And this is "Against the Wind."
"My first wife's older sister's third husband's daughter,
that's about as long as a line of poetry should be.
A field anthropologist's kinship map?
Karmic debris?
The genealogical chart at the back of a family saga?
The reckless patterns of the lives
of a generation for whom desire hollows us out and hollows us
out, just sailed by me on the sunny street.
I could have changed her diaper.
Desire that kills us and kills us and raises us up
and raises us up.
Always laughable, seen from the outside.
The English wit who complained of sex that the posture was
ridiculous, had not been struck down by the god or goddess
to whose marble threshing floor offerings of grapes,
or olive boughs, or flowers, or branches
heavy-laden with new fruit, or bound bundles
of heavy-headed wheat were brought
as to any other mystery or power.
I remember my first wife's older sister
sitting on the back steps on a summer night,
sick with her dilemma, smoking cigarettes
while bats veered above the shriveled persimmons
on the tree in the half-light.
And the scraping sound of a neighbor cleaning off
the grill of a barbecue with a wire brush
came across the backyard fence like a chorus
of ratcheting wrens.
He's the nicest man I could imagine, she had said.
And I feel like I'm dying, living with him.
Probably in her mid-thirties then,
flea markets on Saturday mornings,
family dinners on Sundays, a family large enough so
that there was always a birthday,
some maiden aunt from the old neighborhood
in San Francisco, or a brother-in-law,
or one of the children.
Had not lived where tearing or, like burnished leaves
in the vortex of wind, the part of you that might observe
the comedy of gasps and moans, ass up in the air,
gives way, does not demure, though she did laugh
at herself, an erotic attachment one
whole winter to the mouth of a particular television actor.
She turned the TV on, watching for a minute with a kind
sick yearning, shake her head, turn the TV off, go back
to the translation of the letters of Van Gogh,
or do some ironing.
That always seemed to calm her down, she said,
the sweet smell, the sweet iron smell of steam and lemon.
Honest to god, she'd say about herself,
an expression the elderly aunts might have used.
For Pete's sake, she'd say.
Get yourself together.
A hollow flute or bell not struck,
settling out in a great shimmering not-sound in waves
and waves to the place where the stunned dead
in the not-beginning are gathered
to the arms of the living in the not-noon.
Who breathed them?
Who rage against and breathe the always solicited, always
unattended dead in the tiered plazas or lush meadows
of their gathered absence?
A man wants a woman that way.
A person, a person, down on all fours, ravenous and humbled.
And later, lovers, you remember the shoeshine boys in Quito,
in that seedy city market?
Missing teeth, unlaced tennis shoes,
they approach you smiling.
They have no rules and they'll steal anything.
And so would you, if you were them.
The capital has been sacked, the temple hangings burned,
and the peasants are roasting the royal swans in the ruins
over a makeshift fire made from the sticks of the tax
assessor's empire chair up against a broke wall.
It's Lent, the saints' bodies dressed in purple sacks,
will be taken off at Easter.
For Magdalene, of course, the Resurrection
didn't mean she got him back.
It meant she'd lost him in another way.
And she knew she had to put that loss away, to fold it calmly
into its silences.
It was the voice she loved, the body, not the god,
or the idea of the body, which was, perhaps, the god."