Circles on the Water Read Online Free PDF Page A

babies and trees in parks
    where we would all blossom slowly and ripen to sound fruit.

Erasure
    Falling out of love
    is a rusty chain going quickly through a winch.
    It hurts more than you will remember.
    It costs a pint of blood turned grey
    and burning out a few high paths
    among the glittering synapses of the brain,
    a few stars fading out at once in the galaxy,
    a configuration gone
    imagination called a lion or a dragon or a sunburst
    that would photograph more like a blurry mouse.
    When falling out of love is correcting vision
    light grates on the eyes
    light files the optic nerve hot and raw.
    To find you have loved a coward and a fool
    is to give up the lion, the dragon, the sunburst
    and take away your hands covered with small festering bites
    and let the mouse go in a grey blur
    into the baseboard.

The cyclist
    Eleven-thirty and hot.
    Cotton air.
    Dry hands cupped.
    The shadow of an empty chandelier
    swings on a refrigerator door.
    In the street a voice is screaming.
    Your head scurries with ants.
    Anyone’s arms drip with your sweat,
    anyone’s pliant belly
    absorbs your gymnastic thrusts
    as your fury subsides into butter.
    You are always in combat with questionnaires.
    You are always boxing headless dolls
    of cherry pudding.
    You are the tedious marksman in a forest of thighs,
    you with tomcat’s shrapnel memory
    and irritable eyes.
    Tenderness is a mosquito on your arm.
    Your hands are calloused with careless touch.
    You believe in luck and a quick leap forward
    that does not move you.
    You rub your sore pride into moist bodies
    and pedal off, slightly displeased.

Juan’s twilight dance
    Nobody understood Juan.
    Slight, amiable, he did not stand upon ceremony
    but was unfailingly polite.
    Men liked him: he deferred with wry grace
    though his pride was sore and supple with constant use.
    He was fascinated by mirrors and women’s eyes.
    When he spoke of the past he was always alone
    half in shadow among shadowy forms.
    No one in his stories had names. No one had faces.
    He watched himself but did not listen to his voice.
    Words were water or weapons.
    He was always in love with the body that burned his eyes.
    His need shone in the dark and the light, always new.
    He could not bear suspense or indifference.
    He had to be closed into love on the instant
    while his need gleamed like a knife and the words spurted.
    He never understood what the women minded.
    He never could see how he cheated them
    with words, the mercury words no one could grasp
    as they gleamed and slipped and darted.
    In the woman’s eyes he saw himself.
    He was compiling a woman he would have to love.
    He was building a woman out of a hill of bodies.
    The sadness of his closets: hundreds of arms,
    thousands of hollow and deflated breasts,
    necks and thighs smooth as new cars,
    forests of hair waving and limp.
    Why do they mind? They do not learn.
    Time after time they grapple to win back from him
    what gleamed in his face before:
    the mask of desperate beautiful need
    which each woman claims.
    They chase each other through his hard flesh.
    The bed is his mirror.
    He spends into peace and indifference. He sleeps.
    He is unfailingly polite, even with Donna Elvira
    howling outside his door and breaking glass.
    They always lose.

Learning experience
    The boy sits in the classroom
    in Gary, in the United States, in NATO, in SEATO
    in the thing-gorged belly of the sociobeast
    in fluorescent light in slowly moving time
    in boredom thick and greasy as vegetable shortening.
    The classroom has green boards and ivory blinds,
    the desks are new and the teachers not so old.
    I have come out on the train from Chicago to talk
    about dangling participles. I am supposed
    to teach him to think a little on demand.
    The time of tomorrow’s draft exam is written on the board.
    The boy yawns and does not want to be in the classroom in Gary
    where the furnaces that consumed his father seethe rusty smoke
    and pour cascades of nerve-bright steel
    while the slag