Imagine you at the beginning of the
longest walk of your life, no thought given to
shoes, socks, toothpaste, hats, and the other
rip-rap, nothing of watches or water, sleeping

Richard Strauss, my hero, here you are
finally letting go of both sword and breast,
and there you are escaping from our bleeding world

I’m singing a song for the romeos
I wore for ten years on my front stoop in the North Side,
and for the fat belly I carried

That is a pair of white hands I see
floating in the mirror, the fingers on the left
are blunt and rounded, the ones on the right are raised

Nobody else alive knows the four heart sounds
and nobody touches the four soft places
and raises his wing to look for lice; and nobody

How good it is to lie there
waiting for love;
fighting the fire,

This is how I saved one animal’s life,
I raised the lid of the stove and lifted the hook
that delicately held the cheese—I think it was bacon—

I think this year I’ll wait for the white lilacs
before I get too sad.
I’ll let the daffodils go, flower by flower,

On the first day of viburnum
I followed a school bus for five miles
past the magnolias and the copper lions

I am sitting thirty feet above the water
with my hand at my throat,
listening to the owls go through the maples

I could live like that,
putting my chair by the window,
making my tea,

I lay forever, didn’t I, behind those old windows,
listening to Bach and resurrecting my life.
I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes

Lillian Russell, I think of her standing
at the rail of the Niew Amsterdam as it sails
through Caracas to get a taste of the real slums

I’m dreaming of the dahlias up there on the radiator
starting to grow leaves

I think he is full of some low form of love,
something that Dante would have pitied

Here I am walking between Ocean and Neptune
sinking my feet in mile after mile of wet life.

Sometimes I sit in my blue chair trying to remember
what it was like in the spring of 1950
before the burning coal entered my life.

He was like you,
always cramming and ramming, spluttering in disgust

Some blossoms are so white and luscious, when they
hold their long thin hands up you strip them for love
and scatter them on the ground as you walk;

I will examine my life through curled threads
and short straws and little drops of food.

If I could do exactly what I wanted
I would move a harpsichord into my back yard
and ask Elaine Comparone to play for me all morning.

wishing, this time, they could sail through the sky like
    horses,

you have to be ready for it to start sprouting in your hands;
you have to stick it in the ground like a piece of willow;

Let me please look into my window on 103rd Street
    one more time—
without crying, without tearing the satin, without touching

There is just so much feeling left in me for my old ghost
and I will spend it all in one last outburst of charity.

Come with me to Stanley’s and spend your life
weeping in the small park on 106th Street.