Beef

I’m fairly certain this is beef I’m eating.

I’m not positive, though.

On the contrary, it might be some

Other type of meat lurking under the gravy.

No, it’s beef!

Maybe they just arrange for it to taste like beef, whereas it’s really

An impoverished variety that loves to pawn itself off as beef.

O beef, I treated you shabbily!

On what grounds are you beef, anyway?

When I come to think of it, as seen against the background of everyday life,

You’re probably not beef at all.

Ah, I must be mistaken – it’s beef all right;

Right here, this piece I’m chewing has (what can only be called) a distinctly beefy taste.

Stripped of larger considerations, this is beyond a doubt beef I’m eating.

Isolated from the general unhappiness – it’s beef!

O, beyond the relatively harmless sphere of beef lie issues that eat us!

The idea of beef existing as such is a myth.

And I’m riding the Gravy Train.

And I’m eating my heart out.

                         

                              -- published in New American Review, January 1968

"Should I find it impossible..."

Should I find it impossible to love one who is ashamed,

Living in privacy, one who offers to acquire my love for what I have done,

Entirely herself, one who depends on the piling snow to combine,

Or the rain to break apart; I forgive her January, weeping in public,

Her body’s right to impulse, to retreat,

Knowing the loneliness of what I care about.

I myself, thinking of uselessness, happiness, spend a month

Betraying my friends with lies, distance.

It is easier to spend the last dignity at once, in my mind, by shining,

A slug, a pit, a moth, by shining in mistakes,

In this lonely month.

What is it like to anticipate change,

To turn the disparate, the hated

Aside, giving silence its turn?

                     -- published in Art and Literature, An International Quarterly, Summer 1966

Untitled poem

The lion faced the deep sea,

And the sun withdrew its tongue from the deep water.

The wind turned over a pale shell.

This was your first experience.

You made a gesture so sad, so lonely…

You slept, almost on top of your fire,

And there was a free concourse between the sea

And your dream.

The lion was awake all night.

These logs gave you no warmth:

The green log of China, nor

The bedouin log, nor

The log of Hawaii,

The island log.

And all the forces the sea awoke in you

Headed inland, and gathered about a woman

Who had been waiting that whole night for you.

The lion licked your face at dawn

And you went to her.

                                                -- published in Poetry magazine, August 1966

With a missing text

All night they washed their bodies in the cool, slow-moving

Water of the green river.  By moonlight we saw them washing each other,

Embracing.  A red star presided in the heavens. The pines were speaking

Among themselves.  When was I there?

Am I your spokesman?  How difficult!  These bathers fill

My heart.  These bathers in moonlight.  In water waist-high, laughter.  And

Then they are gone, great silence following them.  Listen, if you find those

Bathers give them one of these words: (here the text has been lost)

                                    -- published in Poetry magazine, August 1966

Two mountains

Effortlessly
Staying alive

Crossing
These next
Two moments

Two mountains
Made of cloud

Flying over them
In a balloon

Made of breath

And only the

Whoosh
Of everything
For company

                                      -- New York, December 8, 2009

In the big scheme of little things

Here you are

Sweet one

Accumulating again

Accumulating

Your days

In the big scheme of little things

Pulses of light

Assembling and dismantling your name

Pieces of you flying every which way

Puzzle pieces

Swirling in your brain’s tornado

And here

Here’s a trombone for your last breath

And if you still have hands

If you still have a hand tomorrow

Here’s a hammer of gold

And a house to be born in

                                        -- New York, June 8, 2008