Read by the author. Late August, your estuary, now Flattens gray, and the eroded Pilings stagger from landfall Like upside-down legs, or Geometric marks you see in Generations of outdated Cave-wall photographs—all Finger flute and crosshatch. What Chases the glint of Light off the water Flattens, too, or flatters, the Chiselled horizon beneath Clouds so shaved white They take shape, beneath this Sky, as humps, or Hulks, or afterlives of hills, As if to ask, “ ?” Here, Sir Patrick Spens And his good lords Capsized so deep under the Sea in the rain-black, ballad Passages of the Norton anthology Of poetry in English, it’s still scarcely English at all.
Or was it four Thousand miles from here, in my Loch Lomond Boulevard Bedroom, in Harris County, Texas, where the square Windows inside the flowing Foam of the wall open into waves Of knockout roses, which in Summer are straining red, Unheard, under the fathoms of Hardly visible miles—what I wish I might have called tawny Scores of star music, or swollen Petals, or shy air, or common Ground, had I known, At the time, that I’d one day Feel like the last Jew alive, with no Children in the future To stand before him, bare- Handed, bareheaded, Like a sailor of gravity Through a lifetime of settling Down as fog or leaves Or a stone rolling soft as rain— As if the sea is always inside him And his mind a floating cloud Sloping into the marshlight Unfurling in a daydream Brimmed with the tresses of three Confabulating hot-air.