When I went down on my knees
in the dark with you and stared
up at that canvas it wasn't long
before I saw His face
or one I imagined
could belong to someone like him.
His long features; lips pouted and
chin sloped emerged
from the black and purple
from the vast oil bruise in the way
people always told me he would come
perhaps in less literal darkness
perhaps when I could feel the weight
on my back from all that he wasn't
give it to you
that will undo your
fastenings with its teeth
and
lay you
out like it was murdering you
when really it was making you live?
After the reading is done
it will take maybe twenty minutes
for you to be able to move again
just lying there with the volume
spread open
on your chest: its cover,
jacket removed, moving
in time with your breath
A poem where
afterward you need a cigarette
to escort you back to the world
outside its lines because you
came that close to forgetting
that people had needs at all
And maybe the next morning
when you come back
to its pages the passion
will have dwindled some
it will seem somehow tired
in the light, its
movements and print both
a little less bold
But when you read it
(now at your desk
with your glasses on)
it still reads you back
with a tenderness
and understanding
that was absent in
the lustful evening
and you will maybe think
it's better that way: to be
who you are in its company, to have
the poem see you hungry and wanting
but still know exactly what to say.
From 1974 to 2004
you wrote in some bright room
that I never saw the light of.
Thirty years. So much of my
lifespan spent with your fingers
in ink and I never read
a word of it.
Not even today in the library
when I ran my fingers down
the spine of your dust
jacket and then walked
out the door.
I know
I am ungrateful not
to give you my time.
A few odd hours in
recompense for a
whole life of
work
But it comforts me enough
to think that you're out there:
you and others like you
rubbing sleep from aging
eyes just trying to say
something. To think
that after all
of those pages,
one of you is bound
to have hit on something
that will save me, something I
just haven't got around to reading yet.
In the street, children gather bits
of sidewalk chalk from their day
spent painting the town.
I am sitting on a friend's porch
satisfied by the early evening breeze
when they call for me to lie
on my back
in the grass.
They have ground the remnants
of their chalk in a bucket
that last week they were using
to wash neighbor's cars for money
They laugh as they spread
the dust over me, and then
leave
as I remain there
the color of the twilit sky
supine on the floor of the city.
I have seen how we grow cross eyed in classrooms
and am concerned with how little most of us
grin when we kiss. Where are the ones we left
in backseats of our mother's station wagons
fumbling for the braclasp of the world?
Please touch one another more.
In exceptionally public and overcrowded places,
demonstrate that affections exist that are beyond
the scope of our control. I will not be offended
by your tactlessness. It does not matter to me
if you are unattractive. My heart has been beating
at a concerning rate since Sunday, but I believe
that the way it touches the roof of my ribcage
is affectionate so I am keeping myself on this diet
of coffee and nicotine. If I have a stroke,
please call my mother.
Ladies and gentleman, I am ill suited to the bluelight
of the television and its thick film of noise.
My yelling days have passed and now the only place
I am interested in being loud is bed. I am not embarrassed to admit
that I still have faith in poetry and its quietude,
the manner in which it compels me to stop for
a moment and admire its self-certainty
like a pretty thing in heels
whose pendulum sway somehow distills
the screeching motion of the world.
Most of us have been writing about a feeling that can
only be communicated through the touching of lips, but
after a long day I still want someone to read to me as
much as I want sex and a glass of whiskey.
Boys and girls of America, there is nothing
unstylish about being genuine. I had
two drinks before writing this because I find
the idea of your judgment terrifying. Still,
I want the best for all of us. If I had your names
in my address book, you, collectively, would be
the first on my dinner party invitation lists.
I spend most of my time alone wishing to be disarmed
by your honesty.
Sometimes I miss the old sadnesses
that made us truer—when we were teenagers
and it was all exposed nerve endings and the
miracle of sexual desire, when a smile
from anyone could break or recompose
our hearts. Older, we are reasonable
but somehow out of breath when it comes
time for the I love yous. Purposeful with
our passions as if they had some utility
beyond the way they felt on our tongues.
Let us articulate to our lovers the electricity
they produce, the way their skin tastes to us
like the drinking of honeyed wine. And if
we manage to may it never be the stuff of self
congratulation.
Remember
we have been forgetting the days when goodness
was not something built but something found
and happened to us like a car accident leaving
our bodies bowled over on the sidewalk,
staring without sarcasm at the untouchable birds
finding their way to more tender climates.
