When Yeats wrote that the center couldn’t hold,
he itched with promise, nearly leaped out of his skin;
but now that that revolution has proven a weasel,
he lives in quiet alleys, selling paste and wallpaper
and seeing what stanzas his mind can bear to recall,
whether idle background doodles represent another facet

of his old, bone-rattling art. If this rough, obscure facet,
furry with moss as a stone heavy with sitting, can hold
the fire of the lilt that every Irish brother must recall,
then it seems the paste would melt into the poet’s skin,
humid and grumous, and hang this pelt, like wallpaper,
on the old poet’s bones. Thus hung and settled, a weasel

of seclusion, limps, and expert squints, a weasel
of urban burrows, he’d show his land a fresh-cut facet
of the Yeatsian verse. O songs of wallpaper
sung in action’s meter, rhymed in symmetric hold
on broomstick and baguette, drafted in folds of skin:
this is the poetry that habit helps recall.

What crumpled revolutionaries now struggle to recall
was then a man of razor beauty who with weasel
thoughts of virtue and with cruelly glinting skin
whipped language into mountains, exploded every facet
of the pebble into shards that even brilliance couldn’t hold.
For this man truth was only wallpaper.

But now plangent silence devotes itself to wallpaper,
and the prophecy of mountains is one that none recall;
these same old trembling hands a whispering spirit hold,
and nature does not cherish anymore the weasel.
Under what cool rock have you discovered this facet,
old man, what mossy stream has transformed your skin?

I shed my revelation like a dried-out skin,
I scraped off my nightmares like old wallpaper.
The red body, panicked raw, seeks a new facet
to an ancient problem, one it can’t seem to recall...
And in the deep fields of forest, a weasel
awakens to its grasping paws, loosens its hold.

My weasel spirit slapped up on the wallpaper,
I recall a once-dull facet of my polished silence;
Within a skin of language, I hold two beating hearts.

she did not come, but was there

as one awakes to find oneself asleep

and then, being awake, searches for the moment

the transition

when sleep set in

to no avail.

we locked arms

two

almost indistinguishable

almost

too late to find the moment

the transition

where

naivelight(empty?)

stopped skipping along with us;

the road is too long and

it’s night anyway.

but now there is This
and This has its fingers around my wrists

and the dirt below me, itself

calm

This frightening divinity knocks the breath out of my lungs

it was always here

the stars, shards of glass on the blue linoleum sky

the air is space

        cooling the insides of my lungs

and nostrils

and chilling the glistening that limps down in front of my ears

then

the sun is there,

on the lip of the earth

        like sleep

having not come
and she lets go

turning slowly away
a glimmer of her wing flutters in the yawning wind
as it rises and falls with her breath

I look up.

A subway train is longer than you think:
In photographs the lights trail on behind,
Float blur by blur in millipedic link:
The residue: a steel banana’s rind.
And passing the camera, in one passing car,
A grocery bag lolls by a man in tweed—
Inside one slightly sticky peach; thus far
He has in daily prayer spat out the seed.
O tell me not you know this man beside;
He, rocking tersely with the swaying train:
He has a cough that wracks him from inside.
Yes, his trails on behind in lighted chain.
        It blurs with yours among the streaking lights:
        Half-eaten fruits behind in hollow night.

After the beat, there is a misty city;

it is a tailor’s chalk on felt buildings,

callous gentle hands painting ancient moulding

silently around closed windows in which voices crumble

and the beat slides.

Moving on his hand encounters one open—

inside outside the usual contents spill out onto the felt,

dully softly coming to rest like a pull-back-go car

running out of its whir,

succumbing to understanding.

He catches, smiles, exhales through his nose.

It is cold and fresh, this tailor’s chalk,

tasting of misty apple bit from tree trunk.

Others swing their feet over buildings’ edges

together alternating together together

they swirl the mist, chalky mist, wet mist, like a circus

worker scooping cotton candy in winter.

The tailor’s tongue plays gently in his part-opened mouth,

gently aspiring to the swirling legs.

        The beat ends, and the tailor

looks up from one silence into another;

A window opens, the next drum commences:
The misty city returns to its silences.