This apartment full of books could crack opento the thick jaws, the bulging eyesof monsters, easily:
Once open the books, you have to facethe underside of everything you’ve loved—the rack and pincers held in readiness, the gageven the best vo...
Can it be growing colder when I beginto touch myself again, adhesions pull away
When slowly the naked face turns from staring backwardand looks into the present,the eye of winter, city, anger, poverty, and deathand the lips part and say:
Every peak is a crater
This is the law of volcanoes,making them eternally and visibly female
No height without depth, without a burning core,though our straw soles shred on the hardened lava
I want to travel with you to every sacred...
II wake up in your bed
I know I have been dreaming
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,you’ve been at your desk for hours
I know what I dreamed:our friend the poet comes into my roomwhere I’ve been writing for days,draf...
(The Floating Poem,
Unnumbered)Whatever happens with us, your bodywill haunt mine—tender, delicateyour lovemaking, like the half-curled frondof the fiddlehead fern in forestsjust washed by sun
Your traveled, generous thighsbetween which ...
The dark lintels, the blue and foreign stonesof the great round rippled by stone implementsthe midsummer night light rising form beneaththe horizon—when I said “a cleft of light”I meant this
And this is not Stonehengesimply nor any place but ...
If I lay on that beach with youwhite, empty, pure green water warmed by the Gulf Streamand lying on that beach we could not staybecause the wind drove fine sand against usas if it were against usif we tried to withstand it and we failed—if we drov...
Your dog, tranquil and innocent, dozes throughour cries, our murmured dawn conspiraciesour telephone calls
She knows—what can she know
If in my human arrogance I claim to readher eyes,
I find there only my own animal thoughts:that c...
VI come home from you through the early light of springflashing off ordinary walls, the Pez Dorado,the Discount Wares, the shoe-store… I’m lugging my sackof groceries,
I dash for the elevatorwhere a man, taut, elderly, carefully composedlets ...
That conversation we were always on the edge of having,runs on in my head
At night the Hudson tremblesin New Jersey light
polluted water yet reflecting, even sometimes, the moonand I discern a woman I loved
Drowning in secrets,fear ...
Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—only the thumb is larger, longer—in these handsI could trust the world, or in many hands like these,handling power-tools or steering-wheelor touching a human face… Such hands could turnthe unborn child r...
Sleeping, turning in turn like planetsrotating in their midnight meadow:a touch is enough to let us knowwe’re not alone in the universe, even in sleep:the dream-ghosts of two worldswalking their ghost-towns, almost address each other
I’ve wak...