crying for children

It is horrible, being run over by a bus

It is the opposite or so of the friendly gossip from upstairs who stops by

It only exists in us so that we may lose it but then not lose it, never at all

Its skin tough and unpliable as scar, the pulp out of focus, weak, granu-

It stinks. It stinks and it stinks and it stinks and it stinks

It’s very cold, Catherine is bundled in a coat, a poncho on top of that

It was like listening to the record of a symphony before you knew any-

It was like simply wanting to give up at last, the saying fifty times a day

It wasn’t any mewling squeamishness about how “hard” he’d become

It was worse than being struck, that tone, that intensity, that abnegating

it would be wonderful to be quiet now

I’ve been trying for hours to figure out who I was reminded of by the wel-

“I want,” he says again, through his tears, in this unfamiliar voice, again

I wanted to take up room. What a strange dream! I wanted to take up as

I was walking home down a hill near our house on a balmy afternoon

I will not grace you with a name … Even “you,” however modest the

Jed is breathlessly, deliriously happy because he’s just been deftly am-

Jed is having his bath; he lies in a few inches of water in his plastic bath-

Jed kills Catherine with a pistol he’s put together himself out of some

Jed says: How come I’m afraid to climb on the jungle game when even

John the tailor had gone racing up the stairs in back of his store and be-

“Just how much are you worth?” Xerxes asks Pythius, reputedly the rich-

Late afternoon and difficult to tell if those are mountains, soft with mist

Maybe it’s not as bad as we like to think: no melodramatic rendings

Maybe she missed the wife, or the wife’s better dinner parties, but she

Mommy and Daddy are having one of their fights, he can tell by the way

More and more lately, as, not even minding the slippages yet, the aches

More voice was in her cough tonight: its first harsh, stripping sound

Musingly she mouths the end of her ballpoint pen as she stares down at

“My character wound,” he’d written so shortly before, “my flaw,” and

My father-in-law is away, Catherine and I and Renée, her mother, are

My friend Dave knew a famous writer who used to have screwdrivers for

My friend’s wife has a lover; I come to this conclusion — not suspicion

My grandmother is washing my mouth

My love gives me some wax

My soul is out back eating your soul

Naturally Annie Dillard

Near dusk, near a path, near a brook

Never on one single pore Eternity

Night, a wildly lashing deluge driving in great gusts over the blind, de-

not bad mouth

Not even when my gaze had gone unmet so long, starved so long, it went

Not only have the skin and flesh and parts of the skeleton

Not soul

Not to show off, but elaborating some philosophical assertion, “Watch,”

Not yet a poet, not yet a person perhaps, or a human, or not so far as I’d

Often before have our fingers touched in sleep or half-sleep and enlaced

Often I have thought that after my death, not in death’s void as we usu-

Often in our garden these summer evenings a thrush

“Oh, soul,” I sometimes — often — still say when I’m trying to convince

Oh my, Harold Brodkey, of all people, after all this time appearing to

On a PBS program, one of my favorites

Once, hearing you behind me, I turned

Once, in Rotterdam, a whore once, in a bar, a sailors’ bar, a hooker bar

One more thing to keep

One of those great, garishly emerald flies that always look freshly gener-

One vast segment of the tree, the very topmost, bows ceremoniously

Only heartbreaking was it much later to first hear someone you loved

On the metro, I have to ask a young woman to move the packages beside

On the other hand, in Philadelphia, long ago, at a party on Camac Street

On the sidewalk in front

our poor angel how sick