Love Poem
The rain whistled.A taxi brought me to your apartment building
And there I stood.
I had dreamed a dream
Of us in a bedroom.
The light shining upon us in white sheets.
You were singing me a song of your sailing days
People Of Watts
where we come from, sometimes, beautyfloats around us like clouds
the way leaves rustle in the breeze
and cornbread and barbecue swing out the backdoor
and tease all our senses as the sun goes down.
dreams and memories rest by fences
Texas accents rev up like our engines
customized sparkling powerful as the arms
that hold us tightly black n fragrant
The Color Green
Two floors up, at the corner of Hearst and Shattuck,he's clamped for good
in an iron lung. When it's time to eat
he nudges his head a sweaty mile
to the edge of the pillow. It takes a while.
His brilliant bloodshot light-blue eyes
steer me from cupboard to fridge:
he would like his chicken burrito
cut into bite-size pieces,
The Hampstead Heath Toad
It was one of thosebeautiful
English summer nights
when levitating
on the moonshine
of a moonlit world
was your entranced lucky
fate.
The lilac shimmer of silent
Talking To Grief
Ah, Grief, I should not treat youlike a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.
I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
The Key to the Kingdom
It's not exile, homes and families behindus, where we meet. It happens anywhere,
now: a stateless
state of no name, quietly seceding
from the crumbling empires round us,
without stamps or Eurovision entries.
No-one does it with a rough guide in a week.
You inhabit it
or nothing. Like this: in a pavement cafe
Work
Pushing off on her back outInto the fishpond's cold
Archaic glitter, my naked wife
Could not have guessed how
High she rode into the noon
Sky, a brightened polestar
Gliding out between nothing
And nothing, between a sun-
All All And All The Dry Worlds Lever
IAll all and all the dry worlds lever,
Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
All from the oil, the pound of lava.
City of spring, the governed flower,
Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
Towns around on a wheel of fire.
How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
In the Theatre
Sister saying—‘Soon you'll be back in the ward,'sister thinking—‘Only two more on the list,'
the patient saying—‘Thank you, I feel fine';
small voices, small lies, nothing untoward,
though, soon, he would blink again and again
because of the fingers of Lambert Rogers,
rash as a blind man's, inside his soft brain.
If items of horror can make a man laugh
then laugh at this: one hour later, the growth
Sweet Rain
Tasted, smelled, rising from hot asphalt, sweet rainin the street where a man works on his camper in the rain.
Like desire, felt less often now we are old, the joint pain
and fatigue competing with that other. Sweet rain
rising, lifting the dampened piano that hides its teeth
beneath a lid. Sweet rain, bird song, all the rain-wet
exigencies a house brings to bear. Valence, curtain,
While Writing
Someone inside says, "Get busy."But I've got appointments to keep,
I have an abstemious love of equations calculated quickly
While the tepid day melts into design.
And the high cheekbones of the beautiful life
Bear the loose look of a calendar by lamplight.
I search for patterns in everything.
I am tied in knots of comprehension.
Train To Derry
A crow beats on the updraft over a scragged hawthorn,rocked but plunging on. A stick of Paras, bristling with nerves,
coughs and boots forward along the sheugh.
Long after the soldiers have gone, the crows will settle home.
Since Newry, choppers have been battling back and forth
across the track. These trains are overheated, sweat
stings in my underslept eyes; I'd rather the crows' lift and pluck
than to be here, rocked to the quick, driving on Derry.
Democracy
Democracy will not comeToday, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.
I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.
The Alphabet
The letters of the Jews as strict as flamesOr little terrible flowers lean
Stubbornly upwards through the perfect ages,
Singing through solid stone the sacred names.
The letters of the Jews are black and clean
And lie in chain-line over Christian pages.
The chosen letters bristle like barbed wire
That hedge the flesh of man,
Twisting and tightening the book that warns.
These words, this burning bush, this flickering pyre
Question
Body my housemy horse my hound
what will I do
when you are fallen
Where will I sleep
How will I ride
What will I hunt
Where can I go
The Visitor
In Spanish he whispers there is no time left.It is the sound of scythes arcing in wheat,
the ache of some field song in Salvador.
The wind along the prison, cautious
as Francisco's hands on the inside, touching
the walls as he walks, it is his wife's breath
slipping into his cell each night while he
imagines his hand to be hers. It is a small country.
There is nothing one man will not do to another.
Welcome Home
Unaware of my crimethey stood me in the dock.
I was sentenced to life....
without her.
Strange trial.
No judge.
No jury.
Invention
Tonight the moon is a cracker,with a bite out of it
floating in the night,
and in a week or so
according to the calendar
it will probably look
like a silver football,
and nine, maybe ten days ago
Goodbye To Tolerance
Genial poets, pink-facedearnest wits—
you have given the world
some choice morsels,
gobbets of language presented
as one presents T-bone steak
and Cherries Jubilee.
Goodbye, goodbye,
I don’t care
if I never taste your fine food again,
Kids Who Die
This is for the kids who die,Black and white,
For kids will die certainly.
The old and rich will live on awhile,
As always,
Eating blood and gold,
Letting kids die.
Kids will die in the swamps of Mississippi
Organizing sharecroppers