Her expectant cordiality locked her away from you.
Where she looked
finches blossomed from the aisles.

His cigarette **** errantry froze him before you.
Where he looked
children dispersed like smoke.

Her gloved discernment hid her suppleness
like a moon in passing,
she had only to reveal a wrist.

His improvisation boredom fended off the breeze.
Where he looked
there were no women left on earth.

*

And on all these passersby,
as when one holds steady the barrel of a gun,
I have steadied my gaze.
And it is for you to know that weight.

A man follows after his daughter with a video recorder. There is a shadow
lengthening from where she walks. He does the speaking for both of them
while she grows higher and higher in response. She used to stay behind him--

afraid of doors and strangers. Now she walks ahead. And he is delighted.
This name he has kept for an undisclosed star has gone beyond his
grasp, calling for re-naming. He does not understand. Though he has given up
all his old photo albums to purchase this image of her, it will be years

before she will turn from her hunger to inquire about the man. She cannot stop
running. For every picture he gives to her, she will race ahead a hundred feet.

You have worn your skin
and never asked where it would end.

In rooms made larger by the Old Masters,
your spine also has learned to bend.

The stalk resides inside of you, the joist
fanning through you with the suppleness
of a willow bough.

Don't you know?
The last ink of the day is written with a green pen.

It's all we can do but rent a room.
Old, with a view to the Bay

Ocean turns shore stone into something
finer than air.

It's time that's needed. We want what flees
and forget ourselves. How much the bone

has stretched to shake with laughter. Gone
and come back

crease over crease
marrow combed, tenderly.

Think how relief washed over her when he deplaned,
returned to the coolness of their susceptible world.

Or the sorrow that was deposited like salt in him
when he looked back and she had disappeared.

In these ways we try to recall the unrecorded performances.
Where an emotion held the room in a trance

with the certainty of moonlight through glass.
We do not know where the applause goes.

Hands that work, released,
flutter up like wooden birds to rise, a throng of geese.

The face is a palimpsest. It is not of Greece
or of the Far East.

Its origin is candled by a city
just visible through the window of a rented room.

To the wind
you were the same at both ends.

There is no core.
Encumbered in a dream, you sleep in tissue:

this thin, skirted apparatus
palming the rucksack of the mind.

When silent is is smooth and oblong;
it must survive winter, the pelting snows.

Speak and the barrel fills
bubbling, fermented.

It is yourself you are drinking.
You have all the names.