“For a few years, I managed to eke out
       a meagre living as The Human Yo-Yo.”
But I tired of the unnatural activity,

The masts are mostly gone, Walt. Pleasure-sailors
ply the harbor, piloting fiberglass forty-footers
down from the North Shore, one at the wheel,

He knows about the destruction caused by reaction:
emotional wounds, self-inflicted, a repeated torture
he brings about, trying to interrogate the self

Once I thought there was no blue in nature
except the sky—I thought Nature couldn’t make
a blue fiower, or tree, or creature.

Don’t Try to Explain

The mind of a lover is a labyrinth
of false starts and miscalculations

Here are the parrots, she says, which Mayor Washington,
the Mayor of Chicago,
in that apartment on Lake Michigan

Heraclitean, for instance: the world as a gaseous
Shimmer, like afterburner fumes in the oily night sky
Outside Carbondale, where lovers pass through the flux

My Daddy slapped my hand against my cheek.
“Don’t hit yourself. Why are you hitting yourself?”
He held my wrists, and laughed. I cried. My hands,

These days our artifacts live in dormitories,
prisons, adopted homes; the world’s museums.
Fragments of stone and bone, white figurines,

Tired now, by candlelight and in the grip
Of much undoing to be done, we strip
   Away at varnish, burn old wills and deeds,