Happiness

So early it’s still almost dark out.

I’m near the window with coffee,

and the usual early morning stuff

that passes for thought.

When I see the boy and his friend

walking up the road

to deliver the newspaper.They wear caps and sweaters,

and one boy has a bag over his shoulder.

They are so happy

they aren’t saying anything, these boys.

I think if they could, they would take

each other’s arm.It’s early in the morning,

and they are doing this thing together.

They come on, slowly.

The sky is taking on light,

though the moon still hangs pale over the water.

Such beauty that for a minute

death and ambition, even love,

doesn’t enter into this.

Happiness. It comes on

unexpectedly. And goes beyond, really,

any early morning talk about it.

The Coming of Light

Even this late it happens:
the coming of love, the coming of light.
You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
sending up warm bouquets of air.
Even this late the bones of the body shine
and tomorrow's dust flares into breath.

Worth

It astonished him when he got to Katmandu to hear

the man from the embassy say a friend was waiting

outside of customs. It was the Australian woman

he had met in Bali. His fault for running back

across the tarmac when he realized she was crying.

Kissing her while the plane waited with the door open.

Wanting her to feel valuable. Now she had used up all

her money flying to Nepal. Calling what had been

what it was not. Now lying awkwardly on the bed

for a month, marooned in the heat, the Himalayas

above the window. As he watched the delicate dawns

and the old women carrying too much firewood down

from the mountain on their backs. Him thinking of their

happiness up in the lush green terraces of rice.

Remembering her laughter as he came out of the shower,

saying the boy had come again with a plate of melon.

"He asked if you were my husband," she said, "and I

said you were my father." Her eyes merry. Now they sat

in cheap restaurants trying to find anything to say.

Remembering how beautiful she was the first time

coming through the palm trees of the compound at dusk.

Tall and thin in a purple dress that reached to her

bare feet. Watching while he played chess with

the Austrian photographer all night. Now calling

that good thing by the wrong name. Destroying

something valuable. Innocently killing backwards.

Valentine Weather

Kiss me with rain on your eyelashes,

come on, let us sway together,

under the trees, and to hell with thunder.

Atlantis- A Lost Sonnet

How on earth did it happen, I used to wonder
that a whole city—arches, pillars, colonnades,
not to mention vehicles and animals—had all
one fine day gone under?

I mean, I said to myself, the world was small then.
Surely a great city must have been missed?
I miss our old city —

white pepper, white pudding, you and I meeting
under fanlights and low skies to go home in it. Maybe
what really happened is

this: the old fable-makers searched hard for a word
to convey that what is gone is gone forever and
never found it. And so, in the best traditions of

where we come from, they gave their sorrow a name
and drowned it.

Evening

the sky is mine, I claim it.

The odd dartings of bats, even, are mine; I like them less than the birds

and much less than fireflies.

the single insect suspended in lucid air

between two fronds of warm palm

is also mine.

I want all the pieces of this.

The moon sits on a spiral staircase tonight

and you talk of a trip from years ago.

and yes, I want that long-ago time-

if I walk back into all those years,

I hope

the moon would be the same.

Winter

It has been nineteen days of waiting
a film of oil coats my thoughts
in slippery rainbows.
Come back to me,
I want the bubbles to burst.

stories

You see, I want this poem to be nicer
than life. I want you to look at it
when anxiety zigzags your stomach
and the last tranquilizer is gone
and you need someone to tell you
I’ll be here when you want me
like the sound inside a shell.

It's time

I like the way
I have taken on some of your habits.
I have taken to showering
in the dark.
At the precise hour
when the twilight
flows like a purple scarf,
I step into the water-
the soap is a translucent mint-scented fish in my slippery hands
and the moon is so faint
I want to bite it out of the sky.
I owe this to you.

FOG

The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.

Trying to have something left over

There was a great tenderness to the sadness
when I would go there. She knew how much
I loved my wife and that we had no future.
We were like casualties helping each other
as we waited for the end. Now I wonder
if we understood how happy those Danish
afternoons were. Most of the time we did not talk.
Often I took care of the baby while she did
housework. Changing him and making him laugh.
I would say Pittsburgh softly each time before
throwing him up. Whisper Pittsburgh with
my mouth against the tiny ear and throw
him higher. Pittsburgh and happiness high up.
The only way to leave even the smallest trace.
So that all his life her son would feel gladness
unaccountably when anyone spoke of the ruined
city of steel in America. Each time almost
remembering something maybe important that got lost.

