The Way We Write Letters

We must lie long in the weeds
In places like Palo Alto or Perugia,
Get lost to find ourselves, get going soon.
But none of the old Heart & Home;
Be a Logan or Creeley, all arrowheads
And .22 cartridges studded and strewn inside,
Find new places to rest and nest. Get looser;
Get back to (you said) daytime drinking, music
of Telemann, Schutz, Buxtehude.
Don't keep your house in order.
If you have any further suggestions for
Improving chaos, please write or wire.

We should lie long in the woods, full of light.
Old friends get published again, though losing
Their moon & vinegar. Write me soon (I said)
Meanwhile, find a new place too,
Where air, not character is cool.
Not Sausalito. San Gimignano?
There, despite psychiatry, towers simply are
In a piercing, lyric, prodigal confusion,
Regulated. Well, remember Heller in Paradise.
Madness & you (we both said). Stay sane and annoyed,
Drunk in the daytime. Call your book, Home for the Night.
But don't go home tomorrow. Write me instead
From the meadow. Turn on the poem & the light.




Read more...

Through A Glass Eye, Lightly

In the laboratory waiting room
containing
one television actor with a teary face
trying a contact lens;
two muscular victims of industrial accidents;
several vain women--I was one of them--
came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye.

It was a long day:
Deborah waiting for the blood-vessels
painted
on her iris to dry.
Her mother said that, holding Deborah
when she was born,
"First I inspected her, from toes to navel,
then stopped at her head..........."
We wondered why
the inspection hadn't gone the other way.
"looking into her eye
was like looking into a volcano:
"Her vacant pupil
when whirling down, down to foundation
of the world.......................
When she was three months ole they took it out.
She giggled when she went under
the an aesthetic.
Forty-five minutes later she came back
happy!............................
The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face
(you know, it never bled?),
stayed happy, even when I went to pieces.
She's five, in June.

"Deborah, you get right down
from there, or I'll have to slap!"
Laughing, Deborah climbed into the slap
of one vain lady, who
had been discontented with her own beauty.
Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily
in the empty eye.
Read more...

The Copulating Gods

Brushing back the curls from your famous brow,
Lingering over the prominent temple vein
Purple as Aegean columns in the dawn,
Calm now, I ponder how self-consciously
The Gods must fornicate.
It is that sense of unseen witness:
Those mortals with whom we couple or have coupled,
Clinging to our swan-suits, our bull-skins,
Our masquerades in coin and shrubbery.


We were their religion before they were born.
The spectacle of our carnality
Confused them into spiritual lust.
The headboard of our bed became their altar,
Rare nectar, shared, a common sacrament.
The wet drapery of our sheets, moulded
The noble thighs, is made the basis
For a whole new aesthetic:
God a revealed as the first genius.

Men continue to invent our histories,
Deny our equal pleasure in each other.
Club-foot, nymphomaniac, they dub us,
Then fabricate the net that God will cast
Over our raptures: we, trussed up like goats,
Paraded past the searchlights of the sky
By God himself, the ringmaster and cuckold,
Amidst a thunderous laughter and applause.

Tracing again the bones of your famous face,
I know we are not their history but our myth.
Heaven prevents time; and our astral raptures
Float bouyant in the universe. Come, kiss!
Come, swoon again, we who invented dying
And the whole alchemy of resurrection.
They will concoct a scripture explaining this.
Read more...