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returning to the parent shock.

  You've read this far, you might as well

  have been there too. Your eyes accuse

  me of false chase. Come off it,

  you're the one who thought it wouldn't

  matter what we found.

  Though we came with lights

  and tongues thick in our heads,

  the issue was a human life.

  The child was still

  alive. Admit you're glad.

  Psychoanalysis

  Everything is

  luxurious; there is no past,

  only an oceanic present.

  You troll along in your glass-

  bottomed boat.

  Parents and siblings lurk

  among the coral with thick eyes,

  they will not eat you

  if you understand them

  well enough. Stop,

  you whisper to the ingratiating

  pilot, here we are,

  maybe this means an end

  to all those hours listlessly improvising.

  Letting down

  the line you think maybe

  now you have it,

  it will come up slick

  with significance, laden

  with the sweet guilt you can name.

  Blues for John Coltrane, Dead at 41

  Although my house floats on a lawn

  as plush as a starlet's body

  and my sons sleep easily,

  I think of death's salmon breath

  leaping back up the saxophone

  with its wet kiss.

  Hearing him dead,

  I feel it in my feet

  as if the house were rocked

  by waves from a soundless speedboat

  planing by, full throttle.

  Coleman Hawkins (d. 1969), RIP

  As if that sax

  were made of bone wrenched from his wrist

  he urged through it dank music

  of his breath. When he blew ballads

  you knew one use of force:

  withholding it.

  This was a river of muscles.

  Old dimes oily from handling,

  eggs scrambled just right in a diner

  after eight gigs in nine nights,

  a New Yorker profile, a new Leica

  for the fun of having one.

  Gasps and twitches. It's like having the breath

  knocked out of me

  and wearing the lost air for a leash.

  I snuffle home.

  I hate it that he's dead.

  Jealousy

  1

  Now I have this smoking coal

  I'm growing from carbon

  in my gut,

  a snake hoping to sleep off

  his meal of fire.

  My heart enters a half-life

  of sludged pumping.

  2

  This lump, this pearl I am making

  sometimes jumps

  like a burning bee.

  Black honey!

  This way love dies

  somewhere else,

  like an arm wriggled out of its sling.

  4

  If I rasp like a crashing plane,

  like a ground-down spine

  made into a rhythm instrument,

  it is because I am knitting

  a fern of bone for your thigh,

  Oh

  I wish it were so,

  I'd take my stubbled tongue

  and file these words

  down

  to their nub of curse.

  5

  In the dewy grass, first July light,

  I blurt damp balls of breath up,

  suck them back in.

  Well hell

  I shall be warm

  by my own fire

  though the sun come.

  Moving

  When we spurt off

  in the invalid Volvo

  flying its pennant of blue fumes,

  the neighbors group and watch.

  We twist away like a released balloon.

  Lust

  It is a squad car idling

  through my eyes, bored,

  looking for a crime to crush.

  Two tough cops drive it,

  three years on the same beat,

  sick of each other.

  To it I am no better

  than a radish.

  I hear its indolent engine

  grump along in second gear,

  feel both cops watch me

  walk with stiff ankles,

  a nun among drunks.

  Faith of Our Fathers

  Now it is time to see what's left:

  not much.

  Gulls above the scrub pine, the tufted dunes—

  though nothing visible emits that low, slurred moan—,

  the graves in rows like a tray full of type.

  What we have lost

  you may guess by what we have kept.

  We rise to sing

  like beach grass swaying in the wind.

  O hymn of salt, the pages of the hymnal

  riffling, turning

  at last by themselves.

  Why We Are Truly a Nation

  Because we rage inside

  the old boundaries,

  like a young girl leaving the Church,

  scared of her parents.

  Because we all dream of saving

  the shaggy, dung-caked buffalo,

  shielding the herd with our bodies.

  Because grief unites us,

  like the locked antlers of moose

  who die on their knees in pairs.

  On Cape Cod a Child Is Stolen

  Fog has sealed in the house

  like a ship in a bottle.

  All the people of the house

  are dreaming of his future;

  only the Puritans

  and he aren't sleeping.

  They watch him lie too long in bed,

  the fog's moist nose at his ear.

