FOUR SONNETS
I.
You men who take a woman’s measure
By girth of breast or tint of hair
Weigh but your own bland pleasure
Like judges of the county fair.
You are fools, never to note
The quick smiles my beloved flashes
Or the flicker of tendons on her throat
As she lifts her splendid head and splashes
A room with laughter, or a tear
Battened behind an eye’s defense
Too proud to show the secret fear;
How useless are those measurements
To miss a beauty plain and pure
That tangles more tightly than mere allure.
II.
How strange that back to back we stand,
You searching for love’s distant sail
And cloud-cleaving high embrace
From a self-possessing, steady man
While earthen suitors trip and fail
And smirk through courtship’s painted face.
And I, near enough to touch,
Crouch in self-denying bands
And dream your eyes and yet forbear
To sing the name I love so much
Or turn and slip my pinioned hands
Around your waist and rise through air.
You long for wild wings to fly
I break my feathers and deny, deny.
III.
Your lovely girlfriend, wise and amorous,
Fixed me in her casual stare
And asked me, wouldn’t you look glamorous
In silken gowns and flowing hair?
A surge of panic seized my brain:
What should I say, That I desired
You as a city street, summer-fired
Desires rain?
That the wicked laughing gleams
In your eyes, and your throat swan-white
Swam in my dreams again last night,
That your hair was the silk of my dreams?
I said nothing, and in my shame
She heard my heart that beat your name.
IV.
I will be all men to you -- no,
Not just King Arthur and Valentino
But the coarse-fingered boy who
Fumbled your first love, then flew,
And all who made you cynical and wise
To fickle men and their urgent lies,
To ego-pups who lick their pleasures first;
I hate them, too, but worse is knowing
How patiently for love you thirst,
While love my heart is overflowing.
Stone me, spill indecent spite
On my head for the many faults of man,
I'll patiently suffer, only come night
Let me be your one Tristan.
SCULPTOR
Douse my eyes but grant me sculptor’s dreams
and hands to write the music of your head
in marble grained with such tall dignity
as swells your profile, throat to crown
silhouette of a Sforza, a Medici, bred
in the prideful north: arrogance of Italy.
Yet turning your face full to me you seem
a child whose fingers touch her dress
as she watches the schoolyard scattering
and hesitates, for fear of shattering
at any touch but a blind belov’d’s caress.
VACATION
He took pleasure in his first job,
sweeping that beauty parlor floor. He stole
fallen crescents of hair,
forced them in the dark inside his pillow.
Now he was grown and snapping
quick pictures of the Navajo girl’s dance.
Image eats soul, he knew the tribe's belief,
and he didn't even care
that if he had asked in a steady voice
his fingers might have held for a time
the exquisite embroidered weight of hair
she had woven down her braided spine.
DREAMS
A passionate woman took all pleasure in me:
swam, arched and now dreams on my arm;
I watch her sleep smile and know
only you, only you, pale Atalanta,
how you outran the slow crave of arms,
and how you’d jab if I
held you, scorn attention, and I sigh
to change her pillow for your swift limbs.
ERRAND
She steps along the narrow
dune path. Her errand halts to
watch gulls ride the cliff wind
up and up, a game so joyous,
a play so unlike a gull’s daily bicker
that she touches her throat to laugh.
The wind flames her hair just then,
the gull-bearing wind makes a belly in
her white dress. Errand resumed, but
standing down the level shore,
mending stiff nets, dark-eyed
fisherman pauses now and follows
her shoulders with his own
brave, aching gaze.
NATURAL HISTORY
That lobsterman out of Block Island swears
at horseshoe crabs, worthless as pigeons in his pots,
throws them on their backs to dry on the streaming deck,
legs kneading the air. Not on my boat.
I pass them back with a small reverence,
earned, I think. I met them first in solid stone
when I trawled the quarry for smooth plates of Connecticut shale
instead of the sea for a living. There we hauled
the grandfathers of these
from rock two hundred million years deep.
And it made me think, we claw love and god but they know
the better trick: be ugly and inedible.
Amusing thought. But the simple things
have watched the whole parade
of dinosaurs, heard the last beast’s dumb cry,
seen stars burn out and die
from beaches that have turned to stone.
