IN WHICH A TOTAL ECLIPSE OF THE MOON IS
ECLIPSED BY CLOUDS AND A WHITE-TAILED
DEER BOUNDS OFF INTO THE WOODS
 

Friend, I give you this consolation:
our losses die with us.
                               It was
only last week or last year
you had imagined a clear deep pool
where jewel-like fishes sat
in perfect understanding. Only the rain
disturbed their clarity, but when you returned to the spot
it was not the same: it was yourself
in whom that rich and tragic place
called up the need to back away and stare
on emptiness, dusky, elusive,
and somehow hostile to the whole you sought,
a whole which continued to vanish
as you crept up lasso in hand. Trepidatious.
 
     Frankly, the night is much too shifty for us,
but if there is an answer
perhaps the children have seen it glancingly from their windows
during a moment's silence in their secret play
as a cloud flits across the copper moon
and the white tail of a deer
flashes beyond the summer-house and disappears into the woods.
 
 
                                    
 

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE
 

   The museum is a woman.
Invisible organisms of dust
    crawl with their ancient perfumes
deep
        into the cracks of the bones
     of my face. And again
in loneliest corners of the basement
  the arcane organs of my life
breathe the deadening air.
 
Her odor attacks my nerve
   reaching down the spine
to the bottom of my will.
       More than animal,
I harden with love
  for the bowels of the woman
        I inhabit. The walls
   grow hot with habit, or
is it my eyes that glow? What
  happens now
                 shatters the shells of turtles,
opens the jaws of rabbits,
    makes man known.
 
The museum would take my secrets,
     yielding only her body, the past,
      while
growing ecstatic in her arms
                         I will see
     my life reduced to incense.
Nothing else can touch me.
         My stones have dissolved,
                                 my seas are ash.
That was my earth.
Now I am perfect in silence.
 
 
                                    
 
 
MY PHOTO ENDOSCOPY
Note: One feature of getting older is that you learn about medical procedures you had no concept of before. An endoscopy explores the intestinal tract, starting at the throat and ending with the colon. One approach makes use of a tiny camera inside a capsule that you swallow.
                                                            
The camera inside
its capsule flashes
once a second taking down
            the pink interior, looking
            for a drool of blood,
            a polyp, some white
slash of scar, anything
off, disjointed, freaky--
then why is it so
            beautiful in there,
            the supple texture of
            bubble gum chewed,
and why don’t I feel
exposed as I walk
through my day lit up
            inside and intimately
            traced—it’s ok,
            it’s ok with me,
as that benign bullet
tumbles through--
something new about
            growing old, I’m consoled
            to be a star in my own
            picture show, where
the slow implacable 
burn of digestion goes
on without thought,
            that process we live by
            but know so little about,
            like Muybridge’s eye,
stilling odd moments
in a world of motion,
it freezes the stomach,
            the small intestine,
            blinking on and off,
            and at last the colon 
like a dreamscape in sci-fi,
the future repurposed
by intelligent worms,
            philosophers of the inner
            biome, spelling out
            the necessary questions
through their wise dialectic
and I wonder How long
is the gut? a couple
            of feet? but no, it takes
            a half dozen meters
            for the small intestines
alone, wound and folded
and full of action
as millions of villi
            break down and absorb,
            and where now the capsule
            like a deep-sea probe
passing through
peers into those cave-like
regions of self, taking
            snapshots of that
            inner squid and
            reaching toward
dark knowledge of where
we come from, where
we’re going, all that
            we’d love to know
            about that many legged
            creature called the soul. ​