Or: you were in a conflagration

and lived.

Just living what you were feeling,

empty enough.

Let the fans of panic and longing whirr.

Do not desire me when I’m unable to burn.

/

The coffee all boiled out in the kitchen.

The birds dead at the bottoms of their cages.

When the spring slips the yoke of winter as if

out from under the sway of a particular monarch,

will we feel the second thought of a hovering,

that sensation of lushness, again?

/

I will lose sight of you. Still, in fluted, blued departure,

the cold spray of fear.

Feelings held together now by malicious ideas

and missing their true meanings.

/

Before he goes and she helps

herself with plans, prior to the seamed

self saying, let them, let them wreck in me—

They are so sorry for each other’s anger.

Nevertheless, they rummage inside

themselves for their tiny knives of feeling

/

and all they want now is relief,

not from feeling but from the anticipation

of an answer, for all the formal difference in between.

/

But feelings keep opening their myriad dark

flowers for you, their thousand petals of thought.

REMARKS ON MY SCULPTURE

In 1973, I found myself engaged in a sort of assemblage

of odd pieces of organic material, connected in a series.

I asked the questions, what is a subject?

What are the isolations around what something is?

The shapes and dimensions of my figures, its volumes

of air and light and dew, had a fraught and transient quality.

I used string and wire, the scent of snow and winter dawn,

fanaticism. I hated less than the wholeness of a situation.

Hunger is a conventional metaphor for desire, and here

I use it simply—it is just what the hand does, where the

eye leads. The absent senses of a word on a starless night,

implied and precluded, mediate the tone of a condition.

Not instances of a geometry or some other larger order;

more or less thinkable, it is paid for by existence.

AUBADE

From the last stars to sunrise the world is dark and enduring

and emptiness has its place.

Then, to wake each day to the world’s unwavering

limits, you have to think about passion differently, again.

Don’t we forgive everything of a lover

if we are the motive,

if love promises to take us to many places, to even larger themes?

Faithlessness is a heart glancing down

a plumed avenue

in which one is serenaded by myriad, scattering birds.

Thunder in the air begins opening appetites;

everyone is being true to themselves, they think—

And then it is having your right arm sheared off,

and the whole world gets to touch you, chime your losses.

I turn to my imagination, but its eyes are still

green, as if from

too much looking on at equatorial gardens.

Still, if I were you I would linger here,

deepen in the rottenness,

learn something about the world, about the desire for safety.