The FLEET
Athens gathering in splendor, might of a city
at last shorn of doubt and democracy, imperial burst:
hulls and spars, brine and oar-grease,
a matchless might. A loud shout after solemn prayers.
All anchors up, trireme surge, dolphin-sport, out
to the headlands, to the bright horizon,
to distant Sicily, death, smoke, splinter,
and none returned but with eyes that stink prison.
The rock slumbered in the tide,
not dreaming to rip anyone’s belly:
A black horse crossed its hot ridge
that night, wholly indifferent.
BERLIN WALL
Tart German had a soft pastry glaze there.
“ish” for Prussian “Ich,” and the suburbs
lisped: Zehlendorf, Steglitz, Spandau.
I met a woman on the train and we made love
in her brother’s flat
she had red hair
I dared not refuse and she had to show me
what to do.
Uneasy at first, working, coupling, waking
behind a concrete blaze that said “Never
Touch Me.” But in a week it seemed natural
to bicycle about, humming tunes and meet
the Cold War behind some trees,
where it zagged inconveniently down
alleys, through yards, tracing an old ward line.
This year in Berlin
the wall came down.
People took
sledgehammers, punched holes, then walked
over and over through the narrow air of it.
NEW VENUS
The delicate cover girl possesses
a careful consciousness of poise,
narrow shoulders, flaxen tresses,
belly flat as a hungry boy’s,
eyes -- not dull but hardly clever:
O my beloved, do you not see?
Ox-eyed Aphrodite never
could look thus or walk like she
or smile through such thin lips;
in the lustering eye that lights your face,
in voluptuous swimming of your hips,
in the dark jewel of your navel I trace
flesh the goddess of passion wore
to lure sea-heroes to a perilous shore.
BELLY DANCER
Curved country, lulled and ripe the harvest,
of a hill full of sunshine, a pale billow
played along the clean beach, rippling flags,
hemmed to the floor, veiled to the eyes,
and all her solid, supple belly bared.
Bare feet beat on stones, wrists
twine and bend, breasts breathe,
and at spiral's end her belly-eye:
delicate yawn in a shudder of flesh,
idol-jewel of temples ruled by Cybele
moving to murmured tides of melodies
thrumming deep in restless, open she.
CLOCK
When I was a boy the clock
by my bed lost its glass
face and spun naked brass-plate hands;
electric chatter
as I waited to sleep. The minute
hand stately striding lapped
the plump hour again and
again. He trotted, but she told
him "it's not a race" and friction
wore him down at every pass,
because there was more of her, you see;
and the second hand ran around and around
saying, "stop it, stop it," and they didn't
see him at all.
MID-LIFE ADVICE
She has the sharp that leaves when a man loses
hair, muscle. Fix your heart to her,
penny on a railroad track. remember this game. Stand back
and watch horror twitch at the edge
of her eye. With a small thump steel
proves its temper. Pry your mangled copper
from the rail -- look, the profile
of a president, dim and long, a shadow in the dirt at dusk.
SANCTUARY
We talk of loves gone in and out of fashion,
but I mute one name -- your friend's -- wary
you'd fear lest your words inspire hope,
and teach me some sly checkmate move
upon that woman. Yet lately you remind
me of that luckless passion;
I sidestep the blaze but find
you steer me to it: and my cement
to tomb away my wretched love
spalls at your words, and something slips
through your voice, folded in an envelope
scented with, almost, it seems to me, encouragement.
Then I learn how, banished from the lips,
heart claims my heedless ears for sanctuary.
BEECH
Lithe heart, timid toward dark
complexities, knot and root,
when the wind bows my gray
leaves to touch your neck, you flick
light heels and skit away,
and when I lay a slight flower
at your ear you lash back a kick.
Easy, simple lads tempt you,
the hunter boys in the free sun;
go, get your destiny in their dangerous glade,
but know my dreaming half-self blossomed
when you gave your amber ring:
the gouge of a hoof's blade
stamped in silver bark.
BLUES QUEEN
The rain yawns and a bad fan
chips Joplin’s headstone
for a tooth of marble.
Red milk crates squat in
parking slots, dam the grimy snow,
little kids give the finger and walk
Rotweilers. Little violations,
black tires on the prowl cars.
In the number streets I watch
what I see of you through windows
boarded plywood after I punched out
unbearable glass. You're only going
for milk, bread, but you are the lie
I can’t stop telling myself.