1.
Hölderlin’s thing with swan-scene and autumn
behind was something beautiful, wasn’t it?
Manet’s bottles mirrored behind his bar-girl
are brighter than the stuff she used to serve—
the canvas should support the artist’s model.
Our children and theirs will have to pose for themselves;
we squeezed the juice, their job to eat the skin,
we put God on his knees, and now he’s praying.…
When I sit in my bath, I wonder why
I haven’t melted like a cube of sugar—
fiction should serve us with a slice of life;
but you and I actually lived what I have written,
the drunk-luck venture of our lives sufficed
to keep our profession solvent, was peanuts to live.
2.
“My cousin really learned to loathe babies,
she loved to lick the palate of her Peke,
as if her tongue were trying a liqueur—
what I say should go into your Notebook.…
I’d rather dose children on morphine than the churches.
When you are dying, and your faith is sick,
and you go on flapping in your sheets
like a cockroach fallen in a fishbowl;
you will look for the love you fumbled, and see
only religion caught naked in the searchlights—
Christians scream worse than atheists on the death-ward.
What is so infamous about it is
they shove your bed nearer the door to move the corpse;
you know damn well it isn’t for fresh air.”
3.
“If it were done, twere well it were done quickly—
to quote a bromide, your vacillation
is acne.” And we totter off the strewn stage,
knowing tomorrow’s migraine will remind us
how drink heightened the brutal flow of elocution.…
We follow our plot as timorously as actors,
unalterably divorced from choice by choice.
“If you woke and found an egg in your shoe,
would you feel you’d lost this argument?”
It’s over, my clothes fly into your borrowed suitcase,
the good day is gone, the broken champagne glass
crashes in the ashcan … private whims, and illusions,
too messy for our character to survive.
I come on walking off-stage backwards.
4.
Our dream has been more than life is solid—
I touch your house, the price of the furniture,
the two round marble tables big as millwheels
in your parlor unvulgarized by clutter-comforts.
But I can say more than this about you,
equal your big eyes to a silver teaspoon,
hindsight cannot romance their anger away—
bite of dog or dolphin, laughing and meant.
In my dream of misinterpretation,
your midnight taxi meets the midnight train—
one person removed, the household falls askew
from the children’s tea to toilet paper.
I read in the floorboards’ unintelligible worm-script
the blanks for all our birthdays … yours by summer.