Plundered Hearts Read Free Page B

euros.
                   Pinched and idly gestured toward a plinth
    Two centuries of customers have careworn
                   To a shallow trough not quite my length,
                             I’m forced to burrow
    Into a pose much more flagellant than faun.
    The sodden towel is too heavy now to hold
                             Itself across me—
                   And there is the pasha’s bay window,
    The shriveled bulblet, the whole ill-shaped scaffold
                   Of surplus fact and innuendo,
                             From arthritic scree
    To the congenital heart flutter’s toehold.
    The attendant walks up and down on my back,
                             Pacing the problem,
                   Then plucks, then mauls, then applies a foam
    He scrubs in until it causes an attack
                   Of radiance, the world’s palindrome
                             Suddenly solemn,
    Suddenly seeming to surrender its knack
    For never allowing us simply to want
                             What we already
                   Have, or are, or perhaps could have been.
    His hand-signal to get up seems like a taunt.
                   I lie there, my fist under my chin,
                             Senses unsteady,
    Something gradually, like a tiny font,
    Coming into focus. I sit up and start
                             To notice small bits
                   Of grit when I run my hand over
    My chest. But wasn’t this debris the chief part
                   Of the package deal? The makeover
                             And its benefits?
    In the fog I can’t really see what trademark
    Schmutz the Oriental Luxury Service
                             Has failed to wash off.
                   So I put it in my mouth and taste
    Two dank gobbets—salty, glairy, and grayish—
                   I should have recognized as the waste
                             That was my old self,
    A loofah having scraped it from each crevice
    And bulge, from every salacious thought and deed.
                             Every good one too.
                   It is the past, not just what is wrong,
    It is the embarrassments we still breast-feed,
                   That we absentmindedly so long
                             To shed. A new
you,
    Oneself an innate second person succeeds.
    How do the saints feel when they fall to their knees,
                             God coming to light?
                   Less ecstatic than ashamed, I fear,
    Of bodies never worthy of being seized.
                   Encumbered by the weight of a tear,
                             In hopeless hindsight
    They see all that the flesh can never appease,
    All that the flesh is obliged to mortify.
                             Here I am, laid out,
                   Looking up to where nothing appears,
    Hardly wondering why nothing satisfies
                   And yet saddened that it’s all so clear.
                             Tulip waterspouts
    Trickle. Reservoirs deep underground reply.

from
SCENES FROM ANOTHER LIFE
1981
AUBADE
    Snowbanks, so heaped by happenstance
    A melting glance would misconstrue
    Them as eiderdown, blanket the trails
    Blazed, day in, night out, at dawn,
    In dreams, whose patchwork accidents
    Become the frosted dormer through
    Brightening panes of which details
    That make a world of sense are drawn.
A WINTER WITHOUT SNOW
    Even the sky here in