Poetry

for Laura Jensen The boats are rented, complete with open sail, as if there were a map, somewhere to go, somewhere besides the cold and nautical Charles, one river wide, up and down, and slow. Even the moon right now, in love, in cloud, is piecemeal, something of a city ghost— something about the sun…

House, house, go away, you’re looking prettier all the time and look me I’m a rag, a brush, a mop, a hammer. I’m your lowly employee not what I intended— I wanted shelter, a self-propelled houseboat. Housepainting for a fortnight now, I have no idea how long I’ve been stroking white up down back forth…

As time and time when I am broken I think of you, when young, there fills the unintelligible ocean with flood tide and a thousand sails. The shore of trouble is then hidden, the wrack of each sorrow and each reef, and round my feet there is the silken rubbing of an unbroken grief. Why…

Your absent name at rollcall was more present than you ever were, forever on parole in the back of the class. The first morning you were gone, we practiced penmanship to keep our minds off you. My fist uncoiled chains of connecting circles, oscilloscopic hills; my carved-up desk, rippled as a washboard. A train cut…

     You and you my masters Though you have told me exactly what to do Are now no longer wanted, I cannot bother To imitate your actions nor your heroes —John Cornford At least we were all well read Those books on barricades tear gas the wars civil Or world won in the name of any…

Did you see the modest girl who was ravished by young Neil on a sunny day on top of a hill: and no one at all near at hand but a young child who could not walk. Pity O King I wasn’t his, I wouldn’t have uttered a cry or shout though he would have…

I wish I could walk deep into a field of spiked wheat reaching my waist and not ask that question, where the sun laces my chest with its indifferent heat, and the sky seems only a backdrop for sharp birds that tuck their wings and glide, where each step pops crickets into quick arcs like…

There is no Simple circumstance, As when a boy hiding In a closet Beside a manikin swoons In the mist of A grandmother’s sachet. The crooked White sticks of the legs And arms bent around Him, as he imagines He is older, Standing in a wooded field, The beads of lavender Rolling In the yellow…

Sometimes I see the schoolmaster on the boat that is shiny with brine and comes from Asia. He is the Ancient Mariner and his finger jabs at a pamphlet soaked with salt, the words running away from back to front, the albatross outstretched, its eyes glazing. The rickshaws arrive at the wedding, with the dead…