Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

I’m singing a song for the romeos
I wore for ten years on my front stoop in the North Side,
and for the fat belly I carried

This is how I saved one animal’s life,
I raised the lid of the stove and lifted the hook
that delicately held the cheese—I think it was bacon—

I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs
before I get too sad.
I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower,

I lay forever, didn’t I, behind those old windows,
listening to Bach and resurrecting my life.
I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes

I could live like that,
putting my chair by the window,
making my tea,

I am sitting thirty feet above the water
with my hand at my throat,
listening to the owls go through the maples

On the first day of viburnum
I followed a school bus for five miles
past the magnolias and the copper lions

Lillian Russell, I think of her standing
at the rail of the Niew Amsterdam as it sails
through Caracas to get a taste of the real slums

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

Some blossoms are so white and luscious, when they
hold their long thin hands up you strip them for love
and scatter them on the ground as you walk;

A bunch of old snakeheads down by the pond
carrying on the swan tradition, hissing
inside their white bodies, raising and lowering their heads

Come with me to Stanley’s and spend your life
weeping in the small park on 106th Street.

There is just so much feeling left in me for my old ghost
and I will spend it all in one last outburst of charity.

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street
    one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching

you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;