In less than a year you digested
a Puerto Rican baseball player,
certified horse inseminator,
disc  jockey, your sister’s
father-in-law,  a woman
named  Genevieve
                 and me.

Not much left after the pan
is boiled dry; memories,
residue and grit.

upon
every
ocean shore
i
draw the shape of
my heart
to
someone
i adore

when i last met her
her ******* were bursting with seeds
her thighs plump as stems of plantain
and when in the December sun
she dried her hair behind the acacia
i dreamed of lying with her on the grass
drunk in the moaning song from her navel
till the evening drove us cold and old
and darkness stole her flesh from my eyes
and it's almost December again
as she walks with my hands in her
along the field after crop
just tugging my hand once to stop
delicately drawing from her breast
an Agfa snap of two unreal people
in the most unlikely place
looking awestruck into the lens
passing into the evening light
before leaving me halfway
of her cottage and a home.

The love that rose on stronger wings,
  Unpalsied when he met with Death,
  Is comrade of the lesser faith
That sees the course of human things.

No doubt vast eddies in the flood
  Of onward time shall yet be made,
  And throned races may degrade;
Yet O ye mysteries of good,

Wild Hours that fly with Hope and Fear,
  If all your office had to do
  With old results that look like new;
If this were all your mission here,

To draw, to sheathe a useless sword,
  To fool the crowd with glorious lies,
  To cleave a creed in sects and cries,
To change the bearing of a word,

To shift an arbitrary power,
  To cramp the student at his desk,
  To make old bareness picturesque
And tuft with grass a feudal tower;

Why then my scorn might well descend
  On you and yours. I see in part
  That all, as in some piece of art,
Is toil cooperant to an end.