Shaking the Tablecloth

Some pleasures come undiluted; on October mornings
when the sun aimed its last, cumulated gold
over our depleted grape arbor, the baked raisins
turned black, wizened solar memories, the air at the edge
of town coming on with a sauterne bite of cold,
and the Kentucky sky high in a preternatural, almost
a Tiepolo blue, my mother would go to the open
kitchen door, with one of our two surviving tablecloths
under her arm and, leaning out, would shake out crumbs.

Even when there were not crumbs, the ritual of morning
from last night's supper was her excuse to feel the air,
and look on past fences to the bold, emblazoned woodland,
and unlike her eyes to the wanton circumference of the world.
I saw her shaking the white linen she had washed and ironed,
gazing beyond. It was a great chance she had every day
to do something ritualistic and free; and like wine
poured over me, intoxicated credence, faith.
That a shook cloth had in it all that distancing.

nazm uljhi hui hai seene mein

nazm uljhi hui hai seene mein
misare atke hue hain hothon par
udate phirte hain titaliyon ki tarah
lafz kaagaz pe baithate hi nahin
kab se baithaa hun main jaanam
saade kaagaz pe likh ke naam tera
bas tera naam hi mukammal hai
is se behtar bhi nazm kyaa hogi

In an Old Apple Orchard

The wind’s an old man
to this orchard; these trees
have been feeling
the soft tug of his gloves
for a hundred years.
Now it’s April again,
and again that old fool
thinks he’s young.
He’s combed the dead leaves
out of his beard; he’s put on
perfume. He’s gone off
late in the day
toward the town, and come back
slow in the morning,
reeling with bees.
As late as noon, if you look
in the long grass,you can see him
still rolling about in his sleep.

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest
Lying together there goes back so far
An emblem of two people being honest.

Yet more and more time passes silently.
Outside the wind's incomplete unrest
builds and disperses clouds about the sky.

And dark towns heap up on the horizon.
None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why
At this unique distance from isolation

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind
Or not untrue and not unkind.

Keeping House

On the grand steppes

of the poetry of other poets

I go far beyond

Even though I can see

the white haze of noon on

the city street

I still go far beyond.

I must return

to the buying of onions and coffee.

Postage stamps.

I Ask My Mother to Sing

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry,
But neither stops her song.

Stargazing

She keeps trying
to show me Orion,
pointing to his belt
in the night sky,
and I try to picture him
—but I've never been much
of a hunter, for food
or for love, for that matter.

Now, Auden may be right,
poetry might make nothing happen,
but when she points
I think of Roethke,
how he wrote he measured time
by the swaying of a body
and I know
I measure something
older and far more still
by how three distant suns
can balance
on the tip of her finger.

Seen

noon heat haze-
a jacaranda
in every pane

The Hush of the Very Good

You can tell by how he lists

to let her kiss him, that the getting, as he gets it,

is good.

It’s good in the sweetly salty, deeply thirsty way that a sea-fogged

rain is good after a summer-long bout

of inland drought.

And you know it

when you see it, don’t you? How it

drenches what’s dry, how the having

of it quenches.

There is a grassy inlet

where your ocean meets your land, a slip

that needs a certain kind of vessel,

and

when that shapely skiff skims in at last,

trimmed bright, mast lightly flagging left and right,

then the long, lush reedsof your longing part, and soft against

the hull of that bent wood almost

imperceptibly brushes a luscious hush

the heart heeds helplessly—

the hush

of the very good.

The Companion

The moon is now tired

of rolling in the sky

like a hurt and broken bead.

I reach out

through the window of the rain

pluck it out

and place it on top of my half-read book.

It beats there,

like a pulse.

Walking in the Breakdown Lane

Wind has stripped
the young plum trees
to a thin howl.
They are planted in squares
to keep the loose dirt from wandering.
Everything around me is crying to be gone.
The fields, the crops humming to be cut and done with.

Walking in the breakdown lane, margin of gravel,
between the cut swaths and the road to Fargo,
I want to stop, to lie down
in standing wheat or standing water.

Behind me thunder mounts as trucks of cattle
roar over, faces pressed to slats for air.
They go on, they go on without me.
They pound, pound and bawl,
until the road closes over them farther on.

advancing summer-

the clothes still damp

in the trumpet tree's shadow

Quiet Girl

I would liken you

To a night without stars

Were it not for your eyes.

I would liken you

To a sleep without dreams

Were it not for your songs.

Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
I go so far as to think that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells,
dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Early in the Morning

While the long grain is softening

in the water, gurgling

over a low stove flame, before

the salted Winter Vegetable is sliced

for breakfast, before the birds,

my mother glides an ivory comb

through her hair, heavy

and black as calligrapher's ink.

