ANGELICA
Angelica stands by the sea
Anything I say is too loud for her mood
I will have to come back
a million years later
with the scalp of my old life
hanging from one hand
THE NEXT ONE
Things are better in Milan.
Things are a lot better in Milan.
My adventure has sweetened.
I met a girl and a poet.
One of them was dead
and one of them was alive.
The poet was from Peru
and the girl was a doctor.
She was taking antibiotics.
I will never forget her.
She took me into a dark church
consecrated to Mary.
Long live the horses and the candles.
The poet gave me back my spirit
which I had lost in prayer.
He was a great man out of the civil war.
He said his death was in my hands
because I was the next one
to explain the weakness of love.
The poet Cesar Vallejo
who lies at the foot of his forehead.
Be with me now great warrior
whose strength depends solely
on the favours of a woman.
A MARVELLOUS WOMAN
a marvellous night
a marvellous woman
they married in the winter
they parted in the spring
she threw her wedding ring
into the Lake of Decisions
she continued
he continued
they met again
in the south of France
she was living alone
but in great beauty
he appeared to her
as a toad
she chased him
out of the 18th century
he thinks of her all the time
but in the winter
he goes crazy
he walks up & down the room
singing Hank Williams
the police put tickets on his car
the snow removal people
cover it with snow
finally it is towed away
to a huge white field
of frozen dogs
THE EVENT
The event engrossed me.
A pigeon flew across the window.
The Chinese girl smiled.
I made my vows to her.
We would never fuck.
We would never speak.
We would never meet.
The unlimited grey afternoon
supported all its creatures evenly.
YOU HAVE NO FORM
You have no form, you move among, yet do
not move, the relics of exhausted thought
of which you are not made, but which give world to
you, who are of nothing made, nothing wrought.
There you long for one who is not me, O
queen of no subject, newer than the morning,
more antique than first seed dropped below
the wash where you are called and Adam born.
And here, not your essence, not your absence
weds the emptiness which is never me,
though these motions and these formless events
are preparation for humanity,
and I get up to love and eat and kill
not by my own, but by our married will.
THE DREAM
O I had such a wonderful dream, she said.
I dreamed you made love to me.
At last, he said to himself, the spirit
has taken up some of the heavy work.
I LIKE THE WAY YOU OPPOSED ME
I like the way you opposed me when you thought I had fallen into silence. You were so happy that I had nothing to teach you, and nobody spoke of my exploits. All this depended on a curious belief of yours that there was only one stage, and you had been waiting for my piece to end, feeling so ripe and swollen for the spot. And here I am again, with the news of another freedom, just when yours was selling well and the competition was under control. You might like to know what my wife said to me upstairs. She’s wearing her wine bikini, she’s rather attractive, you know, in spite of her shaved head which was the idea of your Central Committee. She said, Leonard, whenever you leave the room an orange bird comes to the window.
BESIDE MY SON
I lay beside my sleeping son.
He was not a child now.
A dream radiated from his lips.
He was unusually good company.
COMMENTARY – BESIDE MY SON
May you bless the union of your mother and father
May you discard easily the husks of my thought
May you stand on my dead body
SHE HAS GIVEN ME THE BULLET
Just after sunset
waves creeping up to our toes
my wife said: I have everything I want
I looked down at her hair
as she snuggled against my shoulder like a rifle-butt
Toward the horizon
mist fumed out of the water changing clearly
into the eternal shapes of comfort and ordeal
I will bring these down, I said to myself,
she has given me the bullet
COMMENTARY – SHE HAS GIVEN ME THE BULLET
There is the bullet but there is no death. There is the mist but there is no death. There is the embrace but there is no death. There is the sunset but there is no death. There is the rotting and the hatred and the ambition but there is no death. There is no death in this book and therefore it is a lie.
THE GOOD FIGHT
If only she’d call me Mister again
If only my genitals didn’t float
When I relaxed in the bath
And we both looked down and we both agreed
It’s stupid to be a man
Don’t tell my mother I’ve become
The appendix of a full-grown woman
I’m made of her I’m useless to her
I’m something gouged out with her beauty
I’m the shape of her perfume
I’m the chime of wire hangers
That she took her clothes down from
When I made her strong and angry
With the subtlest insults I could devise
And still she would not fall
And I knew for certain
She was the Magnum Opus of my middle age
THE DOVE
I saw the dove come down, the dove with the green twig, the childish dove out of the storm and flood. It came toward me in the style of the Holy Spirit descending. I had been sitting
