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

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

I could love the pine tree,
and the road going back and forth like a blue thread,

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

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;

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.

I slept sometimes for thirty or forty minutes
while the violins shrieked and the cellos trembled.

Hug me, mother of noise. 
Find me a hiding place. 
I am afraid of my voice. 

The season of the cut and clear. The bales squared
in the distance, a hollow house, no windows or doors.
The Ns of the fence posts, perforated shadows.