After Kees
These speculations sour in the sun.
I have no daughter.  I desire none.
                                   – Weldon Kees


But what if she survived
disease, cars, perverts,
and the more superficial neuroses
of her mother or me?  Since it’s always 
about me, I sit, late 
one night, on the eve
of her departure, listening, half-
listening, the way one does
where response
is futile, observing the furniture
of a kitchen and life.  There, as
here, it represents 
what may be my great theme: the relative impotence 
of love.  So she characterizes it; so, 
lucid at last and free 
from heart, she
accuses me, sick 
(if you wish) at heart and tonguetied.
When in the mind caresses end,
and thought becomes impossible to follow,
and mutilations heal, and time 
is spent, a door may open in the mind,
though nothing leaves or enters.





Inning


I step up to the plate.
I hate baseball.
It bores me to the point of screaming.
In childhood, the radio saying “High and outside … 
Strike two … ” punctuated by
the muddy white-noise of the crowd
was the very sound of boredom.

In gym class, five weeks left 
to serve in high school,
I knocked one out of the park.
In the showers, the pitcher said
“You’ve always been so inept –
what happened?”
And I: “You took a moment winding up
and I had time to realize
two things.  First, that I’m going to Yale,
you to Stanford,
the first baseman to Harvard, other people to Cal, junior college
or the Army.
The couples and cliques are breaking up;
there’s nothing to win or lose.
And at the same time I realized
I have powerful arms
and that all I had to do was keep my eye on the ball.”
He stared at me, uncomprehending.
With a special snarl
I said, “I don’t compete.”
I may have added, Artists don’t compete.

And that, I thought, was that.
Yet here I am at bat.
If I swing I will fail.
If I drop the bat and walk off,
it’s also failure.
If you have to make a gesture
it’s probably too late to do so
and the crowd glares down.
Here’s the pitch,
the worst possible moment
in which to affirm, or to learn, that life
is not a game or dream.





Ferne Geliebte
         for P.

Strange house:
on its upper story
two baths, four rooms off
a double hallway,
and at four AM
in extreme darkness 
all those walls and doors
create confusion.
Then the knowledge that,
however slowly,
I will find my bed and you
becomes knowledge, that 
minor confidence confidence.





Wanted


One who would repay
care, and,  
calling, amid jokes, 
reviews, unexpected
flights, reminiscences enough
to float a culture, dismissively, 
in passing, own 
a diagnosis
or cry with you at yours.

Afternoon light,
mica on jade
on low bustling waves massed 
by breeze as pure as 
lake, white drifting herd 
of sails, stained-glass effect in 
the summerhouse, all 
prohibitive,  
yours for the taking. 





Elegy in Soho


At least it isn’t the Eighties,
when dresses and flatware
outranked the paintings,
sublime and deskilled,
affirming (if testimony 
were needed) the credo brought 
down from the lawyerlofts: 
destruction is consumption.  Now,
again, the usual place
has been made in the dumpster
for art.

And the goddess who reigns
below Houston St. raises 
a fallen spaghetti-strap.  Women 
and men they would tolerate could
say of her, Giver
of sleep after overtime,
clement matcher of money 
to whim, harbor
from the contradictory winds
of feeling, pace-setter; her peace  
is our will.

She is deeply impartial.  But
this installation, this
techno-santería 
in a major gallery will attract 
neither corporate nor museum 
buyer; will resolve
into membra disjecta while
its tapes show
forever to darkness
the mice and pumpkins
of a gone afternoon.

Down the block, better: on
the walls of an outer
room, creditably
manic abstract impastos 
(the old timelessness); then
precise gay reflections, 
in putty, on gender; and,
nearest the office,
remote photorealist 
portraits and night-pieces.
Jersey nights.

Expressed, she emerges
into a flowing crowd and
our eyes meet. –
How lucky I am
to have my wife, my wife’s
arm to save me
from spring-rejoicing girls (their looks,
opinions and fashions
rudimentary versions 
of my leitmotif).  She 
(my wife) meanwhile

looks on without comparable
terror … it is the mirror,
not young cute guys,
that wounds women. 
I suspect she is pondering
our declining fortune 
and wondering
if we will ever shop again
for handwoven jackets,
Fifties tchotchkes,
or art.

But love,
good weather, a gaze
deliberately restricted 
to the nearer, shallow arc
of the slope cannot save me
from the goddess’s brazen
though unemphatic questions, or
from drinks
on her tab
in my mind
as I walk.

It isn’t about
desire with you (she 
says in a place 
of impossible
because ultimate trendiness
and amber light, where bare arms
gleam like artillery).  Not
since your own youth
sank too definitively 
for you to erect
a bridge to it.

Nor is it about
loss, since, 
riding harder
and hungrier toward
acknowledged oblivion     
than the coolest jockey 
of these streets, you positioned yourself
to speak (however wildly, 
unheeded or
correctly) beneath a self-
awarded wreath.

My only question is
what painting means
that you should waste
so much imaginary leisure
on it.  My 
divine involvement
is that of an auditor, but you act
as if ut pictura poesis still
applied: as if the image 
or words it ate
still inspired words ...

She ceases, then,
charmingly not staying. 
It isn’t her job description 
to stay – any more than 
those of the tourists,
herds of young
growing younger as they 
brush past 
a middle-aged couple, birds rising 
from Loisaida, 
Bowery, the meeting rivers

or merging deserts.  And ahead of us,
from another gallery,
workmen carry a crate – which,
as in time-lapse,
I see unpacked, removed, the work
hung.  Two
intelligent, gorgeous, secure,
humane etc. people 
touch 
each other, stare
as if they would never turn away.