  Now the muzzle pokes his tiny mouth,

  prying it open. They love him;

  he's in danger; but it's too late.

  His perfect body is still there

  but clearly empty. The fog

  rolls back to its own place

  and the fishermen scrape back

  from breakfast and go out to work.

  Driving All Night

  My complicated past is an anthology,

  a long line painted on the plains.

  I feel like literary history

  about to startle the professors.

  But it's not true.

  Days ahead, snow heaps up

  in the mountains

  like undelivered mail.

  After driving all night

  I guess what it's like

  to fly over them.

  For the first time you see

  how close things are together,

  how the foothills push up

  just past where you quit

  driving. Urgencies

  sputter in the exaltation

  of chill air.

  Your heart

  begins to fall like snow

  inside a paperweight.

  Oh when in your long damn life,

  I ask myself, when will

  you seek not a truce,

  but peace?

  Oh Yes

  My hands, my fists, my small bells

  of exact joy,

  clappers cut out

  because they have lied.

  And your tongue:

  like a burnt string

  it holds its shape until

  you try to lift it.

  We're sewn into each other

  like money in a miser's coat.

  Don't cry. Your wounds are

  beautiful if you'll love mine.

  Old Girlfriends

  I thrust my impudent

  cock into them

  like a hand raised in class.

  What they
knew that I didn't learn

  was not to ask:

  one participates.

  To say one is "in love"

  says everything:

  the tongue depressor breaks

  into flame.

  To say "one" is in love

  means me, hero of all these poems,

  in love as in a well

  I am the water of.

  What You Need

  Suppose you want to leave your life,

  that old ring in the tub,

  behind?

  It closes cozily

  as a clerk's hand,

  a coin with fingers.

  You hate it

  the same way the drunken son

  loves Mother.

  You will need pain

  heaving under you

  like frost ruining the new road.

  Wehlener Sonnenuhr Auslese 1959

  for Dave Curry

  After each rain the workers

  bring the eroded soil

  back up the slope in baskets.

  When the freezing ground heaves

  rocks up, they are gathered,

  shattered, the pieces

  strewn among the vines.

  The sun reflects from them.

  In the Moselle the sun

  is a broken bottle of light,

  same color as the wine.

  When you drink it,

  you pass through your body

  a beloved piece of earth.

  You are like the worm,

  except you know it.

  A door in the earth opens

  and you go in, as guest.

  Yes!

  You come home loved and troubled,

  tired,

  and lay your body down before me

  like new bread.

  It is the same body I have always loved,

  and in it your eyes shine

  like light still traveling from a dead star.

  I give you my love to use

  and shake with fear you can't.

  A sleep like a long swim

  and dreams of things growing,

  shuddering, wrenched,

  giant kelp 100 ft. high in the ocean,

  sage and yarrow,

  the ferny lace of hair

  around your cunt, marrow

  in mending bones.

  There is no way to stop growing.

  Sleep is a simple faith.

  I wake, wanting

  the moist pull into you,

  your face easing,

  love growing in sweet violence.

  And then you wake,

  still tired, tentative

  but languorous.

  I know that love is life's best work.

  Sleek for the Long Flight (1972)

  Directions

  The new road runs into

  the old road, turn

  west when your ankles hurt.

  The wind will be thinning itself

  in the grass. Listen, those thuds

  are bees drunk with plunder

  falling from the minarets of flowers

  like ripe prayers.

  Follow the path

  their bodies make. Faster.

  The dirt in that wineglass

  came from Chateau d'Yquem.

  You're getting closer.

  That pile of clothes

  is where some women

  enter the river. Hurry up.

  The last hill is called

  Sleep's Kneecap, nobody

  remembers why.

  This is where the wind turns

  back. From the ridge

  you can see the light.

  It's more like a bright soot,

  really, or the dust

  a moth's wing leaves

  on the thumb and forefinger.

  This is where I turn

  back—you go the rest of the way

  by eating the light until

  there is none and the next one

  eats along the glow

  of your extinguished hunger and turns

  to the living.

  Sleeping Alone

  A man is a necessity. A girl's mother says so by the way her hands come together after certain conversations, like a diary being closed.

