Two Kids
Two kids, small
black sculpture.
In trepidation she turns
to him who bends
forward to, as they say,
assist her. It is,
the proposal is,
her fear provokes her,
fear of a frog
crouching at the far
end of this banal, small,
heavy hunk of metal
must have cost a
pretty penny so
to arouse in mind’s
back recesses
a comfortable sense
of incest? Or else
the glass table top on which it sits
so isolates this meager action
—or else the vegetation,
the fern stalks, beside them
hang over, making privacy
a seeming thought
of these two who,
as Keats said, will never move
nor will any of it
beyond the moment,
the small minutes of some hour,
like waiting in a dentist’s office.
One World
Tonight possibly they’ll
invite us down to the barricades
finally sans some tacit
racism or question of our authenticity.
No one will be ashamed he
has to face the prospect
of being blown up alone in
the privacy of his own home.
One can be looted, burned,
bombed, etc., in company,
a Second World War sequel for real,
altogether, now and forever.
Retrospect
Thanks for
what will be
the memory
if it is.
Outside
The light now meets
with the shuddering branch.
What I see
distorts the image.
This is an age
of slow determinations,
goes up the stairs
with dulled will.
Who would accept death
as an end
thinks he can
do what he wants to.
The Faces
The faces with anticipated youth
look out from the current
identifications, judge or salesman,
the neighbor, the man who killed,
mattering only as the sliding world
they betoken, the time it never
mattered to accumulate, the fact that
nothing mattered but for what one
could make of it, some passing,
oblique pleasure, a pain immense
in its intensity, a sly but
insistent yearning to outwit it
all, be different, move far, far
away, avoid forever the girl
next door, whose cracked, wrinkled
smile will persist, still know you.