I'm going to start my own poems with a poem called "Gambit,"
which was written for my wife, and is in a sense about her.
It's a left-handed, surrealistic love poem, I suppose.
It has an element of forgetting in it.
Forgetting, I have a forgetting fetish, it's very big with me.
And everything I can't forget accidentally,
I try to forget deliberately.
You've heard people say that they couldn't remember names,
but they always remembered faces.
Well, I forget names and I put faces out of my mind
as soon as possible too.
So this has that element in it.
It is a little tribute to my wife.
"Gambit," which is as you know a move in chess, opening
move in chess.
"I have boarded up the stations of waiting,
for mice buy tickets to nowhere.
And windows listen for announcements of broken glass.
Let the hands of dead clocks rest
on the final numbers of chance.
The distance is over.
I have discarded the menu for lunch and the menu for dinner.
Each day, I choose something different to forget.
And clear light arrives, bringing
the sea as it should be, the boats where they are.
I go forward, while irreplaceable leaves dripped
from green cages, and spiders are playing their webs
like guitars.
In one hand, I carry your picture to guide me.
And with the other, I am combing your name through my hair."