Poems 1959-2009 Read Online Free PDF Page A

their cars from his royal rationing cards.
    The little boy went to see the king at one of the king’s coal yards.
    The two of them took a train trip to tour the dad’s wartime coal mine.
    It was fun. It was fine.
    The sweetness of the freshness of the breeze!
    The wind is wiggling the trees.
    The sky is black. The limousine trees deep green.
    The man mowing the enormous lawn before it rains makes goodness clean.
    It’s the smell of laundry on the line
    And the smell of the sea, brisk iodine.
    Nine hundred miles inland from the ocean, it’s that smell.
    It makes someone little who has a fever feel almost well.
    It’s exactly what a sick person needs to eat.
    Maybe it’s coming from Illinois in the heat.
    Watch out for the crows, though.
    With them around, caw, caw, it’s going to snow.
    I think I’m still asleep. I hope I said my prayers before I died.
    I hear the milkman setting the clinking bottles down outside.
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EVENING MAN
    The man in bed with me this morning is myself, is me,
    The sort of same-sex marriage New York State allows.
    Both men believe in infidelity.
    Both wish they could annul their marriage vows.
    This afternoon I will become the Evening Man,
    Who does the things most people only dream about.
    He swims around his women like a swan, and spreads his fan.
    You can’t drink that much port and not have gout.
    In point of fact, it is arthritis.
    His drinking elbow aches, and he admits to this.
    To be a candidate for higher office,
    You have to practice drastic openness.
    You have to practice looking like thin air
    When you become the way you do not want to be,
    An ancient head of ungrayed dark brown hair
    That looks like dyed fur on a wrinkled monkey.
    Of course, the real vacation we will take is where we’re always headed.
    Presidents have Air Force One to fly them there.
    I run for office just to get my dark brown hair beheaded.
    I wake up on a slab, beheaded, in a White House somewhere.
    Evening Man sits signing bills in the Oval Office headless—
    Every poem I write starts or ends like this.
    His hands have been chopped off. He signs bills with the mess.
    The country is in good hands. It ends like this.
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MY POETRY
    I sat in my usual place with my back to the corner, at the precious corner table,
    Where everyone wanted to sit, to see and be seen.
    Even the celebretariat were not automatically able
    To sit at that particular table, never mind how desperately keen.
    I sat in my solitude, a songbird that can’t be bought.
    Look at my solitude, white meat deep in thought.
    This was the look of fat dressed slenderly by Savile Row,
    My tailor in those days being Huntsman, in those days long ago.
    But can Mr. Rilke be alone if there are always servants in the castle? Not really. No.
    In a minute, I would be visited by the restaurant owner, the superb madman Elio,
    Who’d been a Marxist once: “Shit, at the five other front tables tonight sit
    A billion dollars! And then there’s you. I just noticed it.”
    I sit at my regular table in a restaurant I favor,
    Napkin tucked into my collar, eating dirt and a stone,
    Stooped over in a La Tache stupor. I know it’s disgusting but I savor
    My African-American antipode with her hand out outside the window, my clone,
    Begging just outside on the sidewalk. I’ll buy her and take her home. We’ll eat dirt.
    We’ll grovel in the grass and bat our eyes and flirt.
    Look at this poem, a set of dingy teeth hailing a cab.
    Look at this poem, kissing the hand of that woman’s brown frown.
    I’m always ready to use my mouth, though my teeth may be drab.
    Lord Above—starless sky above the high-rise—here I am, look down.
    But first open your eyes. The cruel overseer is brutally whipping a slave
    While the slave yawns over an after-dinner poire. Don’t behave. Be brave.
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POEM BY THE BRIDGE AT TEN-SHIN
    This jungle poem is going to be my last.
    This space walk is.
    Racing in a