And Luckier

The dead could
care less about you or me.
They do not populate our dreams
like we may think:
I am thinking of one episode
where my mother, a shade,
lays down on her side of the bed,
crying silently in her room,
with her flowered night shirt on.
while I a child, calls, "I love you"
to the darken face
that rises like she used to do.
With the same weight I remember.
Why would anyone do that?
My mother wouldn't.

And as some may watch,
the magnificent boob tube of oblivion
life becomes more and more
like afternoon T.V.
that one keeps on
in the background during lunch

Soon it becomes clear
And other ideas, far more greater than
we could think of down here on earth
help to turn the attention elsewhere.
Away from us.

I would not think about you or me if I was dead.

And while we are worried about oblivion
the frozen moment of lengthy eternity
they turn away smirking
at our utter simplicity

that we think of them as watching T.V.
in a pool hall, rowing a boat
or fishing by a beautiful stream.
Or that are standing behind us
in the same room
or hovering over us
giving us subtle hints as
to the way we should lead our lives
like a good loved one should.

My Quiet Witness

Sometimes I wonder whether
my eyes, watery, or my bad
knee ache is that
I kick out the crutches
or was a pretty good runner
who cheated.  The light keeps blinking
like cats in a drowning bag
after my father, driving away
from his wife, my mother, a lost
license, my brother, unable
to breathe just at the end.
The whole bathroom sinking.
Giving no other substitute.
A spyglass hoping to be evident.
A curl in the middle of a book
separating the epic tug
after digging through the music.
God, sometimes I wish I'd
be forgiven long enough
to sit down on the rock I've been stitching
and convey the worn reason
the remainder of the night
looks at us with a labyrinthine eye.
Or the real remembrance of things past
and not the inability to translate the title
beats down on our canvas hearts.
But that is enough
drumming for me tonight. 

Field of Snails

Wipe your feet before you enter the room
The cameraman will just be a moment
A cripple wriggles in from the window
And crawls into a maple jar
And I say we all are cripples in a maple jar
I say, take my sneakers to the power-lines
Clouds hang like the limbs of a wartime pilot
I say, I suppose this is dangerous
A sunken wrap across the people
Who look incredulously taken
A great hushed mistake
I say, behave my weeping
A dog bathed in peculiar alarm
Rises into one large nostril
And catastrophe stains the salted feet
Hundreds upon hundreds are quitting
But less and less.

On Translating a Poem Originally Written in English

Let me copy down another paragraph
of stones and a little of the the recalcitrant
hubbub I'm used to Yep! Waves look empty
as newsprint.  Girls open up like umbrellas,
and grieving passengers photograph pastures
of ocean birds, pick up a wiffle ball
and toss it like a remedy for relieving
a headache.  They puff their half-light tragedies
with a single dreamy puff.  Can I see
the missing ponytail? Sometimes I find
myself, the only one in the boat referring
to the sinking feeling one can have after
looking into an ethereal face.
But then a few, and then some, and then some more
come on-board with their life jackets on
bracing for a tidal command. I have a word for it. 

Pluto

I don't know what to call it anymore
or the unskillful  and uneasy pronunciation
of the word figment
As if that had a subject
The furniture is reflected in the window
and the window is a bad toy
for the unconscious.  Its transparent faces
broken stars and horrible collisions
with things that do not believe a solid
could be so clear.
I get that same feeling
when I look at you
but you were not suppose to be here
not now anyway.  I like it how
we now live. That this here is home.
That things bring us surprise
or anger or contemplation
I like it how you and I think
we think no matter how bad we feel
it is more or more or less
 like a distant rock of ice
whose name only recently has
been taken off the list of planets.

Anatomy of the Sea

I astonishingly order my
fries with gravy as I have done for
the last thousand low tides.  The diner
fills up like a fish tank.  A body
slips like a boat without a bottom.
Men deprived of long oceanic
awakenings try to put a spell
on the waitress with a biscuit.
Up pops a clear potential for a
reckoning but we make him walk home
before trouble starts slapping.  I wipe
the flotsam from my brow.  There would be
a hundred ways to set this moment
off in another direction
if only we had a finger-post.
Tonight, we will make love again on
the surface, and afterwards. I'll swim
you home.

Men Comment on Frizzled Time

The sun pours what is left of itself
Onto the grenadine faces of
Dancers.  And there is such a joyful
Flow over the singer's simplest
Words that nothing comes to mind. Not
The forgetting of a season nor
The drink stranding the moon into the sky/
"O filter me!" recite the brothers
Their patches of shade sweeten the dance floor
They dance.  They dance the dance
Where girls pick up hula-hoops and twirl
Themselves into a young translucence.
And yellow are their mythic dresses.
Yellow is the light now turning gold.