1. I sometimes get the sense about poetry That as with ping pong I should work on Getting the ball over the net without Complication until like the reedy quiet men At Matty Eckler Community Centre I can go for hours never needing To kneel to look under the table to pick it up What kind of idiot stands empty-handed What kind of idiot crawls on all fours And finds what they are looking for In the dust under the radiator
2. I wonder, as I fold my laundry, Would I like to live with a quiet woman? Would I like to live with a ghost In the corner by the piano and Pale green house spiders? Not the right questions, because Each of us already does. But What none of us has And rarely knows to want Is a golden tadpole Beating its small unrelenting tail Against the membrane of its egg Until it splits and falls from The leaf of our mother’s pothos Onto our laps, alive among socks Soon followed by the Entire contents of the pond: Meltwater, black silt, screaming ducks Ripples casting wide Collapsing echos of the sun — In a word, You
3. When you look at the Earth from the surface of the Sun the first thing you notice is that night never comes. Time is marked by the trickling passage of oceans and mountains. They pass always in the same way, filling the same volume of light, drawing the same shape. When you look at the Earth from the surface of a calendar you will notice quickly that there is only one Friday, to which we return again and again. Promise me that, this Friday, you will not pretend any difference. Hold fast with me there, hidden from the notice of the Sun in the shadows we've drawn from each other's lungs.
4.
We're on a bus to the church of
my great and great great grandfathers
I sit facing funny little Louis
In a red leather seat
The houses we pass are so cute,
delicate, controlled
I want to show them my terrible twos
I want to stomp them back into sand
What we make should be worse than this
So that we make no mistake
That it is worse than the earth
The blackberry bramble
and the thick unnameable tree
I get vertigo seeing myself
In a long neat row of flowers
I am a baroque theoretical windmill,
a whirligig on the lawn
a thought deferring to a thought
What I make of myself
Should be worse than this
So that I make no mistake
That it is worse than nakedness
Belly hair, thorns pricking thighs
Suckling a desire without history
Tongue sharpened on the question
What's the only thing
that runs thicker than blood?
Unable to speak the answer5. A Particular Kind Of Woman As you may have guessed, this is a poem About a particular kind of woman Where, as you listen, you begin to suspect That you know or expect to know the kind Even though the whole conceit is that She baffles knowledge and expectation You’re jealous That I’ve written a poem about her That I’ve touched her cheek Or that I’ve not touched your cheek With a soft knuckle Just as you would celebrate Her plum-soft cheeks You would celebrate them pared away So quickly the hatred of desire Sours into hatred of what is desired You would hate her voice As you hate dew on glass And cool plum wine In the dusk of a dog day As you hate the savage aimless grace Of ten thousand starlings As you hate that she Would never say anything She did not believe Would bring her heart nearer to yours You will accuse me of reducing Some poor human being To an object of wish-fulfillment To the pornography of fruit and wild birds But last night I bumped into her on the street And she told me she missed you and Asked me to ask you some questions Do you remember what she said to you That night when you first met? Do you remember what you promised her? Did you ever make that full accounting of Every hidden hated passage of your heart Leaving there, in each, a candle For the one who follows after? Don’t worry I told her you broke your promise You’ll never have to think of her again
6. The Flyswatter Question The sky is half a robin's egg The moon used to be a robin's egg Until it cracked in half The red maple used to be red Until she was a skeleton The flesh at the tips of her fingers The only part of her still remembering That she is not asleep Dad visited Great Aunt Sue in the home And upon his arrival all the greats were Planted in a circle facing each other Batting around a balloon with flyswatters Dad said, "I'm not kidding, take me into the Woods in winter and leave me to freeze Before leaving me to the flyswatters." He wants anything but slowly forgetting That he is not asleep But in defense of the flyswatting greats And the greatest Great Aunt Sue Though only by the tips of her fingers Does she still remember That she is not asleep Her eyes are uncracked robin's eggs Still considering the possibility That there is something yet to be born