In the secular night you wander ar
alone in your house. It’s two-thir
Everyone has deserted you,
or this is your story;
you remember it from being sixteen

She has been condemned to death by
may escape this death by becoming
woman by marrying the hangman. But
time there is no hangman; thus the
There is only a death, indefinitel

Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mo
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed
to get onto my head. It’s his

In that country the animals
have the faces of people:
the ceremonial
cats possessing the streets
the fox run

In restaurants we argue
over which of us will pay for your
though the real question is
whether or not I will make you imm
At the moment only I

i
In view of the fading animals
the proliferation of sewers and fe
the sea clogging, the air
nearing extinction

Confess: it’s my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to d
though Lord knows I don’t go out
I wear dresses of sensible cut

The world is full of women
who’d tell me I should be ashamed
if they had the chance. Quit danci
Get some self-respect
and a day job.

In the burned house I am eating b
You understand: there is no house,
yet here I am.
The spoon which was melted scrapes
the bowl which was melted also.

It was taken some time ago.
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flec
blended with the paper;

I would like to watch you sleeping
which may not happen.
I would like to watch you,
sleeping. I would like to sleep
with you, to enter

The puppet of the wolf
I have not made yet
encloses my right hand:
fur stubbles my wrists,
a tongue, avid, carnivorous,

Starspangled cowboy
sauntering out of the almost–
silly West, on your face
a porcelain grin,
tugging a papier-mache cactus

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boar
distances between things, or pound

Two voices
took turns using my eyes:
One had manners,
painted in watercolours,
used hushed tones when speaking

‘They capped their heads with feat
their faces, wore their clothes ba
with torches through the midnight
and dragged the black man from his
to the jolting music of broken

Cruising these residential Sunday
streets in dry August sunlight:
what offends us is
the sanities:
the houses in pedantic rows, the p

You, going along the path,
mosquito-doped, with no moon, the
a single orange eye
unable to see what is beyond
the capsule of your dim

The house we built gradually
from the ground up when we were yo
(three rooms, the walls
raw trees) burned down
last year they said

He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own bir
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on

Let others pray for the passenger
the dodo, the whooping crane, the
everyone must specialize
I will confine myself to a meditat
upon the giant tortoises

Your lungs fill & spread themselve
wings of pink blood, and your bone
empty themselves and become hollow
When you breathe in you’ll lift li
and your heart is light too & huge

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent
it is before that, and colder:
The edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert

Love is not a profession
genteel or otherwise
sex is not dentistry
the slick filling of aches and cav
you are not my doctor

The bronze clock brought
with such care over the sea,
which ticked like the fat slow hea
of a cedar, of a grandmother,
melted and its hundred years

Those whose houses were burned
burned houses. What else ever happ
once you start?
While the roofs plunged
into the root-filled cellars,

The water turns
a long way down over the raw stone
ice crusts around it
We walk separately
along the hill to the open

There are similarities
I notice: that the hills
which the eyes make flat as a wall
together, open as I move
to let me through; become

An other sense tugs at us:
we have lost something,
some key to these things
which must be writings
and are locked against us

This is the lair of the landlady
She is
a raw voice
loose in the rooms beneath me.
the continuous henyard

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your ro
house, half-acre, square mile, isl
knowing at last how you got there,

More and more frequently the edges
of me dissolve and I become
a wish to assimilate the world, in
you, if possible through the skin
like a cool plant’s tricks with ox

There is nothing to be afraid of,
it is only the wind
changing to the east, it is only
your father the thunder
your mother the rain

What should we have taken
with us? We never could decide
on that; or what to wear,
or at what time of
year we should make the journey

The rest of us watch from beyond t
as the woman moves with her jagged
into her pain as if into a slow ra
We see her body in motion
but hear no sounds, or we hear