Example


One who paces enough,
and rigorously shuns
his view of the walls
of long-decayed firms,
gray vines and weeds
and broken streetlamp,
as well as the sounds
of sirens and voices
like sirens, will find his
cramped to-and-fro
become unimpeded,
his hobble a stride,
his rooms neither dank
with boxes and droppings
nor few, and the hallway
between them no longer
short, blind, and green
with mildew but wide,
itself a vast room
with sofas and sumptuous
carpets, which opens
on chandeliered rooms
in whose gilded doors
petitioners cluster,
kneel, and beg
him to forgive and
spare them, while over
their heads, from beyond
the great balconies, lawn
and mountains, light
will come and grow
and grow until
one must cover one’s eyes
and fall, uncertain
where he has fallen.




Cherry Blossoms


“Where *is everybody?”
– Enrico Fermi

In sleep they draw near, for sleep,
though life, is closest
to the spaces between the stars,
which are death, and to cross them
otherwise would be death.
*For some* – we, primitives,
would say; but for them,
any death is death.  In sleep they seek
the warm translucent wall
of others’ sleep; for life
is warmth, though it seem cold
to others.  And the vast
murmuring rhetoric that,
by merging differences,
allows sleep, allows them,
sightless in sleep, to see past
the horror they and we
would feel if we met; to find warmth
in different limbs and breath.
The advanced are never
turbulent crowds, and a crowd come
to visit would be and find
death.  They are *one and *one and *one –
contemplating forever
the moons and whatever
passes for a flower.





Hot


You needn’t say hello, feel
you should, be afraid –
or not afraid exactly, no,
only startled as you round
a sidewalk curve, bringing
your long bare legs, arms, navel,
mostly bare
breasts into shadow.
Sublimely blond, unaware
of the heat or its grateful
momentary drop.  But here,
briefly, an approaching mortal
takes up space.  You mustn’t be afraid;
it’s day;
the mansions of your class surround you –
not mansions exactly, though
they will seem so to the future.
And probably, beneath his keratoses,
he smiles.  As you pass
you speak to your cellphone – a new type,
inscrutable to the old;
always on, with someone always on the line.