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sky
so full of stars, as if the dirt of our lives
still were sprinkled with glistening
white shells from the ancient seabed
beneath us that receded long ago.
Parallel. We lay in parallel furrows.
—That suffocated, fearful
look on your face.
Jim, yesterday I heard your wife on the phone
tell me you died almost nine months ago.
Jim, now we cannot ever. Bitter
that we cannot ever have
the conversation that in
nature and alive we never had. Now not ever.
We have not spoken in years. I thought
perhaps at ninety or a hundred, two
broken-down old men, we wouldn’t
give a damn, and find speech.
When I tell you that all the years we were
undergraduates I was madly in love with you

you say you
knew. I say I knew you
knew. You say
There was no place in nature we could meet.
You say this as if you need me to
admit something. No place
in nature, given our natures. Or is this
warning? I say what is happening now is
happening only because one of us is
dead. You laugh and say, Or both of us!
Our words
will be weirdly jolly.
That light I now envy
exists only on this page.

Across Infinities Without Sentience
2014. 1994. Twenty years.
When this world appearing in a mind is
blotted out, ear and eye
across infinities without sentience
seek the dead. The dead
hide in the past. In what they made.
When you called him each day
he each day
answered. Protected by distance
(Cambridge to New York)
he each day
eagerly answered. Except during summers
with Kenward in Vermont, when he was not
allowed to answer. Or so he said. The distress
with which he said this made you believe him.
Across infinities without sentience
ear and eye
seek the dead.
When you can no longer each day call
him and hear him dead now twenty

years each day answer as once he sweetly did
we are queers of the universe.

End of a Friendship
The United States (salvation of both our
families) was built (stomachchurning to admit it) was built across a continent
on genocide. An abattoir. Mere
prudence, enlightened self-interest, cannot
account for why the head of
Metacomet
whom the colonists called King Philip, at the end of
King Philip’s War, his corpse drawn and quartered, his
wife and youngest son sold into slavery in the West Indies,
why his head in Plymouth was exhibited on a pole
for twenty
years.
I know this not because I know what is
not taught in American
history, but because I’ve read Robert Lowell’s poems.
America the salvation of both our families. History an obscenity
those who inherit the depeopled
and repeopled
land try to forget. Genocide. Long abattoir. But those
who perform amputations
convince themselves amputation is

necessary—; an emblem
against the horizon for which the empty horizon begs.
•
Fun: the immense pleasure of watching, goading
someone into becoming
himself on paper: so many of your best early poems
offended what others thought made good
art: the immensity that The New Yorker would print
only if you agreed to cut the one thing that offended
invisible decorums of impersonality, the provocation
that made it remarkable and yours and which you of
course refused to cut: what
fun: my work not just to watch, but to goad: a privilege.
•
Now we are going to die in estrangement. This
once seemed, still
seems, intolerable; not to be believed.
•
Yesterday, which lasted more or less
forty years, we walked along the bottom of the sea absorbed
picking up tin cans, tossing them back and forth, laughing
at what others rightly had discarded, astonished at the few
we both recognized as
gold. They were
gold. We kept them to show the world

what gold was.
We disagreed
seldom. Then,
somehow, our capacity to find what others were blind to
diminished, shriveled, all but stopped.
We were alone with each other at the bottom of the sea.
•
The reasons for the wound existed long before
the wound.
The reasons (jealousy, humiliation) exist between
any two writers.
For over forty years we willed to keep the space
we shared
the space in which we thought and breathed
free, safe from the inevitable
inherent
enmity of equals.
I cannot name
when that stopped.
Nor can I, to my
torment, name
why that stopped.
•
Why did that stop?

•
Now I must construct the song of
disenthrallment—
I was, I think I now can see, ripe for disenthrallment.
The exhaustion of making invisible
those tiny acts in thought and in deed
which, if revealed, the other
takes as disloyal. After decades I became
giddy, reckless, avid
to change the terms of what seemed
submission, enslavement—; as well as full of
dread, this longanticipated, necessary mourning.
•
It is not cruelty, those who amputate
insist, It is amputation.
Because wound
begets silence
begets rage
each of us secretly (hidden, each in his
way) raises
high on its stake the head of Metacomet.
•
My father’s head
hung outside my mother’s window

for years when I was a kid.
She pretended that it wasn’t there; but hers
also did outside his.
All over town the heads sing the same thing:
This severed head
that pollutes the air
that dominates the horizon
betrayed the intimacy lavished upon it.
•
I was invited to your house. You
invited me into your living room. In the old days,
a small thing. I saw how long it has been forbidden
when it was no longer. You invited
me to sit down among the chairs, the couch, the coffee table.
I saw this was forbidden when it was no longer. You invited
me to sit down among the chairs, the couch, the coffee table.
I said to myself I must be dreaming. I was.
•
You say, There seems to be a floor
beneath one’s feet, but there is not.
Why must you write this poem?
•
Memory is punishment.
•

Meat is flesh, but doesn’t say
flesh when teeth bite into it.

Sum
All around you of course will die but when the fingers of
your left hand no longer can button
tiny and not so tiny buttons
you know you will die quicker.
Anguish more verb than noun hides their incompetence.
•
ANGUISH, duplicitous, hidden, can, for
a time, deny what promises never to return.
•
The elegant ocean
inside, frictionless, that moved as quickly as the eye once moved,
now when your anguished eye shifts
tips deadweight with inertia, almost splashing over.
•
Each morning you wake to long slow piteous
swoops of sound, half-loon, half-dog.
He is wandering in the yard.
The dog at eighteen who at sixteen began protesting each dawn.

Thirst
The miraculous warmth that arose so implausibly from rock had, within it, thirst.
•
Thirst made by a glimpse that is, each time, brief.
•
As if, each time, that is all you are allowed.
•
The way back to it never exactly the same.
•
Once you have been there, always the promise of it.
•
Promise made to beguile and haunt, you think, residue of an injunction that is
ancient.
•
Not only ancient, but indifferent?
•
Half the time when you pursue it you fear that this time, out of distraction or
exhaustion or repetition, this time it cannot be reached.
•

I hope you’re guessing Orgasm, or Love, or Hunger for the Absolute, or even
The Sublime—
•
History littered with testimonies that God gives his followers a shot of God; then
withdraws.
•
The pattern, the process each time the same.
•
There,—
•
… then, not there (withdrawn).
•
Each time you think that you can predict how to get there the next time, soon
you cannot.
•
The singer’s voice, the fabled night the microphone captured her at the height of
her powers—
•
You have been the locus of ecstasy.
•
You have been a mile above the storm, looking down at it; and, at the same time,
full of almost-insight, obliterated at its center.
•

Creature coterminous with thirst.

PART TWO

Disappearing during sleep
[FOR ROBERT LOWELL]
seems release, merciful
ideal not to have to greet (perhaps) oblivion
with panic, remorse, or self-laceration;—
but what I hear is your voice
say that unconscious death
thrust at you asleep in the back seat of a taxi
was never the ideal your work spoke,—
…