  But a boy's mother tells him a woman is a luxury. Maybe when he graduates his mother hugs him and forgets herself, she bites his earlobe! She remembers the hockey skates she gave him for Christmas when he was eight; the stiff flaps in back of the ankles resembled monks' cowls. The year before, the road froze over—they seemed to be what he should want.

  Meanwhile the girl grows older, she hasn't been eight for ten years, her father is cruel to her mother. She'll always have a man, the way she likes to have in her room, even when visiting, a sandalwood box for her rings and coins, and a hand-painted mug showing two geese racing their reflections across a lake.

  Maybe she will meet the boy, maybe not. The story does not depend on them. In a dark room a couple undress. She has always liked men's backs and holds on with her fingertips, like suction cups, turning one cheek up to him and staring through the dark across the rippled sheet. He breathes in her ear—some women like that. Or maybe they've loved each other for years and the lights are on. It doesn't matter; soon they will be sleeping.

  Why do we say we slept with someone? The eyelids fall. It isn't the one you love or anyone else you recognize who says the only words you will remember from the dream. It must be the dream speaking, or the pope of all dreams speaking for the church. It says, It's OK, we're only dying.

  Driving Alongside the Housatonic River Alone on a Rainy April Night

  I remember asking

  where does my shadow go at night?

  I thought it went home,

  it grew so sleek at dusk.

  They said, you just don't

  notice it, the way you don't tell yourself

  how to walk or hear

  a noise that doesn't stop.

  But one wrong wobble

  in the socket and inside the knee

  chalk is falling, school

  is over.

  As if the ground were a rung

  suddenly gone from a ladder,

  the self, the shoulders bunched

  against the road's each bump, the penis

  with its stupid grin,

  the whole rank slum of cells

  collapses.

  I feel the steering wheel

  tug a little, testing.

  For as long as that takes

  the car is a sack of kittens

  weighed down by stones.

  The headlights chase a dark ripple

  across some birch trunks.

  I know it's there, water

  hurrying over the shadow of water.

  Another Beer

  The first one was for the clock

  and its one song

  which is the song's name.

  Then a beer for the scars in the table,

  all healed in the shape of initials.

  Then a beer for the thirst

  and its one song we keep forgetting.

  And a beer for the hands

  we are keeping to ourselves.

  The body's dogs, they lie

  by the ashtray and thump

  suddenly in their sleep.

  And a beer for our reticence,

  the true tongue, the one song,

  the fire made of air.

  Then a beer for the juke box.

  I wish it had the recording

  of a Marcel Marceau mime performance:

  28 minutes of silence,

  2 of applause.

  And a beer for the phone booth.

  In this confessional you can sit.

  You sing it your one song.

  And let's have a beer for whoever goes home

  and sprawls, like the remaining sock,

  in the drawer of his bed and repeats

  the funny joke and pulls it

  sh
ut and sleeps.

  And a beer for anyone

  who can't tell the difference between

  death and a good cry

  with its one song.

  None of us will rest enough.

  The last beer is always for the road.

  The road is what the car drinks

  traveling on its tongue of light

  all the way home.

  Night Driving

  You follow into their dark tips

  those two skewed tunnels of light.

  Ahead of you, they seem to meet.

  When you blink, it is the future.

  The Needle's Eye, the Lens

  Here comes the blind thread to sew it shut.

  An Egg in the Corner of One Eye

  I can only guess what it contains. I lean to the mirror like a teenager checking his complexion. Maybe it is sleep. Or a dream in which, like a bee or nursing mother or a radish, you eat to feed others. Or maybe it is a shard of light in the shape of an island from which dogs are leaping into the water, swimming toward a barking that only death can hear. On the eye's other shore life is upside-down. The dogs have swum for days to clamber up and, like an eye in its deathbed, shake out rays of light. Or maybe the light implodes. Or sinks into itself like a turned-off TV, the optic nerve subsiding like a snapped kitestring. I don't know. To open a tear is to kill whatever it was growing. I can't tell the difference between grief and joy. I tell myself that a tear is my death, leaking. In this way weeping resembles menstruation. The egg that will be fertilized never sees the light of day.