Friend I had in college told
me he had seen as kid out the
window in backyard of an
apartment in upscale Phila-
delphia the elder Yeats walking
and wondered if perhaps he
was composing a poem or else
in some way significantly thinking.
So later he described it, then
living in a pleasant yellowish
house off Harvard Square,
having rooms there, where,
visiting I recall quick sight of
John Berryman who had been
his teacher and was just leaving
as I’d come in, on a landing of
the stairs I’d just come up, the
only time and place I ever did.
Can’t say much
Of age and such,
Just it’s fun to breathe
And take one’s ease
With a friend like you
Who keeps it true
To life and what
We came here for and got.
Beauty’s in eye of the proverbial beholder,
but when you’re older,
you get bolder.
Harvey says, “Hold still, bro, so I can get you,
let me look hard at you, stare at you, see what you
never thought I’d know how to.”
It all fits in his impeccable scheme
like dreams find room for one and all, it seems,
and “inside out” is what it always comes to mean.
Harvey knows—from the hair on your head
to the bottoms of your shoes, to what you do in bed—
even who you were talking to and what they said.
Happiness is its own reward,
not bought or sold,
not earned or even thought of.
Pleasure’s its echo,
sudden burst of sun,
the weather changing everything
when mind can’t follow
after all it was fact of,
what’s then left of feeling.
Your name Alice says that you are noble,
hold true— but wonder for me is all you are and do,
all of you