I Was Thinking Of You And Right Now
I’ll pick out a hike for us in case you feel up for it tomorrow, our one day off. The sun is out and I’m on the patio in my Merton sweater almost hot but liking it. I keep wondering what Tolstoy would say about America’s suburbs— more about vanity and ennui? Or would he get modest and strangely caught up in earth’s sorrowful music? But what am I saying? How could we be peasants, allergic as we are to anxiety and sweat? What else can we do? Write poems to some unseen god far off in the hills, or an angel whose peerless duality sways absolute through the outspreading arms of the Douglass that holds me near its heart here in the old part of town? This town: a highway cuts through, a paralyzed monkey aspiring for heaven. Yes, I’ll pick a hike, but not now. Now I want to do things, like find what it means not to resist fate. Can I look and not resist it? I must be the soft light on wet morning under this tree, praying for peace. Peace! We try in the ordinary to get a feel for it.
The Chamber
wherein we hide our savage hearts where fingers lick and averages collapse and parks procreate more parks washing themselves and all their garments during the night thus passing as museums where heads without necks and theaters with miraculous women and strong soup concocted in a nearby castle and many other secret things gather— the entrées of heaven gather, a pasta prepared by casting noodles down jungle slides by the crystal’s spume and the diamond’s smoke by all the empty boxes that gather to go away from us that gather all the emptiness like old women in their homes like a shimmering lagoon confined to a damn like a lamprey at a final exam for all the theatrical performances are real and we cling to our cuneiform salvation and convey our heads to the altars that stare us down with emerald fascinators and vouchsafe our lands with mystic telescopes and hand us jasmine perfume which we spray upon our collar bones as we talk to someone on the phone an old friend from far away
Crazy Bones Egg Smear
You said it was time to wake up and I could hardly believe you though every matter is believable when you think about it long enough. Frost knew this and turned the world inside out became a tree did not forget what he was and I’ve turned the fun things in life into work like how now reading your letters, Frank, is my solemn study. I hear the bathroom fan and it’s showering outside as it ought for in January it gushes theophanically forth plunging us into mesmerism and even the shrubs get little buds, perking up for life-giving water Otherwise what a dreary day to begin the term called spring in the dead of winter dreary with gray skies, with no cake or ice cream only eggs and the smears on the face from long nights of shopping hotels in Ravenna and Bologna for we are charitable and shall travel in the real spring Ah here comes rain again and I walk out in it