It is marvellous

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute; marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

Driving to Town Late to Mail A Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.
The only things moving are swirls of snow.
As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron.
There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.
Driving around, I will waste more time.

Love Song

How shall I hold on to my soul, so that
it does not touch yours? How shall I lift
it gently up over you on to other things?
I would so very much like to tuck it away
among long lost objects in the dark
in some quiet unknown place, somewhere
which remains motionless when your depths resound.
And yet everything which touches us, you and me,
takes us together like a single bow,
drawing out from two strings but one voice.
On which instrument are we strung?
And which violinist holds us in the hand?
O sweet song.

Gamblers All

sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, 
I'm not going to make it, but you laugh inside 
remembering all the times you've felt that way, and 
you walk to the bathroom, do your toilet, see that face 
in the mirror, oh my oh my oh my, but you comb your hair anyway, 
get into your street clothes, feed the cats, fetch the 
newspaper of horror, place it on the coffee table, kiss your 
wife goodbye, and then you are backing the car out into life itself, 
like millions of others you enter the arena once more. 

you are on the freeway threading through traffic now, 
moving both towards something and towards nothing at all as you punch 
the radio on and get Mozart, which is something, and you will somehow 
get through the slow days and the busy days and the dull 
days and the hateful days and the rare days, all both so delightful 
and so disappointing because 
we are all so alike and so different. 

you find the turn-off, drive through the most dangerous 
part of town, feel momentarily wonderful as Mozart works 
his way into your brain and slides down along your bones and 
out through your shoes. 

it's been a tough fight worth fighting 
as we all drive along 
betting on another day.

Glass

In every bar there's someone sitting alone and absolutely absorbed 
by whatever he's seeing in the glass in front of him, 
a glass that looks ordinary, with something clear or dark 
inside it, something partially drunk but never completely gone. 
Everything's there: all the plans that came to nothing, 
the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness 
opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless 
while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him. 
And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles, 
the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue 
nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining, 
toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker 
signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up 
with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt 
and a little laughter, too, and even beauty—some afternoon from childhood, 
a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow 
that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole 
world's gone white and quiet, until there's hardly a world 
at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex, 
just a blessed peace that seems final but isn't. And finally 
the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually 
while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers 
up empties, gives back the drinker's own face. Who knows what it looks like; 
who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely, 
who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward 
the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost 
angel who recklessly threw it all over—heaven, the ether, 
the celestial works—and said, Fuck it, I want to be human? 
Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything 
but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people 
they've managed to gather around them against the uncertainty, 
against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar 
with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well? 
Forget that loser. Just tell me who's buying, who's paying; 
Christ but I'm thirsty, and I want to tell you something, 
come close I want to whisper it, to pour 
the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you, 
listen, it's simple, I'm saying it now, while I'm still sober, 
while I'm not about to weep bitterly into my own glass, 
while you're still here—don't go yet, stay, stay, 
give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, don't let me drop, 
I'm so in love with you I can't stand up.

The Tao of Touch

What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That 
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly 
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.

Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
into pets, not our food.

The widow looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Not caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?

We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure. 
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.

Love in August

White moths
against the screen
in August darkness.

Some clamor 
in envy.

Some spread large
as two hands
of a thief

who wants to put 
back in your cupboard
the long-taken silver.

THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage this minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

High Country Weather

Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

Love letter to a stranger

Who was it
that said our souls know one another
by smell, like horses?

~What a beautiful thought...a poem in itself. 

I remember

By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color--no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up your
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a puritan lady and what
I remember best is that
the door to your room was
the door to mine.

Nostalgia

                                               There is the sky. Now I can see it.

There is the open sky

waiting for the best I can give.

Left behind are parents,

friends, givers of advice...

The dream toys of childhood,

the tree of desire,

night in the depths of the pool,

the park that witnessed our first kiss...

I see it all in the distance

like a body that awakens

in a remote part of the landscape.

I look at it as if it were false.

We have arrived at life

by saying farewell to everything we've loved,

to that which was given,

to all those we love.

But there, at this moment, is the sky.

"May"

I wanted to stay with my dog
when they did her in
I told the young veterinarian
who wasn’t surprised.
Shivering on the chrome table,
she did not raise her eyes to me when I came in.
Something was resolved in her.
Some darkness exchanged for the pain.
There were a few more words
about the size of her tumor and her age,
and how we wanted to stop her suffering,
or our own, or stop all suffering
from happening before us
and then the nurse shaved May’s skinny leg
with those black clippers;
she passed the needle to the doctor
and for once I knew what to do
and held her head against mine.
I cleaved to that smell
and lied into her ear
that it would be all right.
The veterinarian, whom I’d fought
about when to do this thing
said through tears
that it would take only a few minutes
as if that were not a long time
but there was no cry or growl,
only the weight of her in my arms,
and then on the world.

Now

I told you once when we were young that
we would someday meet again.
Now, the years flown past, the letters
unwritten, I am not so certain.

It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden
in this wind, there are those determined
to bring forth winter at any cost.
I am resigned to dark blonde shadows

at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves
which point in every direction at once.
But I am wearing the shirt you stitched
two separate lifetimes ago. It is old

and falling to ash, yet every button blooms
the flowers of your design. I think of this
and I am happy, to have kissed
your mouth with the force of language,

to have spoken your name at all.

Blazon

—after Breton

My love with his hair of nightingales
With his chest of pigeon flutter, of gray doves preening themselves at dawn
With his shoulders of tender balconies half in shadow, half in sun
My love with his long-boned thighs the map of Paris of my tongue
With his ink-stained tongue, his tongue the tip
of a steeple plunged into milky sky
My love with his wishing teeth
With his fingers of nervous whispering, his fingers of a boy
whose toys were cheap and broken easily
My love with his silent thumbs
With his eyes of a window smudged of a train that passes in the night
With his nape of an empty rain coat
hung by the collar, sweetly bowed
My love with his laughter of an empty stairwell, rain all afternoon
With his mouth the deepest flower to which
I have ever put my mouth

Christmas Away From Home

Her sickness brought me to Connecticut.
Mornings I walk the dog: that part of life
is intact. Who's painted, who's insulated
or put siding on, who's burned the lawn
with lime—that's the news on Ardmore Street.

The leaves of the neighbor's respectable
rhododendrons curl under in the cold.
He has backed the car
through the white nimbus of its exhaust
and disappeared for the day.

In the hiatus between mayors
the city has left leaves in the gutters,
and passing cars lift them in maelstroms.

We pass the house two doors down, the one
with the wildest lights in the neighborhood,
an establishment without irony.
All summer their putto empties a water jar,
their St. Francis feeds the birds.
Now it's angels, festoons, waist-high
candles, and swans pulling sleighs.

Two hundred miles north I'd let the dog
run among birches and the black shade of pines.
I miss the hills, the woods and stony
streams, where the swish of jacket sleeves
against my sides seems loud, and a crow
caws sleepily at dawn.

By now the streams must run under a skin
of ice, white air-bubbles passing erratically,
like blood cells through a vein. Soon the mail,
forwarded, will begin to reach me here.

Daily life so beautifully described. (Whose illness? A sister's, perhaps.) The poet longs for her home and yet there is a sad note of acceptance at the end.