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For Robert Philen You are like me, you will die too, but not today: you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine: if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost radio, may never be an oil painting or Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are a concordance of person, number, voice, and place, strawberries spread through your name as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me of some spring, the waters as cool and clear (late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind), which is where you occur in grassy moonlight: and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving from its earthwards journeys, here where there is no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, when there was snow), you are my right, have come to be my night (your body takes on the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep becomes you): and you fall from the sky with several flowers, words spill from your mouth in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees and seas have flown away, I call it loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you, a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all, and free of any eden we can name

For G A small thing crawling toward me across this dark lawn. Bright eyes the only thing I’m sure I see. You’ve come back to me, haven’t you, my sweet? From long ago, and very far. Through crawling dark, my sweet, you’ve come back to me, have you? Even smaller this time than the stars.

I had the idea of sitting still while others rushed by. I had the thought of a shop that still sells records. A letter in the mailbox. The way that book felt in my hands. I was always elsewhere. How is it to have a body today, to walk in this city, to run? I wanted to eat an apple so precisely the tree would make another exactly like it, then lie down uninterrupted in the gadgetless grass. I kept texting the precipice, which kept not answering, my phone auto-making everything incorrect. I had the idea. Put down the phone. Earth, leaves, storm, water, vine. The gorgeous art of breathing. I had the idea — the hope of friending you without electricity. Of what could be made among the lampposts with only our voices and hands.

i would be eight people and then the difficulties vanish only as one i contain the complications in a warm house roofed with the rib-cage of an elephant i pass my grey mornings re-running the reels and the images are the same but the emphasis shifts the actors bow gently to me and i envy them their repeated parts, their constant presence in that world i would be eight people each inhabiting the others’ dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters picking fruit in one dream and storing it in another only as one i contain the complications and the images are the same, their constant presence in that world the actors bow gently to me and envy my grey mornings i would be eight people with the rib-cage of an elephant picking fruit in a warm house above actors bowing re-running the reels of my presence in this world the difficulties vanish and the images are the same eight people, glass corridors, page lines repeated inhabiting grey mornings roofed with my complications only as one walking gently storing my dream

Fragile like a child is fragile. Destined not to be forever. Destined to become other To mother. Here I am Sitting on a chair, thinking About you. Thinking About how it was To talk to you. How sometimes it was wonderful And sometimes it was awful. How drugs when drugs were Undid the good almost entirely But not entirely Because good could always be seen Glimmering like lame glimmers In the window of a shop Called Beautiful Things Never Last Forever. I loved you. I love you. You were. And you are. Life is experience. It's all so simple. Experience is The chair we sit on. The sitting. The thinking Of you where you are a blank To be filled In by missing. I loved you. I love you like I love All beautiful things. True beauty is truly seldom. You were. You are In May. May now is looking onto The June that is coming up. This is how I measure The year. Everything Was My Fault Has been the theme of the song I've been singing, Even when you've told me to quiet. I haven't been quiet. I've been crying. I think you Have forgiven me. You keep Putting your hand on my shoulder When I'm crying. Thank you for that. And For the ineffable sense Of continuance. You were. You are The brightest thing in the shop window And the most beautiful seldom I ever saw.

You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within. There you will find the clear mirror already waiting.

You who want knowledge, seek the Oneness within There you will find the clear mirror already waiting

You who wronged a simple man Bursting into laughter at the crime, And kept a pack of fools around you To mix good and evil, to blur the line, Though everyone bowed down before you, Saying virtue and wisdom lit your way, Striking gold medals in your honor, Glad to have survived another day, Do not feel safe. The poet remembers. You can kill one, but another is born. The words are written down, the deed, the date. And you’d have done better with a winter dawn, A rope, and a branch bowed beneath your weight. Washington, D.C., 1950

You with the knees of a fish, You with the fish's ears, the tongue in your round Mouth that's nibbling the sweet air, You with a fish's patience, on your side Under the hot plank ot the keel, hook in your lip, And your tail twitching like a bothered lily, And the taste of your own bleeding on the air, salt on the sweetness, You with a fish's voice, singing and still Your aria, and the blue-silver flecks of light, The water's scales, breathing the breeze Abundant and not for you, you with a hook, Absurd, you with lidless mercuried eyes; And the reel whistles, the tall man's cast at you.

That you, Father, are “in my mind,” some will argue, who cherish the present but flee the past. They haven’t my need to ask, What was I? Asking instead, What am I?, they see themselves bejeweled and wingèd. Because they would fly and have value, their answers are pretty but false: the fixings of facile alchemists, preferring their stones to brains. The brain, remember, is not foolproof either, and does and does until it can’t. Sodden, quivering, crossed and recrossed, the mind can become a headstone or be malice stuffed with fish. Everything changes so quickly. You who were are no longer and what I was I’m not. Am I to know myself, except as I was? The rest is catchy, self-promising, false. Oh please write to me, and tell me. I just want to be happy again. That’s what I was, happy, maybe am, you would know.