("Right as rain you are...")

JULY 1983

a figure of fun, as someone outnumbered so often

is, and all because you bring me, and you're right,

my irresistable self, hand outstretched, in the mirror.

e

Four months of his life a man spends shaving,

a third of it asleep or pacing his room in want

of the civil wilderness of sleep, like a zoo lion

surveying the domain of its metabolism

and what slice of his life does he pass

mincing shallots, who loves cooking?

If time is money, it's inherited wealth,

a lagniappe, a relic worn smooth and then

worn to nothing by pilgrims' kisses,

and there's no right way to keep or spend it.

e

Too right, my son accuses me when I correct

his grammar, but then, like an anaconda

digesting a piglet and stunned by how much blood

he needs to get this one thing done, he pales,

and then he's gone, slipped totally inside

himself, someplace I can't get from here

or anywhere, and now I need to tease him out

from his torpid sulk, or to wait until he slithers

out on his own. Come to think of it, that's how

I got here, eager, willful, approximate.

°

On the way to the rink one fog- and sleep-thick

morning we got the word fuck spat at us,

WILLIAM MATTHEWS

my sister fluffed for figure skating and I in pads

for hockey. The slash of casual violence in it

befuddled me, and when I asked my parents

I got a long, strained lecture on married love.

Have I remembered this right? The past is lost

to memory. Under the Zamboni's slathering tongue

the ice is opaque and thick. Family life is easy.

You just push off into heartbreak and go on your nerve.

e

Poems from WRONG

There's some wrong that can't be salved,

something irreversible besides aging.

\

This salt, like a light in the wound it rankles . . .

It seems the wound might exist to uncover

the salt, the anger, the petulance we hoard

cell by cell, treasure the body can bury.

As J. Paul Getty knew, the meek will

inherit the earth, but not the mineral rights.

And what's our love for the future but greed,

who can't let go the unbearable past?

°

By itself wrong spreads nearly five pages

in the OED, and meant in its ancestral forms

curved, bent, the rib of a ship-neither

straight nor true but apt for its work.

The heart's full cargo is so immense it's not

hard to feel the weight of the word

shift, and we might as well admit it's easy