This one is called "The Ice Cream Wars."
I didn't know what this title meant when I wrote the poem,
but then about a year later, an ice cream truck
blew up in lower Manhattan, injuring many people.
And no one ever found out exactly what happened,
but there was speculation that it
was a revival of the ice cream wars of the early 1960s, which
was between rival ice cream distributing companies, which
I had not known about when I wrote the poem.
This goes to show if you wait long enough,
your poem will come to mean something.
[LAUGHTER]
"Although I mean it and project the meaning as hard as I can
into its brushed metal surface, it cannot,
in this deteriorating climate, pick up where I leave off.
It sees the Japanese text about two men
making love on a foam rubber bed as among the most
massive secretions of the human spirit.
Its part is in the shade beyond the iron spikes of the fence,
mixing red with blue.
As the day wears on, those who come to seem reasonable
are shouted down.
Why you all go?
Look who's talking?
Let's see you climb off that tower.
The waterwork's architecture, both stupid and grandly
humorous at the same time, is a kind of mask for him
like a seal's face.
Time and the weather don't always go hand in hand as here.
Sometimes, one is slanted sideways,
disappears for a while.
Then later, it's forget-me-not time and rapturous
clouds appear above the lawn, and the
rose tells the old, old story the Pearl of the Orient
occluded and still apt to rise at times.
A few black smudges on the outer boulevards like squashed midges
and the truth becomes a hole, something one has always known.
A heaviness in the trees, and no one can say where it comes from
or how long it will stay.
A randomness, a darkness of one's own."