LITMIR.BIZ

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and it is His move.

      Robert Penn Warren

      The old buccaneers are leaving

      now. They have had

      their fill. A blue halo

      has circled the imitation

      gold, and the real, and they

      are bewildered. All

      is shimmering. The sea

      is shimmering like a marvelous belly

      viewed from the outside

      during a blizzard in the mountains.

      For each other

      they are shimmering.

      They do not know what splendor

      is balanced

      atop the foresail now, what

      it is that is moving, moving

      toward them, down.

      They rub their bodies.

      The skin is a fine lace

      of salt and disease,

      and something is moving

      just under the skin

      and they know

      that it is not blood.

Flight

       for K.

      Like a glum cricket

      the refrigerator is singing

      and just as I am convinced

      that it is the only noise

      in the building, a pot falls

      in 2B. The neighbors on

      both sides of me suddenly

      realize that they have not

      made love to their wives

      since 1947. The racket

      multiplies. The man downhall

      is teaching his dog to fly.

      The fish are disgusted

      and beat their heads blue

      against a cold aquarium. I too

      lose control and consider

      the dust huddled in the corner

      a threat to my endurance.

      Were you here, we would not

      tolerate mongrels in the air,

      nor the conspiracies of dust.

      We would drive all night,

      your head tilted on my shoulder.

      At dawn, I would nudge you

      with my anxious fingers and say,

      Already we are in Idaho.

Grace

      The one thing that sustained

      the faces on the four

      corners of the intersection

      did not unite them,

      did not invite others to join.

      Their inner eyes as the light

      changed did not change,

      but focused madly precise

      on the one thing until

      it scared them. Then

      they all went to the movies.

      I was just beginning

      to understand when one

      who represented the desperate

      shrunken state came toward

      me, bisecting the whole mass

      of concrete into triangles;

      and handed me a package.

      I carried it with me for

      the rest of my life, never

      opening it, telling no one.

The Last Days of April

      Through the ceiling comes

      the rain to cool my lover

      and me. The lime carpeting

      darkens, and when we cross

      to retrieve our glasses

      of gin from the mantle, our

      feet sink as into drifts

      of leaves. We have a deep

      thirst, for it is the end

      of April, and we know that

      a great heat is coming soon

      to deaden these passions.

Uncle

      Homer was a ventriloquist;

      so drunk, one day he projected his voice

      so far it just

      kept going and going (still is).

      Joe Ray insisted

      Homer was afraid of work, but he’s

      had 130 jobs or more

      just recently, he didn’t think in terms

      of careers.

      The family never

      cared for Homer

      even after

      he ginned himself into a wall

      and died balling

      with a deaf-mute in an empty Kansas City hall.

      Joe Ray insisted

      Homer would have made a fine dentist

      had he kept his mouth shut; that is,

      had he lived. Still is

      heard about the house

      jiggling glasses,

      his devoted astral voice coming back.

How the Friends Met

      So what do you do? What

      can you do? Leave the room

      altogether? Crazy.

      Your eyes are the wallpaper;

      makes it tough, doesn’t it?

      Peel them away. You call

      that pain? It’s not. It’s insane.

      You make it. Keep going.

      Confront a lightpole. Smoke

      a mythopoeic

      cigarette forever.

      Mark a spot with your

      mysterious shoe; scratch

      Hate in the sidewalk.

      A man will come along

      and there will be reason

      enough to knife him. Sure

      enough, there comes along

      a worse-than-Bogart….

      There you are, smoking

      the lightpole. The spot

      you marked appears between

      your eyes, and then becomes

      a sidewalk, and the man

      walks

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