Darst - Thousands: poems

The love of my life died in a motorcycle crash

her words went through me like a needle through tulle

(now she has three children

tenure, a husband, a tolerably well-furnished house).

The student writes,

The weeding is an important day in everyones life.

Chromatics

Id kill for love

kill for la a uv

Dear what Ill do,

We are all familiar with terror.

This produces the coming catastrophe

of mind or contagion; produces the cloud,

crowds roil overturning,

this discipline of questions. They dont read, they dont know

the students,

lovers of terror,

voters, taxpayers,

Notes on a lecture, 1/19/11

anonymous commenters, ex-soldiers, future mothers,

fellow citizens, customers of cable television,

to read

In Parenthesis

Felt through my hair for the missing comb. Kept counting

three, knew

there were four. The blind side feels for itself.

The last flower has opened on the stem,

the first two mostly done by now: call home.

I slipped my skin

walked off & left myself & left

feeling the first snow of the season falling

cold on my face running to catch that downtown bus leaving

my life behind & abandoned my whole self, was I

a colt or a fresh coal afire each chain of nerve

alive naked & loving the feeling of feeling

my heart beating feeling my blood too feeling

Dear Wednesday, 7:13 a.m.,

We were owned by each other at that time.

I loved you then, I love you nowthe earth is whats moving.

And I enjoyed an excess of everything, surplus shine. Others

bathed in it,

washed their cold hands.

In bed counting dawn-invisible stars. There was a lot of talk,

the usual kind of talk,

storm, then clear dawn & another near miss.

(Over a stolen cup of wine I conjure this,

light in the clouds late autumn maples,

the magic hour.)

Healthy & wealthy and we went out in bad weather

because we werent afraid

oh but this is the present.

Does it, I suppose, go on forever? Yesterday

we named our children.

I got tired of not having sex, you know?

But I dont believe a public private life is a revolutionary act.

I believe

11/29/11

(haunts the liquor store)

I like my looks. How we fucked last night.

How fucked now means just that. A cotangle of intimate hair.

Fucking,

fuckt.

I dont believe I do have anything to tell you, officer.

How is my business?

(raises an arm, sniffs)

Dear yes,

I had ways

Sally Manns almost too-beautiful

things that let themselves

be seeneven a dead man, body laid at woods edge, his half

gone face

half-turns to her.

I note another thought to look forward to.

Eva Hesse Drawing, ed. Catherine de Zegher

They were mostly ink, brush, wash; grays, blacks, bronzes

Im always seeking a haunting

That was someones husband.

I want, as always, more. Turning your face to me

when I say whatever trivial thing I say so that you will

turn to meoh its the beginning of fear: ordinary life.

9/10/12

in poetry a garment is not a garment, it conceals nothing

G. E. Lessing quoted in Daniel Tiffany, Infidel Poetics

I lie on my couch after ballet class reading

a vanished world. Want to keep, to make

a record of the present

neither muscular nor spare (fuck your

military aesthetic)

say how her spine centers the ocean in its cursive ah