I GAVE IT ALL AWAY

Ah! Secrets! Gave those away

but usually paid the price.

Virginity you ask? Do men give

that away? Don’t we just...

Oh, never mind, I suppose

I did give mine but I think I gave it to me

very carefully after 24 hours consideration

of her question Well? Are we

or are we not? I was 17

and she was 24. Uh, yes!Yes!
Giving what you have away

—might imply throw it

to the wind or distribute

randomly out the car window

as you pass through the bowry.

The nagging truth is that

the phrase could be construed

as impedimenta—a lovely word

I recently heard used by an eminent biographer

who seems to relish in things given

and received especially reluctantly.

As I was saying, if I chose

the Buddhist gate they’d stop me

no question and say Wait a minute!

Hang on hang on, you haven’t given it all away.

And I would balefully show them my empty pockets

—a mimed affair since I’d be starkers—

and say Oh Come On I didn’t bring anything with me.

What’d you think happened to it then?

Ah yes. The truth is I’m a hoarder.

A disease. It crawls in your windows

and up your trouser legs when you’re wearing them.

Throwing away is practically

impossible. Every scrap of wood

at our place is inventory and that goes for all

the nuts and bolts in the workshop. Books?

Forget it! Not quite true since

I really love giving people books

but I do catch myself picking up doubles

of say, Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems

because I know I’m itching to give one away

but where would that leave

me? Now advice?

You can have that for free. It's yours.

CHRISTINA'S WORLD

CHRISTINA'S WORLD

after Wyeth’s painting

I know that girl the girl in the field

the field still long the grasses tall

she’s there on the ground do we say that

the ground bound by tall grasses not mown

the girl twisting at the waist a sense of

distance the house on the hill a place

of remorse the crows gathering

at a window of the outbuilding

washing on the line the far side

the wind slight the dog barking

up at the sky she looks back

it’s hard to care about why

the girl the ground the house

why she’s there as if outside the circle

why do I care I suppose it’s a place

I know very well and recognition

draws me to her

to the girl

and her bleak

American landscape

I DON'T CARE ANYMORE

I don’t care anymore

and the next word is hole

a very tiny arrangement

with sphincter-like musculature

and the guillotine decisiveness

of an old-fashioned single lens reflex

yeah

camera

not obscura

more the fuck you ra

because I don’t care

and there’s so much I don’t care about

so much that will not fit through that

tiny pinprick

if it doesn’t fit then sayonara suckers

with all your politicizing your bureaucratizing

your proselytizing your capitalizing your

monetarizing your theorizing your down-

sizing and your upsizing I’m done I’m through

the magazine subscription reorder forms

make great book markers anyway and landfill

does it ever reach the recycling center?

Oh yeah I forgot

I don’t care

excuse me while I take a sip

brush a hair from the page

filter out the sound of a passing mynah

sit up straighter so the breath

will find my toes

press my thumb against the table edge

just so

think of Kipling Empire and dead queens

which reminds me of that nonsense

about the champagne and Kalakaua

I’d drink too wouldn’t you?

but the military outfits...

my hand isn’t fast enough to say it with ink

and these abstractions begging me to say

Get knotted calligraphers of the world!

Untie or die!

Do you care? Do I care if you do or don’t care?

And that rhymes with not fair their share

who’s the mayor and she’s a player

Bayer Bayer your beehive’s on fire

and the beetles don’t even like honey

I don’t care so much it hurts

I woke up last night talking to a ghost

and she said you have to stop caring

but she didn’t say “anymore”

like the raven or not like the raven

She said just stop

IF YOU NEED IT

If you need it you’ll find it, I learned

from the Rolling Stones, oh yes, years

after Philosophy 101, I got it from LPs

threaded through and through by steel spindles

turning turning the needlepoint wisdom

transmitted through mesh-covered boxes

encasing tweeters and woofers as if

all the avian and—what’s the dog world called?

fidelity—were being brought to bear in our

search for food, soul food, that is, the sort

found incidentally in famed foraging scenes

of yore as we began copying trees and standing upright

seeing over the tops of wheat ears—beer

would come first, bread much later,

but the yeast the rising agent was born

in a kind of omnipresence that preoccupied us...

I was going to say in a kind of thing-ness

as in “everything” but that feels so mathematical

so Phoenician sheep-traderish. No, no,

the world that truly nourishes us is not made of things.

There’s another bigger essence, isn’t there,

and if you need it you will not only find it,

it will find you, but you will recognize it

there in the laughter of taboos broken

in rush light or candle light

our collective habits acted out

made fun of in the dark

we might even pay good money to sit there

burning our foreheads on the intense glow.