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I asked myself What, Sappho, can you give one who has everything, like Aphrodite?

I did something I could never discuss made an acquaintance and embraced him in a phone booth. While interested parties lurked among free newspaper boxes he removed his domino. What to construe from leather bracelets? The impossibility of translation from a phone booth to a churchyard a gate painted white a belfry with no bell some culture with haceks the sense of lolling in a park from a churchyard to a community garden heckling the rooster as it crowed. We left the part we liked jeering the rooster from a sward. We reentered the garden with a script but refused to expand on the vestiges of happiness. A girl took responsibility for the garden and plied us with background information until her nervous guardian sent us back to the church with a coat of arms where we were going anyway as though under the influence of boreal fluid. The songbirds of the yard were about to be contaminated by a new age concert. With so little at stake they praised positive thinking.

for Adam And I didn't see that now you were here on the page writing poems too: poems silken with blue, fortified with a metaphor passing through. But I knew this speaker was you and knew there was so much about you that could reach around the metaphor to a personal etymology, one that could brighten and darken the poem without too many over-determined moves. But if you, speaker, need figures—more than language— who bless the poem's grief with vantage points or an altitude high up, or bandages soaked in vinegar, sure, then let the speaker invent a mirage, I understand that, too. It's tough these days when anxiety speaks through the fission of thought; it's the piss-pot of the mind. What anchors the fisted pronoun "we" in your poem? Something must. And another thing, upon second read, only now do I see how the "you" and "I" of someone else's poem landed in yours: on that particular cited greenery. And these other pronouns know—ahead of time- to check the soles of their shoes and how to manage a homonym's feet; moreover, they told you, speaker, how to open and shut the door without too much invention or conviction, which in a poem is rare.

I dreamed that in a city dark as Paris I stood alone in a deserted square. The night was trembling with a violet Expectancy. At the far edge it moved And rumbled; on that flickering horizon The guns were pumping color in the sky. There was the Front. But I was lonely here, Left behind, abandoned by the army. The empty city and the empty square Was my inhabitation, my unrest. The helmet with its vestige of a crest, The rifle in my hands, long out of date, The belt I wore, the trailing overcoat And hobnail boots, were those of a poilu. I was the man, as awkward as a bear. Over the rooftops where cathedrals loomed In speaking majesty, two aeroplanes Forlorn as birds, appeared. Then growing large, The German Taube and the Nieuport Scout, They chased each other tumbling through the sky, Till one streamed down on fire to the earth. These wars have been so great, they are forgotten Like the Egyptian dynasts. My confrere In whose thick boots I stood, were you amazed To wander through my brain four decades later As I have wandered in a dream through yours? The violence of waking life disrupts The order of our death. Strange dreams occur, For dreams are licensed as they never were.

The dove-white gulls on the wet lawn in Washington Square in the early morning fog each a little ghost in the gloaming Souls transmigrated maybe from Hudson’s shrouded shores across all the silent years— Which one’s my maybe mafioso father in his so white suit and black shoes in his real estate office Forty-second Street or at the front table wherever he went— Which my dear lost mother with faded smile locked away from me in time— Which my big brother Charley selling switching-signals all his life on the New York Central— And which good guy brother Clem sweating in Sing Sing’s darkest offices deputy-warden thirty years watching executions in the wooden armchair (with leather straps and black hood) He too gone mad with it in the end— And which my nearest brother Harry still kindest and dearest in a far suburb— I see them now all turn to me at last gull-eyed in the white dawn about to call to me across the silent grass

I hate how this unsummoned sigh-sound, sob-sound, not sound really, feeling, sigh-feeling, sob-feeling, keeps rising in me, rasping in me, not in its old disguise as nostalgia, sweet crazed call of the blackbird; not as remembrance, grief for so many gone, nor either that other tangle of recall, regret for unredeemed wrongs, errors, omissions, petrified roots too deep to ever excise; a mingling rather, a melding, inextricable mesh of delight in astonishing being, of being in being, with a fear of and fear for I can barely think what, not non-existence, of self, loved ones, love; not even war, fuck war, sighing for war, sobbing for war, for no war, peace, surcease; more than all that, some ground-sound, ground-note, sown in us now, that swells in us, all of us, echo of love we had, have, for world, for our world, on which we seem finally mere swarm, mere deluge, mere matter self-altered to tumult, to noise, cacophonous blitz of destruction, despoilment, din from which every emotion henceforth emerges, and into which falters, slides, sinks, and subsides: sigh-sound of lament, of remorse; sob-sound of rue, of, still, always, ever sadder and sadder sad joy.

Life's spell is so exquisite, everything conspires to break it. Emily Dickinson It wasn't bliss. What was bliss but the ordinary life? She'd spend hours in patter, moving through whole days touching, sniffing, tasting . . . exquisite housekeeping in a charmed world. And yet there was always more of the same, all that happiness, the aimless Being There. So she wandered for a while, bush to arbor, lingered to look through a pond's restive mirror. He was off cataloging the universe, probably, pretending he could organize what was clearly someone else's chaos. That's when she found the tree, the dark, crabbed branches bearing up such speechless bounty, she knew without being told this was forbidden. It wasn't a question of ownership— who could lay claim to such maddening perfection? And there was no voice in her head, no whispered intelligence lurking in the leaves—just an ache that grew until she knew she'd already lost everything except desire, the red heft of it warming her outstretched palm.

Some little splinter Of shadow purls And weals down The slewed stone Chapel steps, Slinks along The riverrock wall And disappears Into the light. Now ropy, riffled, Now owlish, sere, It smolders back To sight beneath A dwarfish, brindled tree That chimes and sifts And resurrects In something’s sweet And lethal breath. This little shadow Seems to know (How can it know? How can it not?) Just when to flinch Just where to loop and sag And skitter down, Just what to squirrel And what to squander till The light it lacks Bleeds it back And finds My sleeping dark-haired girl — O personal, Impersonal, Continual thrall — And hammocks blue In the hollows of her eyes.

The day turned into the city and the city turned into the mind and the moving trucks trumbled along like loud worries speaking over the bicycle’s idea which wove between the more armored vehicles of expression and over planks left by the construction workers on a holiday morning when no work was being done because no matter the day, we tend towards remaking parts of it—what we said or did, or how we looked— and the buildings were like faces lining the banks of a parade obstructing and highlighting each other defining height and width for each other offsetting grace and function like Audrey Hepburn from Jesse Owens, and the hearty pigeons collaborate with wrought iron fences and become recurring choruses of memory reassembling around benches we sat in once, while seagulls wheel like immigrating thoughts, and never-leaving chickadees hop bared hedges and low trees like commas and semicolons, landing where needed, separating subjects from adjectives, stringing along the long ideas, showing how the cage has no door, and the lights changed so the tide of sound ebbed and returned like our own breath and when I knew everything was going to look the same as the mind I stopped at a lively corner where the signs themselves were like perpendicular dialects in conversation and I put both my feet on the ground took the bag from the basket so pleased it had not been crushed by the mightiness of all else that goes on and gave you the sentence inside.

I don’t understand why everyone stares When I take off my clothes and dance down the stairs. Or when I stick carrots in both of my ears, Then dye my hair green and go shopping at Sears. I just love to dress up and do goofy things. If I were an angel, I’d tie-dye my wings! Why can’t folks accept me the way that I am? So what if I’m different and don’t act like them? I’m not going to change and be someone I’m not. I like who I am, and I’m all that I’ve got.