There are two islands
at least, they do not exclude each other

On the first I am right,
the events run themselves through
almost without us,

we are open, we are closed,
we express joy, we proceed
as usual, we watch for
omens, we are sad

and so forth, it is over,
I am right, it starts again,
jerkier this time and faster,

I could say it without looking, the animals,
the blackened trees, the arrivals,

the bodies, words, it goes and goes,
I could recite it backwards.

The second I know nothing about
because it has never happened;

this land is not finished,
this body is not reversible.

We walk through a field, it is November,

the grass is yellow, tinged
with grey, the apples

are still on the trees,
they are orange, astonishing, we are standing

in a clump of weeds near the dead elms
our faces upturned, the wet flakes
falling onto our skin and melting

We lick the melted snow
from each other’s mouths,
we see birds, four of them, they are gone, and

a stream, not frozen yet, in the mud
beside it the track of a deer

Is/not

i

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise

sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cavities

you are not my doctor
you are not my cure,

nobody has that
power, you are merely a fellow/traveller.

Give up this medical concern,
buttoned, attentive,

permit yourself anger
and permit me mine

which needs neither
your approval nor your surprise

which does not need to be made legal
which is not against a disease

but against you,
which does not need to be understood

or washed or cauterized,
which needs instead

to be said and said.
Permit me the present tense.

ii

I am not a saint or a cripple,
I am not a wound; now I will see
whether I am a coward.

I dispose of my good manners,
you don’t have to kiss my wrists.

This is a journey, not a war,
there is no outcome,
1 renounce predictions

and aspirins, I resign the future
as I would resign an expired passport:
picture and signature are gone
along with holidays and safe returns.

We’re stuck here
on this side of the border
in this country of thumbed streets and stale buildings

where there is nothing spectacular
to see and the weather is ordinary

where love occurs in its pure form only
on the cheaper of the souvenirs

where we must walk slowly,
where we may not get anywhere

or anything, where we keep going,
fighting our ways, our way
not out but through.

Eating fire

i

Eating fire

is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll

To be lit up from within
vein by vein