("Doing anything and everything...")

TWO POEMS

I

Doing anything and everything is a drug

My pen is a bitter root of oblivion, my thoughts

Force day to cover with pictures the abyss of waiting.

Then the meals interrupt and Iask For what,

For what am I waiting?

Is it for my loneliness to spring

An ascetic shoot of new power?

Or is it for her to come into the room

In her red dress and kiss my eyes to bliss

Murmuring "I love you as you love"?

For a year now I have breathed-in lies

Imagining my life was half one life, reciprocated

In another's living need.

But now that half is fallen away and I stand with my body

Split by lightning

How is it possible to believe that what divides

Me, does not deprive her too?

That somewhere she is not sweetly sorrowfully waiting

On a similar desolate shore

Feeling the same loss as I do

And knowing the same cure?

Oh, but there are posts, there are trains!

So these iron days prove

How long I have been wrong, it seems,

And how I still only swallow the truth

-That I have lost for ever her I love-

For a shrieking instant, then turn back again

To a drug of bitter days and dreams.

Il

As I sit staring out of my window

Wasting time which the traffic does not waste,

Nor any of the passers by in the street

Who keep time with time as they go

Measuring the seconds with their feet,

In their minds riding the crested tide

On white horses of pursuant days

I think of you, James, at another window

With your stubby hands relaxed and your blue gaze

Invaded by a sense of emptiness,

Startled as if a gust of air,

Had blown through the interstices

Of your mind and hair,

Ruffling your forehead with a puzzled despair.

But I have learned lately that the spaces

And the timeless loneliness

Of the unfruitful waste places,

The desert, the untidy room, and the hour

Between waking and sleep,

Are windows opened onto power