Riding to the Great Northern Wilderness
we sang about self-correction in the club car,
dreamed up new crimes to put in our autobiographies

Probably easier to be dead in the city,
she opined, but also easier to be alive

take them with a grain of salt. Sincerity
remember is in the mind of the beholder

Snoozes may bowl a dream or two, but no strikes. I prefer
the sensual contours of the bridge off there—
how like your thigh. But after all it’s only a bridge

a tall one, but she sang Delilah well;
she could stand up to the Philistines or Placido like anything.

for a man who writes about
loneliness so much
his poems are full of people.

Musings. Where do they seep to, down there on the floor?

Under the lavender foam of cirrus, swallows
Looped; beyond trees, the pavement whined.

O little men who mock his macho enterprise!

To be one with earth and sky. You ate and went
Immortal, one of the cloudy sages of air;

The music stares to fade. And you’ll be gone
before I write the lines you asked me for.

A redhaired man in a rusty salt & pepper van

If you want to do something you have to do it yourself

Your mother said it was all right for you, he said

 

I flew onward alone, north
in my Mallard Sprinter, accompanied
by charm and ignorance and that old American

It did not ask but kicked the door with steel-toed boot
And took possession, one of the roughs: tough,
                      vertiginous, destitute.

They want one of every kind and they
can’t help it, it’s an addiction,

Yearning was fuel; yet the white-out buried the climber,
His possessions, chalcolithic gear.

His years line up there in receding ranks
Like so many doubting Thomases.

But the sun will set, she knows; its ruddy dooms
Be snuffed like matches, low windows dark once more.

The sea of pages; MelvilIe in older age:
The grown man’s sleepy defiance of denial.

The rounds of seasons, this year’s style or that
Year’s loss; core sample of eternity.

Here bricks are so rare they are like agates
We wonder who would carry them so far
Here I feel good because I have nothing
I am thinking about

Your Death, dressed like the good Gray Poet
Still leaned over your shoulder

We had a candle ready and watched the lightning
Shred up from the landing field in the valley