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Pacific Grove
In the meadows
sharks
in the wells
antelopes
in the sky
peelings
of wet oranges
and windows
the windows
blue winds
sharpen
eye lapsing
breath battling
in the hills
gone
Pinch-hitting
“Nothing you do
becomes you” —
but I with decades
of living it up
believe you that true
should always win
while I still being here-
and-there in the game
to go on tying the score
with short hits and runs
add sure — hoping
that’ll do in a pinch
To Infinite Eternity
I
Death is closer
to infinite eternity
than life is
and each life closer
to each least breath
than the blankness of
infinite eternity itself
II
To think blankness
rouses certain terror
and in the feeling
the sudden sense
of self responding
down to the smallest
unaided particle
of its existence
as answer to
the blankness of
sure nonexistence
III
Then infinite eternity
may be the opposite
of felt existence
durable as any
measurably
felt time
IV
I say hello
to myself
and to break
the terror
of nonexistence
I restore my self
to existence whatever
the consequence
Turning Eighty
It makes so little difference, at so much more
Than seventy, where one looks. One has been there before .
— Wallace Stevens
When he shrugged his body into hers,
a giant brain wave tickled him so
he had to pell-mell pullout
his essential self — only to be seized
by a spurt of whimpers that no one,
including his closest friends,
would ever guess his own.
How much longer could he stay put,
even if he’d use some tactic like
a headstand till the sky turned red,
making him lose contact with the one -
or-he -or-me -part of himself now
entering the ninth decade
of so large a piecemeal life?
Advocate of the hovering question,
how could he explain the cause
of whimpering beyond anything
but implying that since childhood
he’d let just half his body be
taken for his naked self?
Now still as then the question lies.
for Saul Bellow (from Edwin)
on his eightieth... plus
Up Sooner Than That
Will it always be longer
and later than once
it was neither — beyond
your breakfast toasting
every old new morning’s
clattering plates — hardly
risen out of a pile
of shattering nightmares
just to be jammed
into your get up and go
smack into the traum
of being oneself again ?
Elsewhere
Where are you going and when —
way around and coming out
who knows where?
Are you still turning
for going away
just not to be way out
and around here no more?
On Moving On
Take your time.
All will pass.
You’ll still be there
at home — alas !
Fountain
If we have
what they know
that we are
If they know
what we have
is all we are
We can give what
we are without
knowing we do
Give away all of it
give it all
over to them
And as we do
have it all back
again and again
...and again
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