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He described her mouth as full of ashes. So when he kissed her finally he was thinking about ashes and the blacker rim just below the edge of the ashtray, and the faint dark rim that outlined her lips, and the lips themselves, at the limit of another darkness, farther and far more interior. Then the way the red, paling, just outside those lines caught fire and the pages caught soon after that. Slowly at first, but then all at once at the scalloped brown corners of each; like the ruff of an offended and darkening bird, extended, then folded in on itself; multiple, stiffening, gone.

Leave go my hands, let me catch breath and see; Let the dew-fall drench either side of me; Clear apple-leaves are soft upon that moon Seen sidelong like a blossom in the tree; And God, ah God, that day should be so soon. The grass is thick and cool, it lets us lie. Kissed upon either cheek and either eye, I turn to thee as some green afternoon Turns toward sunset, and is loth to die; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Lie closer, lean your face upon my side, Feel where the dew fell that has hardly dried, Hear how the blood beats that went nigh to swoon; The pleasure lives there when the sense has died, Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. O my fair lord, I charge you leave me this: It is not sweeter than a foolish kiss? Nay take it then, my flower, my first in June, My rose, so like a tender mouth it is: Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Love, till dawn sunder night from day with fire Dividing my delight and my desire, The crescent life and love the plenilune, Love me though dusk begin and dark retire; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, my heart fails, my blood draws back; I know, When life runs over, life is near to go; And with the slain of love love’s ways are strewn, And with their blood, if love will have it so; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Ah, do thy will now; slay me if thou wilt; There is no building now the walls are built, No quarrying now the corner-stone is hewn, No drinking now the vine’s whole blood is spilt; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, slay me now; nay, for I will be slain; Pluck thy red pleasure from the teeth of pain, Break down thy vine ere yet grape-gatherers prune, Slay me ere day can slay desire again; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Yea, with thy sweet lips, with thy sweet sword; yea Take life and all, for I will die, I say; Love, I gave love, is life a better boon? For sweet night’s sake I will not live till day; Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon. Nay, I will sleep then only; nay, but go. Ah sweet, too sweet to me, my sweet, I know Love, sleep, and death go to the sweet same tune; Hold my hair fast, and kiss me through it soon. Ah God, ah God, that day should be so soon.

Sisyphus had a bad back. Why? Well, I get up in the morning And my wife wants me to carry A big blue bag of garbage To my son now Sleeping in a studio in NY. Five flights he will not carry. Oh I say I’m not supposed to carry More than five pounds of garbage And she crosses the border with it There was a dead body like little Pedro rolled down the Hill by Buñuel and not the long kiss Of L’age d’or but the dog and dog-dream In Los Olvidados. How do you abandon dirt? The blue bag also rolls down by itself, full of Pedro Something little Pedro always wanted to do It’s a cold day. Man is garbage. Sisyphus has a bad back.

for Susan Koethe This is the life I wanted, and could never see. For almost twenty years I thought that it was enough: That real happiness was either unreal, or lost, or endless, And that remembrance was as close to it as I could ever come. And I believed that deep in the past, buried in my heart Beyond the depth of sight, there was a kingdom of peace. And so I never imagined that when peace would finally come It would be on a summer evening, a few blocks away from home In a small suburban park, with some children playing aimlessly In an endless light, and a lake shining in the distance. Eventually, sometime around the middle of your life, There’s a moment when the first imagination begins to wane. The future that had always seemed so limitless dissolves, And the dreams that used to seem so real float up and fade. The years accumulate; but they start to take on a mild, Human tone beyond imagination, like the sound the heart makes Pouring into the past its hymns of adoration and regret. And then gradually the moments quicken into life, Vibrant with possibility, sovereign, dense, serene; And then the park is empty and the years are still. I think the saddest memory is of a kind of light, A kind of twilight, that seemed to permeate the air For a few years after I’d grown up and gone away from home. It was limitless and free. And of course I was going to change, But freedom means that only aspects ever really change, And that as the past recedes and the future floats away You turn into what you are. And so I stayed basically the same As what I’d always been, while the blond light in the trees Became part of my memory, and my voice took on the accents Of a mind infatuated with the rhetoric of farewell. And now that disembodied grief has gone away. It was a flickering, literary kind of sadness, The suspension of a life between two other lives Of continual remembrance, between two worlds In which there’s too much solitude, too much disdain. But the sadness that I felt was real sadness, And this elation now a real tremor as the deepening Shadows lengthen upon the lake. This calm is real, But how much of the real past can it absorb? How far into the future can this peace extend? I love the way the light falls over the suburbs Late on these summer evenings, as the buried minds Stir in their graves, the hearts swell in the warm earth And the soul settles from the air into its human home. This is where the prodigal began, and now his day is ending In a great dream of contentment, where all night long The children sleep within tomorrow’s peaceful arms And the past is still, and suddenly we turn around and smile At the memory of a vast, inchoate dream of happiness, Now that we know that none of it is ever going to be. Don’t you remember how free the future seemed When it was all imagination? It was a beautiful park Where the sky was a page of water, and when we looked up, There were our own faces, shimmering in the clear air. And I know that this life is the only real form of happiness, But sometimes in its midst I can hear the dense, stifled sob Of the unreal one we might have known, and when that ends And my eyes are filled with tears, time seems to have stopped And we are alone in the park where it is almost twenty years ago And the future is still an immense, open dream.

