Alas, how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,
And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

Alas, how hardly things go right!
'Tis hard to watch in a summer night,
For the sigh will come, and the kiss will stay;
And the summer night is a wintry day.

And yet how easily things go right,
If the sigh and a kiss of a summer's night
Come deep from the soul in the stronger ray
That is born in the light of the winter's day.

And things can never go badly wrong

Adored, invalid autumn, you will
die when the hurricane
blows in the rose
parks, when the snow will have come
among orchards

Poor autumn,
die in the whiteness and richness of ripe
fruit and snow
At the top of the sky hawks
glide and hover
over silly young nymphs
with short green hair
who have never loved

On the far edges of wood the stags
have belled And oh season, season, I
love your dins
Fruits falling unpicked, the wind
and the woods that weep all of their
tears in the fall, leaf by leaf
The leaves

The definition of love in many languages
Quaintly establishes
Identities of episodes
And makes the parallel
Of myth colloquial.

But, untranslatable,
Love remains
A future in brains.
Speech invents memory
Where there has been
Neither oblivion nor history.
And we remembering forget,
Mistake the future for the past,
Worrying fast
Back to a long ago
Not yet to-morrow.

A, a, a, a,
Yet I love wherso I go.

In all this warld nis a merier life
Than is a yong man withouten a wife,
For he may liven withouten strife
In every place wherso he go.

In every place he is loved over all
Among maidens gret and small,
In daunsing, in pipinge, and renning at the ball,
In every place wherso he go.

They lat light be husbondmen
Whan they at the ball rene;
They cast hir love to yong men
In every place wherso they go.

Than sey maides, " Farwell, Jacke,
Thy love is pressed all in thy pake;

My mother is scared of the world.
She left my father after forty years.
She was like, Happy anniversary, goodbye;

I respect that.
The moon tonight is dazzling, is full
of itself but not quite full.

A man should not love the moon, said Milosz.
Not exactly. He translated himself
into saying it. A man should not love translation;

there"s so much I can"t know. An hour ago,
marking time with someone I would like to like,
we passed some trees and there were crickets

(crickets!) chirping right off Divisadero.

A fine house!
Sparrows love the millet
"round back.

Weigh odds. Pray. Pay bills.
Tell truth. Love well. Serve real gods.
Meanwhile, daffodils.

*

Gainesville, Florida

An empire of moss,
dead yellow, and carapace:
that was the season
of gnats, amyl nitrate, and goddamn
rain; of the gator in the fake lake rolling

his silverish eyes;
of vice; of Erotica,
give it up and let
me have my way. And the gin-soaked dread
that an acronym was festering inside.

Love was a doorknob
statement, a breakneck goodbye —
and the walk of shame
without shame, the hair disheveled, curl

In a lightning bolt
of memory,
I see our statue of Buddha
(a wedding gift from Uncle Gene
which always sat
on top of the speaker cabinet.
When a visitor asked,
"So, does Buddha like jazz?"
you said, "I hope so.
He's been getting it up the ass
for a long time."

It was your idea
to park and watch the elephants
swaying among the trees
like royalty
at that make-believe safari
near Laguna.
I didn"t know anything that big
could be so quiet.

And once, you stopped
on a dark desert road
to show me the stars
climbing over each other
riotously
like insects
like an orchestra
thrashing its way
through time itself
I never saw light that way
again.