We live for but never mention:
You are not free to acknowledge
These terms such is our agreement
Then we understand each other
You got it. Then slowly walk out
The room and out in the gathering
Street. The gold flood of the gut-
Ters sunlight and motor oil
Thinking that what our beauty
Finds in the street’s disorder
Can return in the quiet hotel
The conventional neon light making it Spain
Anything else we wd want to believe
Shoddy sense of improvement and
An immaculate joy. Standards
Concerning the function of beauty
And all the love-light shining
In the eyes of a deceased photo
The gone Election Day signs;
Simply to anticipate feelings you had
Already included in your sighs
She offers me the terrain
Of her heart in bondage
I enter and provide its wage
When I sat down at this table
A prophet and now to finish
This ravishing book and have it
Bound in expensive white paper
Filled with the conventional words
Bringing a little strain
Her breath and mine play tag
In lush, bitter arbors
Our wasted hammocks sag
Gladiolas filled with tears
Wrung from the scattered burden
Of trees burnished with rage, our rage
Autumn embroidery in a raw cage
Containing joy, leaking disdain
Holes full of sky in the trees
Her lover crosses his red knees.
Embarrassing. That’s right
She offers me you offer me a jeweled
Motorcade to trust my heart to
But I am not interested. The one
To whom this heart belongs is she
Who hears it singing everywhere
Conventional as honesty in love is.
Discarding daylight’s forgery of
Manners, midnights’s emerald stair
Then we understand each other
Except the Africa of her mouth
SONG
You asked me to sing
Then you seemed not
To hear; to have gone out
From the edge of my voice
And I was singing
There I was singing
In a heathen voice
You could not hear
Though you requested
The song—it was for them.
Although they refuse you
And the song I made for you
Tangled in their tongue
They wd mire themselves in the spring
Rains, as I sit here folding and
Unfolding my nose in your gardens
I wouldn’t mind it so bad
Each word is cheapened
In the air, sounding like
Language that riots and
Screams in the dark city
Thoughts they requested
Concepts that rule them
Since I can’t have you
I will steal what you have
Dracula
DRACULA
Crosses his blond eyes to think of you
Picks up his brown overnight bag and
Runs down the ash covered streets to the station
Scuffles with the ignorant ticket agent
Leaps on the bus as it belches forward
Passengers seeping into the dark
The city is obliged to be dark
And mysteriously desolate under
Ritualized demands of departure
The foolish moon of your care and
Coins filtering through his sheer pockets
A shroud with pockets cape
His personal state of permanent transit
Covered with decals where he ever mailed
His possessions This is serious business.
A brand new black greatcoat neatly folded
Over his naked arm the dance of human fluid
“Blood” in more polite times. The tattoo
Remarkable and genteel,
Pictures of mountains
And soft undistinguished
Rivers in his hand Across his dry palm
bus ticket dup-
lication designs
The awkward sneer impinging on his nez
This particular
Place
Dracula depicted in venetian half- light
dissolving boundaries of his presence:
Dracula your white faces
against the night
Hair falling back
over your faces
formula STORY
Personal history to that man was particular
Actual form and the descriptive logic of it
The word he thought it was
Was death, was the stiffened sense
O the garments only a sob story
That we could say here was a person
And the person a loss to himself
How strange how strange. The bed-
Room