The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly Read Free

last time,
    there they cried with you a last time,
    now the shelter is only a hailstone
    that fell there,
    for already they’ve folded away the voices,
    already they’ve put away the light,
    now that this one
    whom we told
    nothing
    goes away saying I hear your words,
    I will seek these things,
    I will know by these signs.

Surreptitious Kissing
    I want to say that
    forgiveness keeps on
    dividing, that hope
    gives issue to hope,
    and more, but of course I
    am saying what is
    said when in this dark
    hallway one encounters
    you, and paws and
    assaults you—love
    affairs, fast lies—and you
    say it back and we
    blunder deeper, as would
    any pair of loosed
    marionettes, any couple
    of cadavers cut lately
    from the scaffold,
    in the secluded hallways
    of whatever is
    holding us up now.

From a Berkeley Notebook
    One changes so much
    from moment to moment
    that when one hugs
    oneself against the chill
    air at the inception
    of spring, at night,
    knees drawn to chin,
    he finds himself in the arms
    of a total stranger,
    the arms of one he might move
    away from on the dark playground.
    Also, it breaks the heart
    that the sign revolving like
    a flame above the gas
    station remembers the price
    of gas, but forgets entirely
    this face it has been
    looking at all day.
    And so the heart is exhausted
    that even in the face
    of the dismal facts we wait
    for the loves of the past
    to come walking from the fire,
    the tree, the stone, tangible
    and unchanged and repentant
    but what can you do.
    Half the time I think
    about my wife and child,
    the other half I think how
    to become a citizen
    with an apartment, and sex
    too is quite on my mind,
    though it seems the women
    have no time for you here,
    for which in my larger, more
    mature moments I can’t blame them.
    These are the absolute
    pastures I am led to:
    I am in Berkeley, California,
    trapped inside my body,
    I am the secret my body
    is going to keep forever,
    as if its secret were
    merely silence. It lies
    between two mistakes
    of the earth,
    the San Andreas
    and Hayward faults,
    and at night from
    the hill above the stadium
    where I sleep,
    I can see the yellow
    aurora of Telegraph
    Avenue uplifted
    by the holocaust.
    My sleeping
    bag has little
    cowboys lassoing bulls
    embroidered all over
    its pastel inner
    lining, the pines are tall
    and straight, converging
    in a sort of roof
    above me, it’s nice,
    oh loves, oh loves, why
    aren’t you here? Morgan,
    the pyjamas are so
    lonesome without
    the orangutans—I write
    and write, and transcend
    nothing, escape
    nothing, nothing
    is truly born from me,
    yet magically it’s better
    than nothing—I know
    you must be quite
    changed by now, but you
    are just the same, too,
    like those stars that keep
    shining for a long time after
    they go out—but it’s just a light
    they touch us with this
    evening amid the fine
    rain like mist, among the pines.

On the Olympic Peninsula
    Stranger, to one like you,
    here only the old
    people feel like talking—
    but abruptly, as if already in the midst
    of talk, as if they sensed
    with you a kinship in closeness
    to endings—and you aren’t kind
    with them. Stranger,
    here the sea doesn’t obliterate,
    but just lies there carved up
    into bays and inlets, indolent
    or waiting. In the town’s one
    hip bar the lesbians lean
    into sinister embraces, dancing
    together and speaking just softly
    enough that you can’t hear. Your girl
    is gone and you are here
    because you think maybe they
    have taken her from you
    into this establishment where the men
    stink like murdered sea animals;
    they have flying beards, black
    mouths they spill the beer
    into over their laughter
    so that you think of someone urinating on coals.
    Sometimes you unexpectedly taste
    the inside of your own mouth, choking
    as you kiss this bitter foreigner,
    and you feel yourself forgetting, even as you remember,
    that you’ve gone strange and everybody
    else is happy and