There lies a somnolent lake Under a noiseless sky, Where never the mornings break Nor the evenings die. Mad flakes of colour Whirl on its even face Iridescent and streaked with pallour; And, warding the silent place, The rocks rise sheer and gray From the sedgeless brink to the sky Dull-lit with the light of pale half-day Thro’ a void space and dry. And the hours lag dead in the air With a sense of coming eternity To the heart of the lonely boatman there: That boatman am I, I, in my lonely boat, A waif on the somnolent lake, Watching the colours creep and float With the sinuous track of a snake. Now I lean o’er the side And lazy shades in the water see, Lapped in the sweep of a sluggish tide Crawled in from the living sea; And next I fix mine eyes, So long that the heart declines, On the changeless face of the open skies Where no star shines; And now to the rocks I turn, To the rocks, around That lie like walls of a circling sun Wherein lie bound The waters that feel my powerless strength And meet my homeless oar Labouring over their ashen length Never to find a shore. But the gleam still skims At times on the somnolent lake, And a light there is that swims With the whirl of a snake; And tho’ dead be the hours i’ the air, And dayless the sky, The heart is alive of the boatman there: That boatman am I.

I read the palms of the other kids on the field trip to see which ones would grow up to be astronauts. The lifeline on Betty Lou’s beautiful hand ended the day after tomorrow, so I told her how the rest of our lives is vastly over-rated, even in neighboring galaxies. When she asked me how I knew so much, I said I watched War of the Worlds six times and, if she went with me to the double-feature tomorrow, I’d finish explaining the universe. I smiled winningly. The Halley’s Comet lecture by our teacher whooshed in my one ear and out the other.

(1864) Listless he eyes the palisades And sentries in the glare; ’Tis barren as a pelican-beach— But his world is ended there. Nothing to do; and vacant hands Bring on the idiot-pain; He tries to think—to recollect, But the blur is on his brain. Around him swarm the plaining ghosts Like those on Virgil’s shore— A wilderness of faces dim, And pale ones gashed and hoar. A smiting sun. No shed, no tree; He totters to his lair— A den that sick hands dug in earth Ere famine wasted there, Or, dropping in his place, he swoons, Walled in by throngs that press, Till forth from the throngs they bear him dead— Dead in his meagerness.

The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood that I’ve seen and walked through years on end: I created you while I was happy, while I was sad, with so many incidents, so many details. And, for me, the whole of you has been transformed into feeling.

In the secular night you wander around alone in your house. It’s two-thirty. Everyone has deserted you, or this is your story; you remember it from being sixteen, when the others were out somewhere, having a good time, or so you suspected, and you had to baby-sit. You took a large scoop of vanilla ice-cream and filled up the glass with grapejuice and ginger ale, and put on Glenn Miller with his big-band sound, and lit a cigarette and blew the smoke up the chimney, and cried for a while because you were not dancing, and then danced, by yourself, your mouth circled with purple. Now, forty years later, things have changed, and it’s baby lima beans. It’s necessary to reserve a secret vice. This is what comes from forgetting to eat at the stated mealtimes. You simmer them carefully, drain, add cream and pepper, and amble up and down the stairs, scooping them up with your fingers right out of the bowl, talking to yourself out loud. You’d be surprised if you got an answer, but that part will come later. There is so much silence between the words, you say. You say, The sensed absence of God and the sensed presence amount to much the same thing, only in reverse. You say, I have too much white clothing. You start to hum. Several hundred years ago this could have been mysticism or heresy. It isn’t now. Outside there are sirens. Someone’s been run over. The century grinds on.

In the spring time the stars began looking for him By summer time they had found him By autumn time they had wounded him so that the orange and red of his blood began to leak from the sky onto the leaves of the trees By winter time they had slain him so that his white fat began to melt and drip falling as snow all over the land And then he would begin to rise again first as sap in the trees stretching higher and higher until his back ached but knowing he would not stop until his black fur was hidden deep among the unborn behind the dark wall of the night sky