Poem

Fall a scrimage of yellow leaves today All over Lincoln Park Like the mask of the Yellow Mule who travels between the next world and Tibet inside its house of glass in the Field Museum by the lake. I am carrying the night. I am carrying it as if it were a dark blue dish with stars for the dinner of the Dalai Lama. It is the sky two nights ago; Its voluptuous rich blue looks almost black before the word for blue had been invented; The clouds like continents, like huge, majestic prehistoric creatures moving in a dance; The stars are brilliant ants.  They may have died a billion years ago. I feel so happy.   It is as if I'm with my wife who's making sculpture miles and miles away on Ada Street. I like everything about her. The way an angel, say, might look upon this early autumn scene and love everything about it for its reality— These trees flanking the lagoon at Fullerton are quiet as green fish, The pale khaki maple leaf lying on the ground, its veins intricate as the practice of a Tartar cavalry, Its delicacy like the penis of a cuttlefish, The grass pale lime and brown as dreams when they are turning brown Is almost ghostly, The way the family album on the table in the livingroom has a gallery of ghosts. There is only wonder. Like the wonder in the worn thighbone of the dinosaur We're allowed to touch As often as we want on the Main Floor of the Field Museum. I bike along the lake and watch The whiplash of the waves and think, I didn't have to be here in the first place: I could have been a star: Or cuttlefish. The shadow of that tree.  Or been one of the bees of oblivion In any ordinary orgasm. If there were no moon our hearts could take its place.