She sits at the foot of the bed.

My father watches, listens for

the music of comb

against hair.

My mother combs,

pulls her hair back

tight, rolls itaround two fingers, pins it

in a bun to the back of her head.

For half a hundred years she has done this.

My father likes to see it like this.

He says it is kempt.

But I know

it is because of the way

my mother's hair falls

when he pulls the pins out.

Easily, like the curtains

when they untie them in the evening.

Filthy Radiance

And when we are dead,

and our incandescent skin has dimmed,

and hangs in blackened rags on honeycomb bones,

our electric limbs are stilled by soil,

and the flesh that we have loved so fiercely

has all gone into the darkened tomb,

our luminous leavings will linger here,

haunting the impassive dune,

testament to a time when the base matter of

our lustful bodies was transfigured,

and we laid ourselves open to possesion by light.

II

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.

Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,

you've been at your desk for hours.

I know what I dreamed:

our friend the poet comes into my room

where I've been writing for days,

drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,

and I want to show her one poem

which is the poem of my life.

But I hesitate,and wake. You've kissed my hair

to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,

I say, a poem I wanted to show someone . . .

and I laugh and fall dreaming again

of the desire to show you to everyone I love,

to move openly together

in the pull of gravity, which is not simple,

which carried the feathered grass a long way down the upbreathing air.

~From Twenty- One Love Poems

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful
than the way the sun,
every evening,relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon
and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,and is gone--
and how it slides again
out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower
streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
and have you ever felt for anything
such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure
that fills you,as the sun
reaches out,as it warms you
as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--
or have you too
gone crazyfor power,
for things?

Never Again the Same

Speaking of sunsets,last night's was shocking.

I mean, sunsets aren't supposed to frighten you, are they?

Well, this one was terrifying.

People were screaming in the streets.

Sure, it was beautiful, but far too beautiful.

It wasn't natural.

One climax followed another and then another

until your knees went weak

and you couldn't breathe.

The colors were definitely not of this world,

peaches dripping opium,

pandemonium of tangerines,

inferno of irises,

Plutonian emeralds,

all swirling and churning, swabbing,

like it was playing with us,

like we were nothing,

as if our whole lives were a preparation for this,

this for which nothing could have prepared us

and for which we could not have been less prepared.

The mockery of it all stung us bitterly.

And when it was finally overwe whimpered and cried and howled.

And then the streetlights came on as always

and we looked into one another's eyes?

ancient caves with still pools

and those little transparent fish

who have never seen even one ray of light.

And the calm that returned to us

was not even our own.

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That's why we wake
and look out--no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

My South: On the Porch

There used to be a way the sunlight caught
The cocoons of caterpillars in the pecans.
A boy's shadow would lengthen to a man's
Across the yard then, slowly. And if you thought
Some sleepy god had dreamed it all up - well,
There was my grandfather, Lincoln-tall and solemn,
Tapping his pipe out on a white-flaked column,
Carefully, carefully, as though it were his job.
And we would watch the pipe-stars as they fell.
As for the quiet, the same train always broke it.
Then the great silver watch rose from his pocket
For us to check the hour, the dark fob
Dangling the watch between us like the moon.
It would be evening soon then, very soon.

Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

The moon put her white hands
on my shoulders, looked into my face,
and without a word
sent me into the night.

Fast Gas

for Richard

Before the days of self service,
when you never had to pump your own gas,
I was the one who did it for you, the girl
who stepped out at the sound of a bell
with a blue rag in my hand, my hair pulled back
in a straight, unlovely ponytail.
This was before automatic shut-offs
and vapor seals, and once, while filling a tank,
I hit a bubble of trapped air and the gas
backed up, came arcing out of the hole
in a bright gold wave and soaked me—face, breasts,
belly and legs. And I had to hurry
back to the booth, the small employee bathroom
with the broken lock, to change my uniform,
peel the gas-soaked cloth from my skin
and wash myself in the sink.
Light-headed, scrubbed raw, I felt
pure and amazed—the way the amber gas
glazed my flesh, the searing,
subterranean pain of it, how my skin
shimmered and ached, glowed
like rainbowed oil on the pavement.
I was twenty. In a few weeks I would fall,
for the first time, in love, that man waiting
patiently in my future like a red leaf
on the sidewalk, the kind of beauty
that asks to be noticed. How was I to know
it would begin this way: every cell of my body
burning with a dangerous beauty, the air around me
a nimbus of light that would carry me
through the days, how when he found me,
weeks later, he would find me like that,
an ordinary woman who could rise
in flame, all he would have to do
is come close and touch me.

