I was just forgetting the stroll grandpa took with Grieg,
then I forgot the blessings
bestowed on me by Jesus, and the amber light at dusk
that made me think the world was somewhere else aflame,
because right now someone’s roasting a pig on a spit,
and you can still hear its squeals in the shitpile
they call southern Ohio, where he was once mucking around,
happy as Stanley Plumly. You might not know
Stanley Plumly and you might not know Ronan O’Brien,
who plays the lyric suites as if he and Grieg had a score to settle
(each melody sparking his synapses with surgical precision),
and you might not know the caress of my former wife
when I was distressed, which took up a lot of clock time,
or how we’d visit soup kitchens and shelters
because we tried to think of ourselves as a good people,
and even though the stockbrokers of Brazil may think differently,
our lyric poets believe the body’s made for pleasure,
and though you might not know Whitman’s “Passage to India,”
or that all the riches of the east were meant for our pleasure,
just as the pig was meant for our pleasure,
and Cambodians and the Shiites, and all of god’s music,
and on the porn sites you’d think every young woman’s pussy
was designed for our pleasure: to hear them squeal
on a spit you’d think what songs we are, what instruments,
walking with our hands behind our backs as if they were tied,
strolling through Grieg’s meadow, talking
about claret, the kroner and the first trillium in the lea.