Soonest Mended
We are all talkers / It is true, but underneath the talk lies / The moving and not wanting to be moved, the loose / Meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor.
though meaning could be cast aside some day / When it had been outgrown
though nothing / Has somehow come to nothing
Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
But your eyes proclaim / That everything is surface
No words to say what it really is, that it is not / Superficial but a visible core
I see in this only the chaos / Of your round mirror which organizes everything / Around the polestar of your eyes which are empty, / Know nothing, dream but reveal nothing
Tomorrow is easy, but today is uncharted
just as one / Gets accustomed to a noise that / Kept one awake but now no longer does
New York / Where I am now, which is a logarithm / Of other cities.
deflate / Its mapped space to enactments, island it.
Since it is a metaphor / Made to include us, we are a part of it
questioning / We now see will not take place at random / But in an orderly way that means to menace / Nobody
And we can no longer return to the various / Conflicting statements gathered, lapse of memory
We don't need paintings or / Doggerel written by mature poets when / The explosion is so precise, so fine
us / Who have been given no help whatever / In decoding our own man-size quotient and must rely / On second-hand knowledge.
to flatten ultimately / Among the features of the room, an invitation / Never mailed, the "it was all a dream" / Syndrome, though the "all" tells tersely / Enough how it wasn't. Its existence / Was real, though troubled,
and the ache / Of this waking dream can never drown out / The diagram still sketched on the wind, / Chosen, meant for me and materialized / In the disguising radiance of my room.
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