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I could hear her already:

“what? you mean he couldn’t tell

you what was wrong with your

leg?

what do you mean, he didn’t

know?

and what are those PILLS?

here, let me see those!”

as I drove along, I switched on the

radio in search of some soothing

music.

there wasn’t any.

the girl outside the supermarket

a very tall girl lifts her nose at me

outside a supermarket

as if I were a walking garbage

can; and I had no desire for her,

no more desire

than for a

phone pole.

what was her message?

that I would never see the top of her

pantyhose?

I am a man in his 50s

sex is no longer an aching mystery

to me, so I can’t understand

being snubbed by a

phone pole.

I’ll leave young girls to young

men.

it’s a lonely world

of frightened people,

just as it has always

been.

(uncollected)

it is not much

I suppose like others

I have come through fire and sword,

love gone wrong,

head-on crashes, drunk at sea,

and I have listened to the simple sound of water running

in tubs

and wished to drown

but simply couldn’t bear the others

carrying my body down three flights of stairs

to the round mouths of curious biddies;

the psyche has been burned

and left us senseless,

the world has been darker than lights out

in a closet full of hungry bats,

and the whiskey and wine entered our veins

when blood was too weak to carry on;

and it will happen to others,

and our few good times will be rare

because we have a critical sense

and are not easy to fool with laughter;

small gnats crawl our screen

but we see through

to a wasted landscape

and let them have their moment;

we only asked for leopards to guard

our thinning dreams.

I once lay in a

white hospital

for the dying and the dying

self, where some god pissed a rain of

reason to make things grow

only to die, where on my knees

I prayed for LIGHT,

I prayed for 1*i*g*h*t,

and praying

crawled like a blind slug into the

web

where threads of wind stuck against my mind

and I died of pity

for Man, for myself,

on a cross without nails,

watching in fear as

the pig belches in his sty, farts,

blinks and eats.

2 Outside, As Bones Break

in My Kitchen

they get up on their garage roof

both of them 80 or 90 years old

standing on the slant

she wanting to fall really

all the way

but hacking at the old roofing

with a hoe

and he

more coward

on his knees praying for more days

gluing chunks of tar

his ear listening

for more green rain

more green rain

and he says

mama be careful

and she says nothing

and hacks a hole

where a tulip

never grew.

The Japanese Wife

O lord, he said, Japanese women,

real women, they have not forgotten,

bowing and smiling

closing the wounds men have made;

but American women will kill you like they

tear a lampshade,

American women care less than a dime,

they’ve gotten derailed,

they’re too nervous to make good:

always scowling, belly-aching,

disillusioned, overwrought;

but oh lord, say, the Japanese women:

there was this one,

I came home and the door was locked

and when I broke in she broke out the bread knife

and chased me under the bed

and her sister came

and they kept me under that bed for two days,

and when I came out, at last,

she didn’t mention attorneys,

just said, you will never wrong me again,

and I didn’t; but she died on me,

and dying, said, you can wrong me now,

and I did,

but you know, I felt worse then

than when she was living;

there was no voice, no knife,

nothing but little Japanese prints on the wall,

all those tiny people sitting by red rivers

with flying green birds,

and I took them down and put them face down

in a drawer with my shirts,

and it was the first time I realized

that she was dead, even though I buried her;

and some day I’ll take them all out again,

all the tan-faced little people

sitting happily by their bridges and huts

and mountains—

but not right now,

not just yet.

the harder you try

the waste of words

continues with a stunning

persistence

as the waiter runs by