Poetry

for Helen Corsa All that is lost is the body and the object of desire. Approaching composition, the laureate said and resaid his name like the clack of British Railways: Tennyson, Tennyson-Tennyson, murmuring of innumerable be‘s—mere being, humiliating history. Heinreich Schliemann, final hero of Troy, once saw as a child a tombstone: “Here Lies Heinreich…

(In memory of Victor Jara) No! white bird you’re no dove, no sign, you are an albino pigeon shitting on skyscrapers, citizens, monuments; you’ll never sing to me of lemonade & hard cider.* They broke both his hands bone after bone after bone that, swallows once, filttered over quick strings to start the children singing;…

Here there is violence: she waits on simple blue not innocent, not unaware, sprawled, random, nude. The ambiguities of her air all gathered in and pent emerge as rose and scarlet. Rage takes its attitude.

My daughter tells me her dream, where she saw The Times on the porch in the morning and knew from the page-sized black of the headlines—WAR— DECLARES WAR—that now it was over, and wept in her dream to think that she’d never have her years, friends, a marriage night, shifting the dreck of everyday life….

In the fierce peak of the day it’s quietly they wade With spread arms into the blue breakers rushing white And swim seemingly with no tension, the arms Curved, the head’s gestures circular and slow. They walk dripping back into the air Of nineteen-fifty-five smiling downward from the glare As if modestly, as they move…

Ten years older in an hour— I see your face smile, your mouth is stepped on without bruising. You are very frightened by the ward, your companions were chosen for age; you are the youngest and sham-flirt with the nurse— your chief thought is scheming the elaborate surprise of your escape. Being old in good…

I love sweets,—            heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose                  body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal;…

They are like two houses Waiting for the same couple. They return late one night, Exhausted and hungry, Only to find their key Fits neither door and yet unlocks The darkness between them. They have mastered the art Of carefully taking each other apart, Of leaving themselves nothing but together, Of fitting piece after piece…

(For Peter Taylor) Southcall— a couple in passage, two Tennessee cardinals in green December outside the window dart and tag and mate— young as they want to be. We’re not. Since my second fatherhood and stay in England, I am a generation older. We are dangerously happy— our book-bled faces streak like red birds, dart…