School of Taxidermy
Listen, see that boy who discovers
a dead squirrel at the foot of the tree,
he thinks it is worth something,
he thinks he will skin it and they
will have a fair and sell it. And he
tells his friend and his friend is
excited, too. Then night falls and
they return to fetch the broken
corpse which is encrusted like
a jewel with moss or a cake with
crumbs, the maggots white,
swarming, churning away
the squirrel's eyes. And he does
not know how to rid himself
of it now that he has it.
That boy is me I was that boy.
Early Winter, After Sappho
Some say the air of
early winter moving through
windows. For some, black ships
coming towards the city
are the quietest sounds on earth.
but I say it is with whomever one loves.
And very easily proved:
when we are trying to think of
something to say to each other,
each remembering back
who said what, the ground
we've already covered,
you can hear all the money
lost earlier in the stock market,
even fresh water slipping
into salt water.
Convalescence
When you taste "sick,"
iron from lamb's blood,
sour mash filling your mouth,
you feel what your hands
feel after dropping something,
as on the first day
you reached for the table
to still yourself and found them
quaking like boiled water.
What you miss most is touching
the things in the other room,
and the color, of course,
the reason you moved back to
New York: fall leaves. The cardinals,
the brick walls you repaired.
the amaryllis flowers
and the sunset that are blossoming
black as we speak.
There Were No Horses
That summer,
no horses moving roughly
over the rocks, one incensed
at another, nudging its
head with a shout. We looked
for horses—you found some cars
but I only saw equine clouds
neighing silently at each other.
Ever since the dream of horses,
hundreds buried underground
like a crop of tomatoes
about to burst from the soil,
we wanted
not the clay horses of Xi'an,
no, though their hooves still tore
darkly through my mind like rainwater,
not the horses Xenophon says
were sent to the king of Persia
each one said to wear a bridle
of gold, but the real thing.
The stuff they feed to dogs.
