so private it can burn

hear it said aloud

and learn and learn

History is a needle

for putting men asleep

anointed with the poison

of all they want to keep

Now a name that saved you

has a foreign taste

claims a foreign body

froze in last year’s waste

And what is living lingers

while monuments are built

then yields its final whisper

to letters raised in gilt

But cries of stifled ripeness

whip me to my knees

I am with the falling snow

falling in the seas

I am with the hunters

hungry and shrewd

and I am with the hunted

quick and soft and nude

I am with the houses

that wash away in rain

and leave no teeth of pillars

to rake them up again

Let men numb names

scratch winds that blow

listen to the stories

but what you know you know

And knowing is enough

for mountains such as these

where nothing long remains

houses walls or trees

—from Flowers for Hitler, 1964

DEATH OF A LADY’S MAN

The man she wanted all her life

was hanging by a thread.

“I never even knew how much

I wanted you,” she said.

His muscles they were numbered

and his style was obsolete.

“O baby, I have come too late.”

She knelt beside his feet.

“I’ll never see a face like yours

in years of men to come,

I’ll never see such arms again

in wrestling or in love.”

And all his virtues burning

in the smoky holocaust,

she took unto herself

most everything her lover lost.

Now the master of this landscape

he was standing at the view

with a sparrow of St. Francis

that he was preaching to.

She beckoned to the sentry

of his high religious mood.

She said, “I’ll make a space between my legs,

I’ll teach you solitude.”

He offered her an orgy

in a many-mirrored room;

he promised her protection

for the issue of her womb.

She moved her body hard

against a sharpened metal spoon,

she stopped the bloody rituals

of passage to the moon.

She took his much-admired

oriental frame of mind,

and the heart-of-darkness alibi

his money hides behind.

She took his blonde madonna

and his monastery wine.

“This mental space is occupied

and everything is mine.”

He tried to make a final stand

beside the railway track.

She said, “The art of longing’s over

and it’s never coming back.”

She took his tavern parliament,

his cap, his cocky dance;

she mocked his female fashions

and his working-class moustache.

The last time that I saw him

he was trying hard to get

a woman’s education

but he’s not a woman yet.

And the last time that I saw her

she was living with a boy

who gives her soul an empty room

and gives her body joy.

So the great affair is over

but whoever would have guessed