Aimless Love Read Online Free PDF Page B

would be enough light
    to read a book or write a letter at midnight,
    and if you drank enough tequila
    you might see eight of them roving brightly above.
    But think of the two lovers on a beach,
    his arm around her bare shoulder,
    thrilled at how close they were feeling tonight
    while he gazed at one moon and she another.
No Things
    This love for everyday things,
    part natural from the wide eye of infancy,
    part a literary calculation,
    this attention to the morning flower
    and later to a fly strolling
    along the rim of a wineglass—
    are we just avoiding our one true destiny
    when we do that, averting our glance
    from Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?
    The leafless branches against the sky
    will not save anyone from the void ahead,
    nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.
    So why bother with the checkered lighthouse?
    Why waste time on the sparrow,
    or the wildflowers along the roadside
    when we all should be alone in our rooms
    throwing ourselves at the wall of life
    and the opposite wall of death,
    the door locked behind us
    as we hurl rocks at the question of meaning
    and the enigma of our origins?
    What good is the firefly,
    the droplet running along the green leaf,
    or even the bar of soap sliding around the bathtub
    when we are really meant to be
    banging away on the mystery
    as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?
    banging away on nothingness itself,
    some with their foreheads,
    others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.
The First Night
    The worst thing about death must be
the first night.
    —Jose Ramón Jiménez
    Before I opened you, Jiménez,
    it never occurred to me that day and night
    would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,
    but now you have me wondering
    if there will also be a sun and a moon
    and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set
    then repair, each soul alone,
    to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.
    Or will the first night be the only night,
    a long darkness for which we have no other name?
    How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,
    How impossible to write it down.
    This is where language will stop,
    the horse we have ridden all our lives
    rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.
    The word that was in the beginning
    and the word that was made flesh—
    those and all the other words will cease.
    Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,
    how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?
    But it is enough to frighten me
    into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,
    to sunlight bright on water
    or fragmented in a grove of trees,
    and to look more closely here at these small leaves,
    these sentinel thorns,
    whose employment it is to guard the rose.
January in Paris
    Poems are never completed—they are
only abandoned.
    —Paul Valéry
    That winter I had nothing to do
    but tend the kettle in my shuttered room
    on the top floor of a pensione near a cemetery,
    but I would sometimes descend the stairs,
    unlock my bicycle, and pedal along the cold city streets
    often turning from a wide boulevard
    down a narrow side street
    bearing the name of an obscure patriot.
    I followed a few private rules,
    never crossing a bridge without stopping
    mid-point to lean my bike on the railing
    and observe the flow of the river below
    as I tried to better understand the French.
    In my pale coat and my Basque cap
    I pedaled past the windows of a patisserie
    or sat up tall in the seat, arms folded,
    and clicked downhill filling my nose with winter air.
    I would see beggars and street cleaners
    in their bright uniforms, and sometimes
    I would see the poems of Valéry,
    the ones he never finished but abandoned,
    wandering the streets of the city half-clothed.
    Most of them needed only a final line
    or two, a little verbal flourish at the end,
    but whenever I approached,
    they would retreat from their ashcan fires
    into the shadows—thin specters of incompletion,
    forsaken for so many long decades
    how could they