Three Poems

“If you don’t express yourself you walk after you’re dead. The great thing is to go empty to the grave.” — W. B. Yeats

Standard Time

I left the country for the country.

Nothing like it to confuse
your sense of incongruity. Suddenly
disentangling is next to impossible.
Would you rather be the trellis or the vine?

I prefer to be difficult.

I am the frame of the barn
hailing former triumphs
like wings in epoxy,

the cracked egg
in the swallow’s nest
mouthing imprecations.

After 1:59 the clock struck one,
and we were introduced to feelings
we had met before.

Desperate Remedy

The plucked piece limns a moment of death,
expecting the process to end responsibly

	so a thoughtfully raisined present
	may live on

a hymn to a fragment, prised
for its intelligence

				  or else decried as unyielding

The way back is thick with wind,
more force in it now, perhaps,
and not all road. You can tell
by the color—blue, ecru, meandering
violet (blue by other means).
Beware of hangers-on,
queasy transplants clutching the gunwale,
and the absence of tension
that consists in absence.
(You may excuse yourself
to get some of it back.)

We say “products”
of the imagination,
and products tend to end
as their opposites.
Potpourri never dies.
To conserve enigmatism
is to live with loss.
You’re in charge, tell them
not to stare here
and not to expect thanks.
You will find if you stand back
that the work is done.

Bethlehem

Circling Bethlehem,
birth- and resting place of H.D.,
recalling the rasp of Penn Station
in deathbed detail,
the agony of progress, we hoped
amid flickering squibs
for an image to appear
in light.

Some thing she said
That would be something,
not to fall in love
but to arrive there.
She dipped into my drink
to preserve contiguity.
I told her they tried that once
in France. The ad copy
was interesting work
never to be continued.

Lord make me anything but a man.
What do you mean by that?
Nothing, I forgot I was talking.
A man walked across
the page with a bouquet
and a grocery bag. Something
faintly pathetic about a man
holding flowers. That’s sweet
she said, a bouquet on her face.

To assimilate the bizarre,
the man emerged in flowers
with an offering of bread and milk
and clutching a husband.

These things have a habit
of arranging themselves
like September twisting
into blood bow ties
or the chalky motifs
that fall into a theory
On Love.
(Beware the nonlapsarian kind:
a skip along a cliff face.)