Beauty, I’ve seen you
pressed hard against the windowpane.
But the ugliness was unsolved
in the heart & mouth.
I’ve seen the quick-draw artist
crouch among the chrysanthemums.
Do I need to say more?

If only he could touch her,
Her name like an old wish
In the stopped weather of salt
On a snail…

Hand-to-hand: the two hugged each other
into a naked tussle, one riding the other’s back,
locking into a double embrace. One
forced the other to kiss the ground,

The year 1936 was not a good year in America, except perhaps for the hundreds of people staring from the pages of the book, faces mostly smiling, filled with the youthful hope and confidence and ignorance that would allow them to see the future beyond the Great Depression.

Hounded by Central Islip till the end
Of pyrethmetic days, and onward wishing
Oh that he like me and she like me too,
And the green arboretum bush waving
And the elephant in his noose waving
And the deaths saying goodbye–

Not so unsound as a path
Nor so white as a star
Fairly wild with the sound of my own hoof
I the horse race into the back edges
Of my existence!

…do not mock us with examples
of breach, morals of escape –
indeed, as further punishment
our cells from side to side…

Those scars rooted me. Stigmata stalagmite
I sate at a drive-in and watched the stars
Through a straw while the Coke in my lap went
Waterier and waterier. For days on end or

when the wound speaks
how does it sound
has it authority
a record of achievement
that the leader of a nation
will listen to

oshkosh was full of those
damn mosquitoes and st louis
it rained all week in st louis
the heat is peculiar to itself there

Compose for Red a proper verse;
Adhere to foot and strict iamb;
Control the burst of angry words
Or they might boil and break the dam.

The young dandies drop ice into the drinks,
While the girls slice the succulent lotus root.
Above us, a patch of cloud spreads, darkening
Like a water-stain on silk.

We who must act as handmaidens
To our own goddess, turn too fast,
Trip on our hems, to glimpse the muse
Gliding below her lake or sea,
Are left, long-staring after her,
Narcissists by necessity;

I let the smoke out of the windows
And lift the hair from my ears.
A season of birds and reaping,
A level of light appears.

if the tears are to
stream coldly
like long streaks
of rain down the light
brick of the storehouse

The flat, thus loved, is ours
by being broken in the rigid air:
the angle of the technical seen cause
and thorough reason, where we live. Nothing
eludes its narrow-gauged line. Little
pleases this lucidity, the eye
of conversation.

In the evening
haze darkening on the hills,
purple of the eternal,
a last bird crosses over,
‘flop flop,’ adoring
only the instant.

Juniper and cedar in the sand.
The lake beyond, here deer-meat smoking
On a driftwood fire. And we two
Reaching each other by the wash of blue
On the warm sand together lying
As careless as water on the land.

This well-deep outpouring is not for
anything. Yet we have to put into exact words
what we are given to see, hear, know.
Mother’s eyesight blurred; she saw trash
as flowers. “Oh. How very beautiful.”
She was lucky, seeing beauty, living
in beauty, whether or not it was there.