For MDM
If you find yourself burning only now for a clumsiness
you have always possessed, for the way your coat hangs
askew
on your shoulders, and the methodical, unthinking manner
in which you cross and uncross your legs in public,
then you will lie down in your bed at night
like a white and spotted thing lying down in the moonlight of an open field;
and if you desire something out of place to disappear
from your breakfast table,
and the polished spoons and buttons and clean saucers
to carry their secret lives no longer
into the proud metaphor at the center of your sorrow,
then you desire no more than the eucalyptus leaves
thrashing the air at the beginning of October;
and if you discover the words cacophony and colloquy and
calumny
recurring obsessively in the crossword puzzles,
and yourself expecting the windows of your neighbor’s
house
to stay lit much later than they do, and when they do
you worry, then you are beginning to understand and
forgive
the Hungarian woman next door
for burning leaves all day in a blowing drizzle;
and if you learn to stop hating the grocery clerk
for counting your change out loud,
for the tattooed name on his wrist and the ugly way
the bills fall apart in your hands,
then you will grow to love the company
of the blue and nameless flowers
that pepper the earth around the olive trees each Spring;
and if looking out your window you see the blue shirts
of the workmen moving up Highland Street to begin
their day,
and if you catch yourself falling as easily as they
into the smell of coffee and the empty dream of the
afternoon,
then you will stop turning to Browning and Chopin
to explain how you feel, and you will speak
in the anger and conspiracy of your own dark eyes;
and if walking downtown one blazing afternoon it
occurs to you
that people have always said too much, that you have
gone there
to hear their voices, and to watch your own image
floating
with theirs through department store windows, then you
are learning
the luxury of the warm earth floating beneath your feet,
and of the black waters at the mouth of the Corbuscu
River
voluptuously reclaiming their silted shores.
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