This is called "Poem for My Twenty-eighth Year."
Shakespeare makes a big thing of the number seven
as being very important in a man's life.
When he's seven, when he's 14, and then when he's 21.
I don't know.
I wondered about the fourth seven, about 28.
28 seems an important number in a great many ways.
It seems to me that I'm reading novels.
Every novel that I pick up the main character
happens to be just my age.
I forgot who I was reading about today it was 31,
but at this time it was Far from the Madding Crowd
in the beginning sentence, where Thomas Hardy describes
Gabriel Oaks as being 28.
Just at that age where they've stopped calling him a young man
so he said.
"Poem for My Twenty-eighth Year."
The last, the last, the last, nothing can come through.
The gate is closed.
A shaft of sun permitting sight.
I hear the lark.
No more nightingale.
Back in the darkness remember a girl woman sexual child
with a mind of light.
Burrs stick to my socks in dry October.
Opens up the mind.
Leaves not muddled with trees.
The dead smell rustling in the frost.
The dance is not so loud.
We hear the separate words.
Past the window each old branch takes its own direction.
The moon, low in the lake through the trees,
are two moons tangled together in the branches.
28 the fourth seven.
Number of my years.
Phase of my conception.
Phases of the moon.
28 years.
28 days in the cycle of pulse caught in the middle.
Two magnets click together.
28 nights.
The moon flower feeds on its own sad light.
A girl is sent away with child.
A poem sticks in my throat.
Poet and girl in one phase of the moon.