Lying in a Hammock

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota-

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distance of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last years's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

One Cigarette

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker's tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I'll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

Summer 1890: Near the Gulf

The hour was late, and the others

were asleep. He struck a match

on the wooden railing of the porch

and lit a cigarette

while she beheld his head and hand,

estranged from the body

in wavering light….

What she felt then

would, like heavy wind

and rain, bring

any open flower to the ground.

He let the spent match fall;

but the face remained

before her, like a bright light

before a closed eye….

Leaning into the Afternoons...

Leaning into the afternoons I cast my sad nets
towards your oceanic eyes.

There in the highest blaze my solitude lenghtens and flames,
its arms turning like a drowning man's.

I send out red signals across your absent eyes
that wave like the sea or the beach by a lighthouse.

You keep only darkness, my distant female,
from your regard sometimes the coast of dread emerges.

Leaning into the afternoons I fling my sad nets
to that sea that is thrashed by your oceanic eyes.

The birds of night peck at the stars
that flash like my soul when I love you.

The night gallops on its shadowy mare
shedding blue tassels over the land.

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart

Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds.

The End

You must have felt it working in your bones. It's begun: The papers

print the same stories over and over, and have you checked

the obituaries? Already, nobody remembers

how their first kiss went. The phone keeps ringing and ringing

when nobody's home. Between our skins is a necessary friction

that separates us forever. Look: space. Somewhere, a lost key. It's begun:

What was once the wind or an echo or an accidental sweetness

is now a bird outside your window singing with perfect pitch and timbre

the song that's on all our tongues, cut. What pulls from the earth to exist

the earth pulls back into itself: this and this and this is mine.You own nothing.

Our bodies breathe to a rhythm, to one direction, to one regression. It's begun:

The truth stares us down like an owl: There's no place to go: You own nothing.

In the dark you hear movement - a squeak, a hiding. The heart opens, closes, opens.

It's This Way

I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can't get enough of the trees—
they're so hopeful, so green.


A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I'm at the window of the prison infirmary.


I can't smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It's this way:being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

Invisible Dreams

I’m awake when I’m sleeping & I’m
sleeping when I’m awake, & no one
knows, not even me, for my eyes
are closed to myself.
I think I am thinking I see
a man beside me, & he thinks
in his sleep that I’m awake
writing. I hear a pen scratch
a paper. There is some idea
I think is clever: I want to
capture myself in a book.
*
I have to make a
place for my body in
my body. I’m like a
dog pawing a blanket
on the floor. I have to
turn & twist myself
like a rag until I
can smell myself in myself.
I’m sweating; the water is
pouring out of me
like silver. I put my head
in the crook of my arm
like a brilliant moon.
*
The bones of my left foot
are too heavy on the bones
of my right. They
lie still for a little while,sleeping,
but soon they
bruise each other like
angry twins. Then
the bones of my right foot
command the bones of my left
to climb down.

The Insomniac Learns a Lot

Dark voices talk to her
about the most poisonous substance
known to man, about heirloom potatoes
and for an hour acute pain.
Next week: chronic pain.

All around her tiny green, red and orange lights
where things are in sleep mode and standby mode.
The house is a city full of traffic
needing to be told when to stop and go.

Underneath the covers her body is busy
and warm as an animal.
So many litres of sweat drain out of it
she might drown in her mattress
might lie in it like a tank
like a glass coffin.

All night the house ticks and clanks
like a cake cooling on a rack.
With its curtains drawn it is blind
and only two eyes open
only two doll’s eyes fighting open.

In the morning men come to break bottles
men come to cut, they leap from their truck
and mow down hundreds of daisies
that at night close up like fields of fists
because even flowers
know how to go to sleep.

Visiting Hour

In the pond of our new garden

were five orange stains, under

inches of ice. Weeks since anyone

had been there. already by far

the most severe winter for years.

You broke the ice with a hammer.

I watched the goldfish appear,

blunt-nosed and delicately clear.

Since then so much has taken place

to distance us from what we were.

That it should come to this.

Unable to hide the horror

in my eyes, I stand helpless

by your bedside and can do no more

than wish it were simply a matter of

smashing the ice and giving you air.

In Time (New Year's Day)

Beneath the icy pond outside my window

Are eight half-frozen goldfish

Lying in formation, prepared to swim,

One is pale and speckled,

The other seven are carmine,

And all are glorious and held still in time.

Within my window is an Amaryllis,

its tall leafless single stalk

Kept forging toward Heaven,

Finally stopping to prepare to bloom.

All the glorious carmine buds

Are paused before their explosion in

time.