For G&J
High-beams stabbing the eyes of animals,
the ruts and spilling over shoulders,
upon which my right wheels occasionally
cry, I am driving this gravel road
toward you, for you, just driving
without controversy, without a worm
in my stomach, not a thought in my head,
when I pull up short in your driveway.
Just to say thanks, write, and stay well,
I arrive to launder the trees, upon which
the poet has shed his tears for years,
and to whitewash the lemon-like house.
It is the middle of the winter of the heart,
or it is summer—I am never quite sure.
Anyway, the furnace is practically floating
or the two people have turned it off
because it is only winter in the heart.
Not a thought in my head for winter!,
and here I am and it might as well be winter.
Or this is winter-in-summer, does it matter?
I remember, getting here, the air exceptional
because it was so clean, and that this purity
and contour and innocence, such as we have seen
in the animals and in the farmer when he farms,
never kept anyone in the Old Country.
I know well they left for shirts and ties
for their children, and dresses for the girls
who would marry them to a new language.
Friendship, which seems so unpromising now,
promised them an envelope of profit,
a Land at land’s edge, the word itself
extending to a testament of geography.
And now you want to separate for good,
and if I were better I would stop you,
wouldn’t I?, by singing to spite this hunger,
though you beat the bars of my harpish heart.
And can I propose the self’s satisfaction
if commanded to, and rise, thus, above you,
in alteration of the solitary soul
which poets worth salt take as their task?
I am afraid I have only the casual prophecy
and not the life of the word, that energy,
within me, though I have sworn to seek it.
Swear to me, that you leave to seek it too.
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