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the bare-backed barback in the bear bar’s back bar barebacked with a bare bear who was also a barback back there

For Rebecca Feldman and Brian Roessler That's what the first line says of the song I've been playing all summer at the keyboard—trying to get my hands around its dark, melancholy chords, its story line of a melody that twists up like snakes from melodic minor scales that I've also been trying to learn, though I'm no great shakes as a practicer of scales. Come to think of it, neither am I much when it comes to love—no great shakes, I mean. Not that I haven't had my chances. Twenty years married, I made a lousy husband, half asleep, selfish, more like a big baby than a grown man, the poet laureate of the self-induced coma when it came to doing anything for anybody but me. "Now and then he took his thumb out of his mouth to write an ode to or a haiku about the thumb he sucked all day." That's what I imagined my ex-wife said to our therapist near the end. She did say: "It's all about Bill." She was right. And suddenly it frightens me, remembering how, at our wedding, our poet friends read poems of (mostly) utter depression to salute us. I wondered if their griefs in love had double-crossed our union, if strange snakes in the grass of our blissful Eden had hissed at us, and now I worry, on your wedding day, if I'm not doing the same damned thing . . . . I haven't come to spring up and put my curse on your bliss. Here's what I want to say: You're young. You don’t know what love is. And as the next line of the song goes, you won't —"Until you know the meaning of the blues." Darlings, the blues will come (though not often, I hope) to raise their fiery swords against your paradise. A little of that you unwittingly got today, when it rained and you couldn't be married outside under the beautiful tree in Nan and Alan's yard. But paradise doesn't have to be structured so that we can never reenter it. After you've kicked each other out of it once or twice (I'm speaking metaphorically, of course), teach yourself how to say a few kind words to each other. Don't stand there angry, stony. Each of you let the other know what you are feeling and thinking and then it may be possible to return to each other smiling, hand in hand. For arm in arm, you are your best Eden. Remember the advice the old poet sang to you on the afternoon of August 4, 2001, the day you got married. May you enjoy a good laugh thinking of him and his silver thumb now that you've turned the key into your new life in the beautiful Massachusetts rain and—hey, now—sun!

I sang my songs so much that they became the soundtrack for my dreams, the melody of my moods, a room I lived in, and a balm for my wounds. I sang my songs enough to know them backward and forward, enough to wonder if they could lift me from hometown haunts to center stage. I’d sung my songs enough to think I could take on Baltimore’s best talent at the Harlem Theatre Amateur Hour and maybe even win. If you sing a song enough, it can go to your head that way.

for Robert Creeley (1926—2005) You told me the son of Acton’s town nurse would never cross the border into Concord, where the Revolution left great houses standing on Main Street. Yet we crossed into Concord, walking through Sleepy Hollow Cemetery to greet Thoreau, his stone stamped with the word Henry jutting like a gray thumbnail down the path from Emerson and his boulder of granite. We remembered Henry’s night in jail, refusing tax for the Mexican War, and I could see you hunched with him, loaning Henry a cigarette, explaining the perpetual wink of your eye lost after the windshield burst in your boyhood face. When Emerson arrived to ask what you and Henry were doing in there, you would say: You got a song, man, sing it. You got a bell, man, ring it.

Tell the truth I told me                                When I couldn’t speak. Sorrow’s a barbaric art, crude as a Viking ship                Or a child Who rode a spotted pony to the lake away from summer In the 1930s                                       Toward the iron lung of polio. According to the census I am unmarried                And unchurched. The woman in the field dressed only in the sun. Too far gone to halt the Arctic Cap’s catastrophe, big beautiful Blubbery white bears each clinging to his one last hunk of  ice. I am obliged, now, to refrain from dying, for as long as it is possible. For whom left am I first? We have come to terms with our Self Like a marmoset getting out of  her Great Ape suit.

Listen, you who transformed your anguish into healthy awareness, put your voice where your memory is. You who swallowed the afternoon dust, defend everything you understand with words. You, if no one else, will condemn with your tongue the erosion each disappointment brings. You, who saw the images of disgust growing, will understand how time devours the destitute; you, who gave yourself your own commandments, know better than anyone why you turned your back on your town's toughest limits. Don't hush, don't throw away the most persistent truth, as our hard-headed brethren sometimes do. Remember well what your life was like: cloudiness, and slick mud after a drizzle; flimsy windows the wind kept rattling in winter, and that unheated slab dwelling where coldness crawled up in your clothes. Tell how you were able to come to this point, to unbar History's doors to see your early years, your people, the others. Name the way rebellion's calm spirit has served you, and how you came to unlearn the lessons of that teacher, your land's omnipotent defiler.

Orange gleams athwart a crimson soul Lambent flames; purple passion lurks In your dusk eyes. Red mouth; flower soft, Your soul leaps up—and flashes Star-like, white, flame-hot. Curving arms, encircling a world of love, You! Stirring the depths of passionate desire!

Sulky what-ifs. Sulky what-ifs. They bumblefuck the metastuff. Diffidence their stock in trade. Cozy hell — cozy, hell. They make a mockery of irony. They hold Special Olympics in wit. What was Shakespeare’s blood pressure? Vertical river, cloister of thunder, Bleeds the ship’s fell sail. God comes in for a landing. He lowers God’s landing gear. He raises holy spoilers, lowers the sacred ailerons. He imagines Reality. Tried everything in life? Sulky what-ifs are dumbstruck. Drumsticks. Their spiritual actuality is empirical. What if uppity angels? What if there really were rules? What if those angels melted in the rain? If reality is an illusion, wouldn’t it stand to reason That illusions are real? A lot of dumb questions. Impingement of external objects or conditions upon the body Palpitate apostasy. The oppressed must free the oppressors to free themselves, see? The soul is euphemism for the body. What does willing mean? Do you sense my sense? Am I fashionable? Objective as an angel in the rain? Screaming from a safe place? Nine smocked doctors, three unmasked. One has left his face sewn to the pillow. One holds a lace fan like a hand of cards she studies, Considering the risks. She is the loveliest doctor. Her doctor-father scolds her right there in front of all the other doctors. They are aghast. They kneel and don carnival hats with feathers. I don’t think they are really doctors. The trees are real. They are green kachinas. Dark rooms of wind are installed in the house of barbarism. The norm is always incorrect. If what?

You know where you did despise (Tother day) my little Eyes, Little Legs, and little Thighs, And some things, of little Size, You know where. You, tis true, have fine black eyes, Taper legs, and tempting Thighs, Yet what more than all we prize Is a Thing of little Size, You know where.

for Eleanor Roosevelt Who showed the world the world itself Was awkward, shy and plain. A high-born leader in a long, Low decade full of pain. Poor farmers, blacks, homeless, the least Advantaged hoped to see, Magnificently unarrayed, Pure human dignity. A lady first, the great first lady Looked fear in the face, And said,There is no room for fear When courage take its place.