To A and B, My Friends Who Are Not in Books
Another summer: bookcase-building time.
I've made the yellow sawdust rise all day,
Six days it's filled the air and slowed the light
Lapping the coteries of other years.
I've paid a week for space to shelve a year
Of new acquaintances, volumes of friends.
My friends outside this room are like this room's
Forests of books I fell and range to hand:
Here's James, in whom I find unfolded A;
B is a simple soul, I learn from Proust.
Thinking my leisure here would help me learn
More than your winter nights of talk in bars,
Gestures among the leaves on autumn walks,
My friends, I've tried to make you characters
Flat as the leaves of books, like leaves between
© The stiff, preserving pages of my books.
I'd rather check my heart to learn the time
Than read my passions' passing from the clock.
It seems that all this dust has closed my eyes.
My friends, I'm taking off the day to clean.
3:00
This night growing up
was born an old man.
It grows austere: the gaudy
stuff of desire is left behind,
a peacock adolescence passed.
The muscles of remorse begin
to atrophy as the moon relaxes down.
On the wall the Turner is dead
as a cat's closed eye. The sheets
have lost their fishy glimmer;
they negate our wrapped bodies.
Only the maniac workshop of the clock
still counts.
No world calls beyond the window
in summer voice of car horns
challenging. The grass is black.
Wind whistles in the air conditioner.
Memory, murdered, comes back to haunt.
The pillow is like a ballistics box.
The air too seems to trace and claim
attempts of light, till only the clock's
green, stiff fingers irradiate the night,
working toward three-owe-one.
Structure
44 lines · 9 stanzas