This
feeling from long ago came to me –
a feeling of old cars gone by
down streets on nights
long ago –
a boy’s love for all that.
Light.
Summer over everything.
The flat river there
below spreadout industries and pipes
dominating the banks,
the wasteland of the mouth unowned.
All the food offered up in cafeterias –
baked, stuffed pork chops
and veal parmigiana
and corn sticks
and fried okra
and
stuff like that
irresistible to a young child.
In a rooming house a man is confined
to a room
with all his passions.
Passions come.
The room of myself is lost in some
old rooming house.
He would cast glances at himself
always
while moving through the city –
in windows and cars and doors –
never enough time before the mirror –
never enough time to fall into things
carrying you away.
It was an affront to me that joy existed.
Simple joy, to me, was a terrible affront.
Oh love is in unknown places and times.
Love is to come –
as daylight and always is,
and the unknown wakening of children.
My dry hands, my dry hands
are my hands this spring.
Memorial Day
I can’t afford flowers for the
dead soldiers.
Oh men
lying in the ground.
oh how many men
lying in the ground
that I could love.
Summer is given to me once more.
Rain –
the street sizzling
like a wet black hamburger in the
night.
The Tree
I write letters to myself
and send them to his house
and then I steal them
and read them
beneath
his window.
He does little all day.
He sits and gazes
in his beauty and does a great thing –
he tears my heart in two.
Sometimes he leaves the house.
I don’t know where he goes.
I’ve never been able to follow him.
When he leaves the house I
watch
him
until he goes out of sight –
at least out of sight in my mind
before I spring to look for him –
and then –
which way to go?
Down which avenue has he disappeared?
Round which tree, beyond which house?
I begin to become a tree beside
your
window,
oh beautiful man.
Oh beauty,
come back to me!
It’s rare that beauty comes back to you
once it’s left you –
physical beauty, I mean.
Oh but it does.
My beauty is come back.
I stand beside my sister and my Mother,
and the bank and the church and
the sun
all fall next to one another
that afternoon.
Oh Father who art dead
oh Father whom I never knew
and who art therefore like God –
Happy Father’s Day –
Happy Father’s Day between the thighs
of every man I love.
Happy Father’s Day in the eyes
of boys –
grey, green laughing
in the playground of the sky –
Happy Father’s Day.
I love you.
There I could have been killed
by the silent river
in the silence of the afternoon.
The summer is like a long, slow
hurricane
blowing through two books –
Then and Now.
The sky looked like there were
whole seas suspended
in it.
The way I walk through town
and the way you do are different –
said the man to his reflection
in the bank window.
But the boy pondered his reflection
and wondered how they both walked
through town.
You know – if you don’t? –
how shyness is among boys?
How it can become everything to you?
The town is empty.
Entering it,
I am a child in the clutches
of my Mother one afternoon.
The days were so long you didn’t
know what to do.
You didn’t know what to do
with the broad daylight.
Summer was given to me.
[B]
