Addonizio - Tell me: poems

I want to count them, I want them to end. I dont want to wonder how many people are sitting in restaurants about to close down, which of them will wander the sidewalks all night while the pies revolve in the refrigerated dark. How many days are left of my life, how much does it matter if I manage to say one true thing about ithow often have I tried, how often failed and fallen into depression? The field is wet, each grassblade gleaming with its own particularity, even here, so that I cant help asking again, the white sky filling with footprints, bricks, with mutterings over rosaries, with hands that pass over flames before covering the eyes. Im tired, I want to rest now. I want to kiss the body of my lover, the one mouth, the simple name without a shadow. Let me go.

How many prayers are there tonight, how many of us must stay awake and listen?

Everythings there: all the plans that came to nothing, the stupid love affairs, and the terrifying ones, the ones where actual happiness opened like a hole beneath his feet and he fell in, then lay helpless while the dirt rained down a little at a time to bury him. And his friends are there, cracking open six-packs, raising the bottles, the click of their meeting like the sound of a pool cue nicking a ball, the wrong ball, that now edges, black and shining, toward the waiting pocket. But it stops short, and at the bar the lone drinker signals for another. Now the relatives are floating up with their failures, with cancer, with plateloads of guilt and a little laughter, too, and even beautysome afternoon from childhood, a lake, a ball game, a book of stories, a few flurries of snow that thicken and gradually cover the earth until the whole worlds gone white and quiet, until theres hardly a world at all, no traffic, no money or butchery or sex, just a blessed peace that seems final but isnt. And finally the glass that contains and spills this stuff continually while the drinker hunches before it, while the bartender gathers up empties, gives back the drinkers own face. Who knows what it looks like; who cares whether or not it was young once, or ever lovely, who gives a shit about some drunk rising to stagger toward the bathroom, some man or woman or even lost angel who recklessly threw it all overheaven, the ether, the celestial worksand said, Fuck it, I want to be human? Who believes in angels, anyway? Who has time for anything but their own pleasures and sorrows, for the few good people theyve managed to gather around them against the uncertainty, against afternoons of sitting alone in some bar with a name like the Embers or the Ninth Inning or the Wishing Well? Forget that loser.

Just tell me whos buying, whos paying; Christ but Im thirsty, and I want to tell you something, come close I want to whisper it, to pour the words burning into you, the same words for each one of you, listen, its simple, Im saying it now, while Im still sober, while Im not about to weep bitterly into my own glass, while youre still heredont go yet, stay, stay, give me your shoulder to lean against, steady me, dont let me drop, Im so in love with you I cant stand up.