Cento

You dragged your feet when you went out-
those sure abutments... gone.
Defenseless under the night:
your laugh, your scarves, the gloss of your makeup,
scraps of moon-
romance had no part in it.
Daffodil time
is past,

but that strange flower, the sun,
is just what you say:
hasteless
in the nothingness,
the way, in a field of sunflowers,
you can see every bloom's
eyes - waking.
You...

you once said,
"There are many truths,
but they are not parts of a truth."
Then the trees, at night, began to change.
You said, "let's catch one that comes low,"
but I'm afraid I'm not much use.

...Forgive me if you read this.
The marker slants, flowerless, day's almost done.

Ideas of Order in New York

1.

Are symmetries
in a lightheaded and repeating
circumference of blue and red.

2.

But fragments are natural-
we have no golden underworld.
Still, we'll circle
the base of these statues,
keeping a distance from home,
scraps of anchor:
keener memories of us that could have
no more meaning than tomorrow's bread,
lost under the skyscrapers' vertigo.

3.

In mornings of angular ice,
suggestive of the freshness of nothing,
in first snow, the day has no symmetry-
lost track of the avenues,
and roamed there all the stupid afternoon-
the sky harsh and acutest at its vanishing.
From under the Towers' phantom limbs
the colors deepened and grew small.
We hardened ourselves to live by bluest reason
all our recognitions fading like a world tattoo.

4.

At the base of these statues,
the eccentric is the base of design.
Chess, clocks, lilies, and gutters are:
tempers, hammers, sinews, and frozen soil.
The mind is smaller than the eye-
the eccentric being the base of design.

5.

So keeping a distance from home, the sky will be
much friendlier than now. Elsewhere, a song
to three dissonant ideas, a few words
tuned and tuned and tuned. The ruddy temper,
the hammer of red and blue sinews,
the hard sound. Fragments
are natural- I have no silver fields,
no bishop. The gutters still echo
a cyclical aubade
in which every verse and beat
tick like a clock. Above lilies,
the sky will be much friendlier than now.

6.

Under these towers, we'll be sleepers,
the mid-day sky drained,
the night will have a being, breathing frost,
like the night, which must create colors
out of itself. We'll circle a point to lower an anchor,
in such terms as the vernacular of light,
the sleepers in their sleep will move,
waken, and watch the moonlight on their floors,
will remember the same patterns on the statues
in the park, where the clouds rise upward
like heavy stones. They won't be induced
by a golden underworld, nor worldly urgencies:
not made for the concentric clash. 

Thin

Some causes for celebration
in youth;
midsummer.
Lights strung changing
in abrupt constellations,

rain-dancing stilted figures, and
cart-wheeling fingers and palms
of a steel-girdered gymnast.
The evening weaves
through hanging carriages.

"I have to do the cliche thing and say-"
"It was taller
when you were little?"
She smiles, "I was on top of the world."

The Ferris wheel cycles round
the air: night-humid and
carnival sounds
are thick in it and thinning
toward the top-
the chime as a father helps his weak son
swing a hammer at the ring-the-bell;
a huckster yells "get your cotton candy,
candy apples."

All the old world
is gathered at the boundaries,
tobacco incense,
balmy wilderness.

"I love the silence up here."
"You're being sentimental."
"Am I? It's a carnival."
"It's something now."

She smooths back her hair
and fingers pressure on a bare brow.

"It's nice,
and sometimes when the wheel stops
you stay up here longer."

He glances at his thin wrists
as rain drops gather in their carriages
and the fairgrounds pull them into needles,
away from the weighty moon:
silver as a bell.