Activity

Out of some simple part of me
which I cannot use up
 I took a blessing for the flowers
tightening in the night
like fists of jealous love
 like knots
no one can undo without destroying
 The new morning gathered me
in blue mist
 like dust under wedding gown
Then I followed the …

Blackboard covered with a dust
 of living chalk, live chaos-cloud
  wormed by turbulence: the rod glides

and the vet narrates shadows
 I can’t quite force into shape:
  His kidneys might . . . the spleen appears . . .

I can’t see what he sees, and so
 resort to simil…

Big blocks of ice
—clear cornerstones—
chug down a turning belt
toward the blades of a wicked,

spinning fan; scraping din
of a thousand skates and then
powder flies out in a roaring
firehose spray of diamond dust,

and the film crew obscures
the well-used Manhattan snow
with a replica …

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness —

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower’s thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled natu…

Your old kitchen, dear, on Bleecker: sugar, dates, black tea.
Your house, then ours. Anyone’s now. Memory’s furious land.