I'd sent them off in letters to friends
or keep them in that way that is for another person but kept,
waiting for James one day, and actually
the same thing with Susie, I remember,
waiting for them to come by, writing one just
to be waiting more presently, I think, with them,
excited to be with them and not sharing it,
I guess, to be more with them, too.
Crushed and ragged piece of street
in which I waited all morning.
My tongue and my face feel no thing anymore.
There's a time when I started thinking about the book.
I wanted the social experience of sharing expanded,
being in people's lives over time,
entering, returning to, being lived with,
shared, made private, almost singular, and in relation
to you being physical things.
Basho used to slip a poem into the conversation.
And if it went unnoticed, it was a success.
I think of those and the unsuccessful ones, too.
Never even getting written down, just
awkwardly remaining a part of the conversation.
And some poems find the outward quality of a private experience
fulfills in all ways their outward needs.
Love poems can do this simply by being given,
or the poem you kept reading all summer,
meaning all that summer and not this, or writing.
Imagine an occasional poem unwittingly
making it so and making the occasion along with it.
And they're lost as many private little gifts, like breath,
still entering the air ephemeral and real.
Storm left flat, green leaves still live,
and a little bucket of flesh colored fruit.
The poems themselves mimicking a little batch away
as I tucked myself away.
The poems sent or shed in relation
to the needs or social impulses caused and gone
from feeling love with thoughtless persons and days
flat heap of news.
This life's a moon and, in some older time, was planets, too,
a trying voice spoke-- be home soon.
Sky not some cold, rainy thing, but blue before
and turned away, this frozen gush, my fever now full
leaked of summer.
Being that which does on a dead bulb flower,
land palm and different with barely yellow feather.
Jay said, stopping past the storm on their way
south October, to watch them while they're here.