Some are nice, some aren't.
Some are deranged by the heat,
the ticking clock in the herbarium.
Some listen, some fasten.
Some fish, some dread. Against
the apartment door, some must prove flesh.
This includes our breath-drawn literature.
Some quail, some answer. Some plunge
into city troubles, erecting themselves
on the amusing soles of qualified others.
Some polish bone, some describe venison.
Some dance drunk in the female earth
chanting indigenous names, hunting the big glade,
surrounding darkness by bladed horizons:
subjects for a dream's humility. So, heaving the sea,
moon-driven at sundown, I stand ashamed.
A gigantic pawnshop cross, the blue vestige
of a conscientious joke. While some stagger, some sell
bottles, shells, chunks of cork, fish heads, floppy nets.
It doesn't change us or sleep's lazy hurdles.
Some gossip, some junk. Some are exquisite letters
in the enormous bulk of a room on supple sheets,
like the leg of a man who is in fact suffering death.
Some smoke, some cheat, some prepare summer
by the boiling stove, and for what? The cloud-flecked sky,
the hard toil of grace. In time, some see to it.
JUNE 2008