I once went to bed with a nun

whose budding had barely begun.

She was tender and small;

I was thick, strong, and tall;

Yet her blossoms bloomed two for my one.

Can I employ my safely seated life to sled some scary slope, some soapy thigh? And the sway of uncut grass; can I make use of it? the hardened nipple, smoke slowly climbing up a light, the sky receding like an illustration in a physics book, Lou’s vaginal caress . . . all, one way or other, part of a universe expanding into emptiness. A part. I populate my brain each day with further figures, larger numbers, longer lists, yet the space between everything increases. Fifty into . . . One. One. Yes, One’s amusing, it’s so little and lonely above the bar: 1. Then I . . . how huge a word in that small English mark, the shape of a Grecian pillar. Even now I am the crowd, the hall, the lecture and the lecturer. I am his snotty hankie, dusty coat cloth, brittle bones and bony body. And I laugh. I shake.

. . . diese Tiefen, diese Wiesen

und diese Wasser waren in Gesicht.

Ah, Mad Meg shook, for Meg was mad. He shook until he died. He shook his length, entire; inside he shook; his veins whined like wires in a wind, and his bones scraped. Until he died. Wildly shaking, wildly singing. A fire out of fuel, flue, and fireplace. Till he died.

I followed his coffin to its grave.

Life in a schoolroom. Life in a chair. Endless journey. I’ve read many novels about tired clerks, their fingers erasing their eyes as they worked, perched on high stools, too, like stumped owls, elastic bloomering the sleeves of their shirts—-so have you—while banded to their foreheads like the frown from their squints, there were eyeshades to dampen the dry light a little. I’ve been the doctor in his buggy (they always showed snow in the old prints, runnered roads, cheerful death), and so I’ve known the company of scuffed black bags and shiny basins, gray worried faces, dark cold middles of the night. Cups of steaming tea follow both the baby and the amputation. I’ve been with the miner at the coal face, just as you have, dust gathering in every line of him till he’s gray as a rubbing. I’ve put on the pale face of the prisoner—easy, too—worn as his walls, always, isn’t he? his fingers running like water over the stones, searching for cracks, for something. He’s at once listless and frantic. So don’t talk to me of miners, Martha, sandhogs worming under rivers, of sewers or the shut-up prince, of occupations of special hazard and remuneration; don’t hand me sentimental upchuck of that kind, the sacrifice of doctors, the beatings pugilists receive, or the personal pounding politicians get; not when I’ve lived my life at a desk, here or there among nailed-down chairs; don’t piss along my leg or shit in my pants—that’s what such appeals are—for I have black lung, too, a bent nose, a tarnished reputation, an abandoned wife (that’s you, my dear); and have spent so much of my time in the study, settled as a lesson plan, level as this desktop, still as my mind was, quiet as the whisper of the clock, that I’ve passed whole days on my ass in the posture of the constipated or the guru; weeks, months, seasons, semesters, years, sluggish as a python; and consequently led—just like the books I’ve written, read, and taught—a small, square, solid, six-buck, clothbound, print and paler jacket life.