Elegy Owed Read Online Free PDF

thought the cloud a Lamborghini and got in.
    I thought the zoo deserved a hacksaw.
    I thought the tree had climbed the boy.
    I thought the grenade a potato and ate it.
    I thought Francis Bacon was painting my heart.
    I thought bears would stop us
    from killing the oceans.
    I thought pole dancing had made a comeback.
    I thought the Decency Party
    would offer a full slate of candidates.
    I thought the snow fort
    a metaphor for the womb
    of public housing.
    I thought Zen Buddhism
    would beat the New York football Giants.
    I thought San Francisco
    a roller coaster and screamed whee
    into the ear of noon.
    I thought you were alive
    when I packed an extra pair of socks.
    I thought you were alive
    when I realized “manumit” was two down
    on the plane.
    I thought you were alive
    when I asked a mutual bartender
    how you were.
    I thought you were alive
    even when I peed Sam Adams a first time
    after being told you were dead.
    But I thought the war had ended.
    I thought the half-moon was winking at me.
    I thought cabernet on the roof
    with two of your ex-wives a lovely funeral
    ten years too late with jumping
    at the end into the pool the only way
    to prove I’d paid attention
    to the jump shot with a second left
    you’d always tried to be.
    I thought a good, steady rain
    would bring us to our senses.
    But five thousand years
    into the flood, I just don’t know.

A poem that wanted to be a letter but didn’t know how
    Thank you Marianne Boruch

    When, with the cadaver’s skinned face
    beside its open skull,
    one of the other students
    held up a stray left hemisphere
    and spoke to this bit of brain
    as to a phone, “She’s not in
    right now, can I take a message,”
    I wanted there to be a story
    our incursion had to tell
    about the woman — that she “liked words — Aesop’s
    Fables, Housman. Frost by heart...
    Not Jane Austen, she lied” — or to take
    part of her home, nick spleen
    or knuckle, and last night

    reading your poem
    in the almost-dark, with three deaths
    on my mind, of who
    who cares, the only difference
    between my dead and yours
    is everything, I got to this
    and regretted I didn’t —

    â€œThat nothing on and on, huge
    and years, weighs
    about nothing like
    a whistle’s sweet because
    it’s distant” —

    and consider all the jars
    I wasted, holding then and still
    screws and jams
    and more thorough nothings,
    when of whomever she gray
    and gutted was, there could still
    be a smidge in the fridge, in my life, sick
    but so are language and memory, which never
    let the living let the dead die

Owe is to ode as whatever is to I don’t know

    I owe the crow, I know. Owe the watch,
    the wrist, the swatch, the fist,
    the sock, the crow, I know. Without clouds
    I’d stand alone, without house
    and switch and bomb and lock
    and pick, there’d be no boom, no breaking in
    to song for the crow, I know.
    Owe every needle said no
    to my arm, every leaf said yes
    to the wind in my ear, owe wind
    again, wind again
    in this poem for the crow, I know.
    When I’m dead, I want my head
    to be an ashtray
    in a bus station, tagged
    at will by slugs and mugs
    bound for Poughkeepsie and Kankakee,
    my hips plunked into your garden
    in lieu of my lips, after my kiss
    is flown away by the hunger
    of the crow, go crow. Owe maggots
    for flies, flies for buzz, buzz
    for saw, saw for seen, scene for action,
    action for cut, cut for cure, cure
    for sure, sure for shore, shore
    for more, more for moon, moon
    for flashlighting the night,
    which falls softly
    as the word softly
    falls, and is wall-to-wall
    crow, you know.

Ode to ongoing

    People are having babies. Hoisting their children
    to tree limbs on their backs and tying their shoes.
    Telling them what the numerator is and why not
    to eat one’s boogers or not publicly
    pee if at all possible to pee in private.
    People are mixing their genes after wine
    in romantic alleys and London