fast and invisible as the wicked fingers.

These sea-seams, these black-bodied cloaks of guts,

are just as dazed as the thoughts of the fisherman.

For every thought, a new fish soars

right under the anchored boat—

a lullaby to quiet another lullaby.

Part 3

3

Poem About My Wife Being Perfect and Me Being Afraid

POEM ABOUT MY WIFE BEING PERFECT AND ME BEING AFRAID

You chase my face with your face

by making my faces:

Your lips, right after mine, form a crescent

and wax and wane with all the moons

of my mouth.

You catch up and have my thoughts.

Your brain binds around mine, a gold gauze.

You have my thoughts faster than I can.

The mouth made from our lips

pours chilly water

out the pipe.

We go faster than I imagined

my mind built time or built itself.

I see behind the documents:

the gauze swelling with gold

blood into a halo.

Thou art me before I am myself.

When I Criticize You, I’m Just Trying to Criticize the Universe

WHEN I CRITICIZE YOU, I’M JUST TRYING TO CRITICIZE THE UNIVERSE

Why do you shit so much—is it cancer or anxiety?

I go to the bathroom to visit my ex-girlfriends.

They’re two lily pads, fire-white—one in the bath,

the other in the toilet—and they call me Kermit,

and beg Kermit to swim.

My body’s voices, normally so quarrelsome,

grow warm and weepy, and start

to sing together “Take Me to the Water.”

I thought I might sleep in the bathroom tonight.

Please don’t be mad, wife.

I’m not mad at you,

I’m mad at the universe unfolding in your body.

Can’t you think of me as a person?

Me seeing the universe in your body

is what makes you such a people person.

*

I went to the bathroom to sleep.

I dreamt two dreams—one inside the other—

The outer dream, a shell,

the deeper dream, a yolk.

In the yolk dream I was a horse—the dream broke,

I awoke, and I saw you driving the dream,

charioteer of my sleep.

Then the shell dream broke and I woke again,

my back stippled with tile, a scar of soap in my ear.

*

Beyond the door, in the realest bed,

I find you sleeping.

Your breast

is like the delicious voice

in the telephone.

Your bones when I bite too deep

are the phone’s wires,

full of voice, blue marrow.

Poem in Which My Shrink Is a Little Boy

POEM IN WHICH MY SHRINK IS A LITTLE BOY

Pick which is yours, I say.

Wordlessly, you take the legal pad, his old legal pad,

from a glass table between us.

My excitement mounting,

I plunk down a block

of toffee, a box of Tic Tacs,

and a husk of Listerine PocketPak Breath Strips.

You reach for the Breath Strips, his Breath Strips.

Welcome back, Doc! What a strapping young lad