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SELECTIONS FROM REVISED EDITION

Saturn and Child

I

Your murder is a sweet creek that meanders through my youth.
Six days from the new year
and everything hits the fan,
a beanstalk throttled to sea level,
and the furniture and frames of that time come
a bottle of perfume, Ananya
that I cannot smell without remembering
a face I no longer remember,
cannot by any act of will call up:
huge eyes, ravened with desperation
suspended two inches above mine,
green and green together making no color but jealousy.
A child had to inherit one or the other
never said, like Polyxena: I wish to die.

II

Such a mating of fate
The Duino Elegies and your wyfe
head-to-head
in the same gene pool
the agonies that keep
reinventing themselves, like great artists
set and definite as statues.

No, not going anywhere.
Not even an arm hacked off
to suggest
an obscene gesture
made under thy neighbor’s table.

Can’t rely on America anymore
hiding in the House That Jack Built
his mother
outliving all her children
living to see her son’s picture
torn down and defamed
with the flag of her adopted country
her hand clenched secretly around France
like the hand of the second lover in the bed,

A Lady Liberty
well beyond spring chicken
and the joys of the voluptuous Madonna
the curve of her hips
loved by every man
and most of all by one.
my beautiful

Lizzie, myself, our baby
closed and clogged
in the laudanum of our bliss.