Selected poems from the one poetry book I own. More when I get others.
Blue Poles
Blue poles (well?) on the beach
in a snowless winter and
I'm too cold to ask you
why we're here but of course "we are"
where on the puzzled reef dwarves either
fish or drown in the abandoned ships
sharks dissever year-old children in search
of "young blood" Jersey acting like Europe
in an instant and lovely Mary kneeling along the quick tide
to be anxious with thoughts of bare oceans
that move as the thighs of an eventual sunlight
like bathers moving closer to their season
when again gulls perch in their lovely confusion
"alone," as now, the sand sifting through
your fingers like another's darkness, it's true,
you are always too near and I am everything
that comes moaning free and wet
through the lips of our lovely grind
The Narrows
That is the way you are, always given
to silence, so I don't care anymore
about these green leaves in my carpet
about the death of an historical figure
about your voice.
you were thinking about a red curtain
we might hide behind. I was
thinking about the freedom of your shadow,
last night, when this livid sky unfolded
its vault of a thousand swords and the air
we were breathing seemed our own.
I'm glad that you're able to breathe
I'm glad that you're able to distinguish me
from the lights along the thruway.
I mean don't both of us illuminate
the direction which you are taking?
and don't both weep nervously above
the moist pavement where you move.
I'd like to watch myself holding you
above the cool shore of something really vast
like a vast sea, or ocean.
and when I was through watching
I'd become someone else, seducing the heavy
waters, allowing nothing to change.
as the sands are changing and night comes
and we're not aware of all this endlessness,
which is springing up like The Moonlight Sonata
ascending from the glare of a thousand frightened moans.
The Loft
So I move through the black dooorway
to be turned head on into light
and the phone was desperate
to speak to tell you something
in the next room she pants like 8th St.
the drawers swept up the powdery substance
through the green shaft and
it was Thursday because of your breath
(the efflugence of your sway
and total landscape of clockblood
I have produced the ransom once more
and the third of five angels is set free
to resurrect / and be buried again
so that I hardly remember the
composed landscape and waters
the rose violin the basketball teams
I was happy as you were about the whole thing
I saved for months . . . the calendar is crushed
"put on your rifle," they told her, "death
is only white by nature"
evening is so vain lately
like your lips geometry
should anything have come to this, love?
take the yellow typewriter,
it's winter I'm so glad
and the wind is pushing like pinecones
against the angel's dying sperm.
California Poem
The ocean fooled me
I thought it was bubble
but it was frozen spray
like a pain dream
and the double driftwood
and agates
surfers in rubber masks
and suits . . . like leather angels
leaning forward on their knees on
moonstruck docks along Tenth Ave.
N.Y. . . . city of cowboy fantasies
and my own dreams beneath this blonde sun
of heroin and poolrooms childhood back home
you'll never return
yet you will go back
drawing more distinctions . . .
there, where my entire history
waits in sun puddles on filthy sidewalks
thousands of umbrellas poking my body
to wound the heart
and out here poets sleep beaches all day
with fears of Japan where bronze children
start landslides in their brains
Maybe I'm Amazed
Just because there is music
piped into the most false of revolutions
it cannot clean these senses
of slow wireless death crawling
from a slick mirror
1/8th it's normal size . . .
Marty was found dead by the man literally
blue 12 hours after falling out
at the foot of the Cloisters
with its millions in rare tapestry
and its clear view of the Hudson
and even testing your blue pills
over and over to reverse
my slow situations
I wind up stretched across the couch
still nodding with Sherlock Holmes
examining our crushed veins
Richard Brautigan,
I don't care who you are fucking
In your clean California air
I just don't care
Though mine are more beautiful anyway
(though more complex perhaps)
and we have white flowers too
right over our window on 10th St.
like hands that mark tiny x's
across infinity day by day
but even this crumb of life
I eventually surface toward
continues to nod as if I see you all
thoughtlessly
through a carefully inverted piece
of tainted glass
