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Titled after Satie I. Three pears ripen On the ledge. Weeks pass. They are a marriage. The middle one’s the conversation The other two are having. He is their condition. Three wings without birds, Three feelings. How can they help themselves? They can’t. How can they stay like that? They can. II. The pears are consulting. Business is bad this year, D’Anjou, Bartlett. They are psychiatrists, Patient and slick. Hunger reaches the hard stem. It will get rid of them. III. The pears are old women; They are the same. Slight rouge, Green braille dresses, They blush in unison. They will stay young. They will not ripen. In the new world, Ripeness is nothing.

When a hurricane sends Winds far enough north To put our power out, We only think of winning The war bodies wage To prove the border Between them isn’t real. An act of God, so sweet. No TV. No novel. No Recreation but one Another, and neither of us Willing to kill. I don’t care That I don’t love my lover. Knowing where to stroke In little light, knowing what Will happen to me and how Soon, these rank higher Than a clear view Of the face I’d otherwise Flay had I some training In combat, a blade, a few Matches. Candles are Romantic because We understand shadows. We recognize the shape Of what once made us Come, so we come Thinking of approach In ways that forgo Substance. I’m breathing — Heaving now — In my own skin, and I Know it. Romance is An act. The perimeter Stays intact. We make out So little that I can’t help But imagine my safety. I get to tell the truth About what kind Of a person lives and who Dies. Barefoot survivors. Damned heroes, each Corpse lit on a pyre. Patroclus died because He could not see What he really was inside His lover’s armor.

Grotesque and queerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, We lie all sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Wind’s fumble or men’s feet Is on your face.

It stops the town we come through. Workers raise Their oily arms in good salute and grin. Kids scream as at a circus. Business men Glance hopefully and go their measured way. And women standing at their dumbstruck door More slowly wave and seem to warn us back, As if a tear blinding the course of war Might once dissolve our iron in their sweet wish. Fruit of the world, O clustered on ourselves We hang as from a cornucopia In total friendliness, with faces bunched To spray the streets with catcalls and with leers. A bottle smashes on the moving ties And eyes fixed on a lady smiling pink Stretch like a rubber-band and snap and sting The mouth that wants the drink-of-water kiss. And on through crummy continents and days, Deliberate, grimy, slightly drunk we crawl, The good-bad boys of circumstance and chance, Whose bucket-helmets bang the empty wall Where twist the murdered bodies of our packs Next to the guns that only seem themselves. And distance like a strap adjusted shrinks, Tightens across the shoulder and holds firm. Here is a deck of cards; out of this hand Dealer, deal me my luck, a pair of bulls, The right draw to a flush, the one-eyed jack. Diamonds and hearts are red but spades are black, And spades are spades and clubs are clovers—black. But deal me winners, souvenirs of peace. This stands to reason and arithmetic, Luck also travels and not all come back. Trains lead to ships and ships to death or trains, And trains to death or trucks, and trucks to death, Or trucks lead to the march, the march to death, Or that survival which is all our hope; And death leads back to trucks and trains and ships, But life leads to the march, O flag! at last The place of life found after trains and death— Nightfall of nations brilliant after war.

I How can we accommodate these reforms? The nights of bell-flowers are as finished as the hell of water that has unrolled and become news. Pull at the ox’s ring and the wall of the sinuses falls down. Pull at the hoop in the eyelid, dormitories are felled. A marriage of fists and kites, the smile is hammered so painstakingly into the gut it forms a ring. II I am staring up at a boxing match in which white Everlasts and red Everlasts take on the breakneck speed of cupids. Art Deco façades hem in the open-air courtyard; a black belt of skyline circles off their incandescent white waists. The sunrise pulls level with the sea. The boxers’ shadows furl and unfurl, drawing into cups. III You open your heart’s wings like a bread riot, split the uncooked potatoes on the table with a glance, and eat. You make the hours work like fragile perceptions for the food they get, the warmth they get, for the variable, contradictory spontaneities imposed on their bodies as love or triumph in mistaken assertions.

In the still morning when you move toward me in sleep for love, I dream of an island where long-stemmed cranes, serious weather vanes, turn slowly on one foot. There the dragonfly folds his mica wings and rides the tall reed close as a handle. The hippo yawns, nods to thick pythons, slack and drowsy, who droop down like untied sashes from the trees. The brash hyenas do not cackle and run but lie with their paws on their heads like dogs. The lazy crow’s caw falls like a sigh. In the field below, the fat moles build their dull passage with an old instinct that needs no light or waking; its slow beat turns the hand in sleep as we turn toward each other in the ripe air of summer, before the change of weather, before the heavy drop of the apples.

Bananas ripe and green, and ginger-root, Cocoa in pods and alligator pears, And tangerines and mangoes and grape fruit, Fit for the highest prize at parish fairs, Set in the window, bringing memories Of fruit-trees laden by low-singing rills, And dewy dawns, and mystical blue skies In benediction over nun-like hills. My eyes grew dim, and I could no more gaze; A wave of longing through my body swept, And, hungry for the old, familiar ways, I turned aside and bowed my head and wept.

Someone enters: That alone makes me speak. When you lived, I spoke to you. We are transitive. I never dream of speech: I either speak or don’t. And now that I know where you will not be— I do not go there.

Just for this evening, let's not mock them. Not their curtsies or cross-garters or ever-recurring pepper trees in their gardens promising, promising. At least they had ideas about love. All day we've driven past cornfields, past cows poking their heads through metal contraptions to eat. We've followed West 84, and what else? Irrigation sprinklers fly past us, huge wooden spools in the fields, lounging sheep, telephone wires, yellowing flowering shrubs. Before us, above us, the clouds swell, layers of them, the violet underneath of clouds. Every idea I have is nostalgia. Look up: there is the sky that passenger pigeons darkened and filled— darkened for days, eclipsing sun, eclipsing all other sound with the thunder of their wings. After a while, it must have seemed that they followed not instinct or pattern but only one another. When they stopped, Audubon observed, they broke the limbs of stout trees by the weight of the numbers. And when we stop we'll follow—what? Our hearts? The Puritans thought that we are granted the ability to love only through miracle, but the troubadours knew how to burn themselves through, how to make themselves shrines to their own longing. The spectacular was never behind them. Think of days of those scarlet-breasted, blue-winged birds above you. Think of me in the garden, humming quietly to myself in my blue dress, a blue darker than the sky above us, a blue dark enough for storms, though cloudless. At what point is something gone completely? The last of the sunlight is disappearing even as it swells— Just for this evening, won't you put me before you until I'm far enough away you can believe in me? Then try, try to come closer— my wonderful and less than.

Sonnet 29 Is there a sound? There is a forest. What is the world? The word is wilderness. What is the answer? The answer is the world. What is the beginning? A beginning is happiness. What is the end? No one lives there now. What is a beginning? The beginning is light. What makes happiness? Nothing. What makes an ending? What does not. What is her skin?Her skin is composed of strange clothing and clouds of butterflies, of events and odors, of the rose fingers of dawn, transparent suns of full daylight, blue loves of dusk and night fish with huge eyes.