New XV and XVI

DEFINITIONS XV

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I could write a lament: if only I knew how things should be; is that what the fall means, making the rules up as you go, is that why luck is for beginners only?

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I used to write verses for the servants: would you like to know what happened, or is it enough to watch a sun set out of night and out of day?

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The coach stops: is it winter or Russian forgotten mother tongue of torches burning just beneath the water, no ice no bridges; did you already get in? Were you there already, mistaking your father for the sky?

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When you saw a man driving a bear: did you ask him for directions; did he smile at you with his perfect teeth?

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I can remember anything at all: all of it thinking in the back of the cab; a different person under each passing streetlamp.

DEFINITIONS XVI

(For Paula)

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I don’t endorse the tango: all the commotion of Cowell; but it’s the touch that mattered, smallest increment forgetting its way, forgetting to say anything but the beat.

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The sentence is a motion pushing back on that other one: each moment with no one to lead, just the sky staring back at you hard as it can.

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One drifts along with convenience he said, who was he: but it’s existence, existence alone can excuse out utterance of “Being;” my breaking this glass in your stupid house, my loving you anyway in this stupid place.

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The reality is what pushes back: piano for an altar sit down and I’ll tell you who you are, most uncertain term you paradise prayer into feel; remember when Jean–Baptiste Lully struck the conductor’s staff into his fatal foot? Does it take the weight of your whole life to cut through a tomato?

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The gleaming wet note simply there in its not so simple way, a woman standing on a lake: we never needed explanations, walk across and pick one up, a piece of water, a word she saved for you, it was so easy to do what you didn’t know; and when it left a wet mark on her dress, is that what they call remembering?