Death comes close and breathes a little over my lips and smiles at my terror,
No more the night has songs for the snow, has love for the whiteness,
But lets it go to the last hallucinations under the sun.
Grandfather, lift my soul when this boyhood is done,
And think of things to tell me when darkness grows too cold,
I will be in the corner of eternity, writing poems for no one.

The most beautiful poem is written on a shroud,
As if the stars closed their eyelids at seeing the gods die,
But still-gauzy foundlings like cities of dusted sunlight,
Bound so long between the pillars of Athens and Rome,
Disconsolate remnants in after-golds and winding sheets of stone.

The most beautiful poem speaks only to death,
So it may know something of our loss, our bereftness,
And like the turnkey of afternoon to evening
Under the warm-felt pressure of our reminiscing hands,
We too shall pass like long-limbed sunset along the barren grass,
Like so many solitary walks bundled up in Autumn mists,
And eyes filled with someone once there and absences to come.

We have made too much of love,
Something it will never be,
Without touch or place or rosary bead,
Beyond ourselves and the human race,
But no nearer to infinity,
Without cause or prompting by war or peace,
Simply quelled within its own embrace,
The wax seal on our lips for its unity and defeat.

Moon of Pythagorus, such proofless arithmetic derived,
No sigmoidal curves or cold calculus of the divine,
But pale barbarian, war-bringer of straight lines,
Your sea drifts commandeered like lit ash-spears in line,
Or the thrashing of wind-whipped rags of horses’ manes.
Moon of Pythagorus, the phantasms of your campfires
Of waiting armies flicker like fireflies along the stream.

Burn me, Moon, with your fire-tongued spears,
Your haunt of horses, unbridled and reared,
Burn an eye through my heart like the oculus of the Pantheon,
So I can see my pulse beat against the ash of naked footsteps
Of those who make false shrine to me.

Love, what have you become?
In broomsticks and cupboards and pantries,
On the dust-covered stairs,
In the breathless rush of faucet water,
On the crumpled lampshade at night,
Love is the summation of an individual’s life alone,
Somehow still expressed by two across the bridge of language failing.

My finest dusk was the watermelon kind,
When bats skitted in the shortcomings of light,
And on a picnic bench in the cool June of outside,
I felt the dogwoods and pines and other apple-greens
Fidget with insects in the newness of night,
I felt the only grace was
The watermelon kind, and though the world was newly
Dying in its freshness, the pulp squirmed
From my bloated, gleaming lips like
Blubber split from a whale’s side.

In the park, soft-study of sands and swings,
Where the birds while away the unabridged air
Like rains on green, copper roofs ~ their wings.
So I have touched my rainy fingers on the fountain’s surface,
And tum-tumed at the dumpy belly of a dog,
So I have felt the vendor’s balloons like cantaloupes for freshness,
So I have a pocket-change of smiles for all.
At the fountain’s edge,
Like green-molded quaystones feather-singed
By the touchstrokes of the arcing wings of the sea,
Or like a saucer of warm milk
For the alley-cats to drink the milkiness of sun
And then with their paws,
Plink at overturning the day into porcelain shadows.