Aimless Love Read Online Free PDF

with joy
    and I rise like a feather in the wind.
    Poetry fills me with sorrow
    and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.
    But mostly poetry fills me
    with the urge to write poetry,
    to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
    to appear at the tip of my pencil.
    And along with that, the longing to steal,
    to break into the poems of others
    with a flashlight and a ski mask.
    And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
    cut-purses, common shoplifters,
    I thought to myself
    as a cold wave swirled around my feet
    and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
    which is an image I stole directly
    from Lawrence Ferlinghetti—
    to be perfectly honest for a moment—
    the bicycling poet of San Francisco
    whose little amusement park of a book
    I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
    up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

FROM
BALLISTICS

(2008)
Brightly Colored Boats Upturned on the Banks of the Charles
    What is there to say about them
    that has not been said in the title?
    I saw them near dawn from a glassy room
    on the other side of that river,
    which flowed from some hidden spring
    to the sea; but that is getting away from
    the brightly colored boats upturned
    on the banks of the Charles,
    the sleek racing sculls of a college crew team.
    They were beautiful in the clear early light—
    red, yellow, blue and green—
    is all I wanted to say about them,
    although for the rest of the day
    I pictured a lighter version of myself
    calling time through a little megaphone,
    first to the months of the year,
    then to the twelve apostles, all grimacing
    as they leaned and pulled on the long wooden oars.
Searching
    I recall someone once admitting
    that all he remembered of
Anna Karenina
    was something about a picnic basket,
    and now, after consuming a book
    devoted to the subject of Barcelona—
    its people, its history, its complex architecture—
    all I remember is the mention
    of an albino gorilla, the inhabitant of a park
    where the Citadel of the Bourbons once stood.
    The sheer paleness of her looms over
    all the notable names and dates
    as the evening strollers stop before her
    and point to show their children.
    These locals called her Snowflake,
    and here she has been mentioned again in print
    in the hope of keeping her pallid flame alive
    and helping her, despite her name, to endure
    in this poem where she has found another cage.
    Oh, Snowflake,
    I had no interest in the capital of Catalonia—
    its people, its history, its complex architecture—
    no, you were the reason
    I kept my light on late into the night
    turning all those pages, searching for you everywhere.
High
    On that clear October morning,
    I was only behind a double espresso
    and a single hit of anti-depressant,
    yet there, on the shore of the reservoir
    with its flipped-over row boats,
    I felt like I was walking with Jane Austen
    to borrow the jargon of the streets.
    Yes, I was wearing the crown,
    as the drug addicts like to say,
    knitting a bonnet for Charlie,
    entertaining the troops,
    sitting in the study with H.G. Wells—
    so many ways to express that mood
    of royal goodwill
    when the gift of sight is cause enough for jubilation.
    And later in the afternoon
    when I finally came down,
    a lexicon was waiting for me there, too.
    In my upholstered chair by a window
    with dusk pouring into the room,
    I appeared to be doing nothing,
    but inside I was busy riding the marble,
    as the lurkers like to put it—
    talking to Marco Polo,
    juggling turtles,
    going through the spin cycle,
    or—my favorite, if I had to have one—out of milk.
The Four-Moon Planet
    I have envied the four-moon planet.
    —The Notebooks of Robert Frost
    Maybe he was thinking of the song
    “What a Little Moonlight Can Do”
    and became curious about
    what a lot of moonlight might be capable of.
    But wouldn’t this be too much of a good thing?
    and what if you couldn’t tell them apart
    and they always rose together
    like pale quadruplets entering a living room.
    Yes, there