I have seen enough dust & wind by now to know

I am a little breath that always goes the distance

Longing requires, & to know even this will fail.

The truth is, dear friends, we fall apart;

And for mysterious reasons, not entirely clear to us,

We choose to live alone. The truth is,

We do not choose, & do not fall apart. But are apart. She

Dresses in the dark of a New Year, &, if she had been born a Catholic,

She might cross herself. But she is not a Catholic.

To clothe the temple of the soul, & that music

When the last bell on the toe of the dancer stops,

She puts on a gray silk dress, a fur coat.

It is snowing in Iowa City.

In the Old World, there was always another season.

The unpicked fruit about to fall. Nursing,

The painful suckling of infants by new mothers,

And an unchecked laughter from the workingmen's bar

Among long closed streets of wharves & warehouses

With a quiet as old as habit, or the worn sky

Over all the sleeping Bibles. I suppose it was simply

Smug, & male.

*

I rise, & put on my precisely faded jeans, a black Hawaiian shirt

With ridiculous light yellow roses; & sharp-toed

Cowboy boots.

Style, after all, is a kind of humor,

Something truly beneath contempt,

Even here, on the Southern Plains, in Oklahoma City.

Though something, beneath the armor we put on,

Is always missing, the trouble with this wind

Is that it drives the land away: These raw cuts

In the red dirt of the roadside almost speak for themselves.

Are they painful? They look as if they once were.

Someday, see for yourself, & take care when you

Do so. Look closely, but take care.

And put your arms around each other's waists so you don't

Slip through to anything truer

Than you meant to be.

The earth, for example, has often been a lie,

And the wind its rumor.

Together once, they drove all

The better people away.

AFTER THE BLUE NOTE CLOSES

Tonight, holding a stranger in my arms—

Suddenly a downpour, a late

Summer storm. I thought of you, alone or

Not alone in that distant city,

And at that hour when the punk musicians' bars,

And the carpeted bars,

With their well-coiffed, careful clientele,

Are closing—

Those strangers pairing off at last & each desiring

What little mercy the other can

Afford. That

Wasted breath of neon light a frail

Tattoo or come-on in pools

Of rain. That street. That rain.

No. Our street. Our rain. Holding her, not you,

I watched it finally

Empty, watched until the streaked,

Reddening light of dawn came back & touched

The quiet brick of empty dance halls, touched,

Behind blackened tavern windows, a girl's cast off

Blouse; touched even the pocked faces of musicians on

The posters there: Gun Club; Millions

Of Dead Cops—almost as if dawn light could

Hold all things, each piece

Of shattered glass, as if to somehow bless them,