Long may these days
stay drowsy
in their tempo,
sweet as they sing our way home.
AFTER HORACE (I, V)
I wonder what skinny, sweet-smelling boy
holds you, tangled
in the roses of your unreal garden.
Although you tie your blond hair
back with such lovely practiced grace,
he will grieve at your moods to come;
in stunned surprise he will stare
at the darkening waters that you trouble.
Because he thinks you are his alone,
for him you are the light;
to him you seem content,
the way you seem so real to the pitiless boys
always on the verge of you.
I wrote my prayer on the temple wall.
I hung my dripping clothes to dry
and bowed to the gods of the sea.
AFTER HORACE (II, V)
She is not strong enough yet
to carry the wife’s
double plow on her neck,
or to bear the force of the bull’s weight, pounding.
She thinks only of her ghostly fields
where she burns back the sun’s
sultry light
in the shallows
and runs through the marsh grass unfolding.
But don’t taste those unripe grapes
until they are dappled purple
by autumn,
until they are clustered in their true and dark light.
Wild in his work,
Mr. Time will give her
all of the days
that he will take from you,
but she will want even more
than the one whose white neck
shone like the moon on night sea,
more than the clever, fey visitor
whose hair and sweet boy’s face
baffled the girls around him
gathered to ask him his sex.
WHY PLATO LEFT FOR MEGARA
Imagine your old teacher
has died
in the gray broken
columns of pious script
as he calculated
the weight of his loss,
the unbribed jailer
only a shadow,
like the law
was only a shadow
that the teacher had exposed
to the nagging light
of being
someone. Imagine
that your name
is not uncommon
among Greeks,
so you must keep moving,
because he who knew all
has passed
into the never,
into the right understanding
of the soul’s revenge
on the body, into the justice.
ON THE EVENT OF MY UNTIMELY DEATH
Let the fires of sweet redemption
burn my tired body into ash,
and spread that ash
among the limestone boulders
old as God
in the cold waters of the Little J
below the spired Presbyterian church.
You may even want to wet a line there,
especially in late May
where I caught my first great
brown trout on a caddis
trailed lovely by its delicate emerger.
Thank God I let that fish go.
It swam upstream and away,
then turned into a spirit
that promised many fish to come.
Sunder my ashes there.
FINDING THEIR BODIES AT HOME
A solitary dove
came to rest in the dying willow
just as the dusk was rising,
a detail, which in itself
was meaningless
a second time
to the willow,
dying of omens,
and I thought I saw
dark shapes slide by
in the light between the branches.
I thought I saw the wings
of a dubious angel,
so I forever keep my guard,
and like you,
I waited for the dove to come back
as long as the light allowed,
and then I waited in the dark
so that my eyes took on
that different seeing,
until I felt the breath and songs
of things who come out in the dark,
their bodies drifting all around me.
BY THE SUBURBAN SWIMMING POOL
For one whole night and most of
all the next day,
the little dog was missing,
its people
worried about the lowering temperatures.
Two other dogs,
who I believe were
close friends of the missing,
clicked their nails
back and forth
across the tile floor in worry.
Posters were distributed
among the neighbors
and tacked to light poles
up and down the streets.
I had no rights in the matter.
I didn’t even know the little dog
or why he had run away,
but he must have had his reasons.
MEETING MR. DEATH
You could say I
kept my cool
when I met Mr. Death.
I even made him
laugh
by offering my
hand to shake
in the bullet-torn
morning hours,
and then I said,
Are you looking at me?
and he got the joke. Death
gets the joke
or else
our whole lives
are a lie and a waste.
He didn’t take my hand,
but he laughed at my jokes
and he made me feel
welcome inside the grace
he still wore,
shawl of the ghostly
angel he had been
but could not remember.
Mr. Death,
he was hanging around some
pals of mine, some
boys of the unspeakable
rapture of war. He
could have had me that morning
too, when I looked away
to the monsoon-heavy
river
where the bodies
had come to rest
in the last eddies,
but he changed his mind.
NOTES
Part One
“Immorality of Beauty” is for Nguyen Ba Chung (a thousand bows).
“Nixon” is in memory of President Richard Milhous Nixon.
Every spring in Hinckley, Ohio, people gather to wildly celebrate the annual return of the vultures.
Part Two
“Incident at Eagle’s Peak” is for Richard O.
Part Three
“Time After Time” was inspired by the lines “you may cradle my honey/whimper in your fresh bite,” from Camilla Rose, in a letter.
“That Towering Feeling” is for Toby.
“After Horace (I, V)” and “After Horace (II, V)” represent unforgivably liberal translations of two Horatian odes.
“By the Suburban Swimming Pool” is for Jack Myers.
“Meeting Mr. Death” is for Tim O’Brien.
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