"Civilization."
"Civilization.
There's an art to everything.
How the rain means April and an ongoingness like that of song
until at last it ends.
A centuries old set of silver hand bells
that once an altar boy swung processing.
You're the same wilderness you've always
been slashing through briars, the bracken
of your invasive self.
So he said in a dream.
But the rest of it, all the rest,
was waking more often than not to the next extravagance
to Blackamoor statues each mirroring the other,
each hoisting forever upward his burden of hand-painted carved
by hand peacock feathers.
Don't you know it?
'Don't you know I love you' he said.
He was shaking.
He said, 'I love you'
There's an art to everything.
But I've done with this life what I meant not to do
or would have meant maybe had I understood.
Though I have no regrets, not the broken but still flowering
dogwood, not the honey locust either, not even
the ghost walnut with its non-branches whose
every shadow is memory, memory.
As he said to me once, 'that's all garbage down the river
now' turning but as the utterly lost--
because addicted-- do: resigned all over again.
It only looked.
It-- it must only look like leaving.
There's an art to everything, even turning away.
How eventually even hunger can become a space to live in.
How they made out of shamelessness something
beautiful for as long as they could."
I get lots of flak from a certain friend
of mine for that poem.
Because his favorite phrase is that's
all garbage down the river now.
So when that appeared in the poem,
he wanted to know like, what about royalties,
royalties for a poem.
And he has these Blackamoor statues.
And he has these old silver hand bells
from when he was an altar boy.
It's like be careful who you sleep with.
That's the motto of that.
"Immaculate each leaf and every flower."
Which now that I think of it is a little bit of a faye title.
But it's there now.