English

[In Sardis] Her mind often here

Readily acknowledging your goddess-like beauty,
Most of all she rejoiced in your music.

Now, though, she stands out among the Lydian women
Just as at times as the sun
Sets the moon rises rosy-fingered

Outshining all the stars, the moonlight
Stretching out over the salt sea
As well as the full flowered fields

Dewdrops appear beautifully on
Blooming roses as well as delicate
Chervil and sweet, flowerful clover.

But she wanders about, dear

In the fog there goes a knock-kneed farmer
And his ox, slowly in the autumn fog
Which hides the poor and shameless villages.

And out there as he goes the farmer is singing
A song of love and infidelity
That speaks of a ring and a heart which someone is breaking

Oh! The autumn the autumn has been the death of summer
In the fog there go two gray sillouettes.

He fancies his chances are good with her,
unaware that in the years since the war

she has come to prefer women whose cunts
taste like mustard. To pin one" s hopes on

a bark-colored moth, its wings crinkled
like crepe paper, a moth affixed high

on the kitchen wall, frozen for days where
it will likely die in noble clinging mode

just under the cobwebby heating vent,
is to confirm your need for more friends

and a greater daily quota of sunlight.
To raise C." s hopes that T. can stop

In English
we place a noun
meaning fixed purpose
before our verbs
to create the future
tense.


Here, in the private life
my team invents,
I" m in a floodlit kitchen
like the set
of an old-time ad
for Tide

and I am chopping
something.



Isn"t this the past
perfect?
Should I feel nostalgic?

This corn is highly
leveraged

and I" m wearing
a pink slip.

The fields are infertile
as far as I can tell.
Their winter systems
sparkle like the diamonds
that pelt Neptune.

Limpid silvers
reflect in the dark
museums and theaters
back in town.

To them we run
to elevate our eyes
to a well-shaped ethics.
Colors are supplied
by our nervous minds.

ÔÇó

Towards a just
and invisible image
behind each substance
and its place in a sentence
you must have been walking.

Well-defended, best

The overweight, overnight parts
that came to me in a dream.

Their clothes no longer fit,
it was this that brought them
to me crying, their faces twitching.

That had to end. No, they said,
it didn"t. So I rolled over to ghosts
that couldn"t dent a pillow.

The clock shed. Night pulled its
burdens into harbor and I woke,
glad for the day, its telltale light,

its flying minute, that genie work,
and the everlasting perturbations
of my people, their glories,

their heavy last words,

The evidence was in and it went to the contrary.
The contrary wound around us rather like a river.
The river reacted, spider-like, tangling up its legs
with other wet parts we thought we knew,
such as creeks and fjords and deltas and such.

A beaver sits on the riverbank watching all of this unfold.
He doesn"t know what a fjord is, and he doesn"t care
for other waters, or even other beavers, or the merest
hint of other business, so he removes this evidence.

Then he builds a structure which for years he is rehabbing.

I moved my chair into sun
I sat in the sun
the way hunger is moved when called fasting.

Once, I
was seven Spanish bullocks in a high meadow,
sleepy and nameless.

As-ifness strange to myself, but complete.

Light on the neck-nape
of time
as two wings of one starling,

or lovers so happy
neither needs think of the other.

Re-reading him in Bouchon
past noon, it is mobbed midtown,
like an ant farm seen through painkillers.
God, what a bust it"s all been,
capitalism, communism, feminism,
this lust to liberate.
Che should have stayed in medicine.
The girls here admit they can"t wait
to marry and get to the alimony,
before they hit thirty. The men,
heads skinned like Lager inmates,
know only the revolutions
in diets and spinning classes.
Still, one table away,
these two, with gnarled empretzled hands,