Like bulls trotting on their solemn rounds
over the cow flops, daisies, clover,
checking out the maidens of the meadow,

Pewter, then silver, the palest gold, an almost
silence we almost could hear, dawn led us out.
So light a sound had lifted us from our pillows.

That's true. Often the only amusing thing in a graveyard
                will be the Jewish names.

There they are, in the full sight of everyone, winking from

 

Stumbling midnight tipsy in Jackson's studio,
who knocked black paint over into tomorrow
and throbbing rainbows of our morning after?

“Feel me to do right,” your father whispered
to you out of the blue of two silences:
his shyness, his dying. How beautifully

come in every size and shape,
wiry and weighty,
jogging and mincing, plodding and sprinting,

“What I am is not important, whether I live or die —
          It is the same for me, the same for you.
What we do is important. This is what I have learnt.

        Aiee, father of mine, father of mine,
        What are these shouts in the rain, these voices in the air?
        The petal is ripped from the flower, the branch from the tree.

Better give me something to smoke
If I'm going to love you, better

Take what once was so hard to give up

"A god can do it"—yes. But a girl?
The Greeks named it hubris,
As if she had a choice: this is all