Here's a poem that takes as its title
the very funny name that's given to the pinball machine
when you kind of bounce it around too hard,
and you think you're winning.
And it's at that moment that the little sign lights up,
and you've lost the game.
You've probably broken the machine for a while.
Tilt.
I am on a peninsula 40 miles out in the Atlantic
and have driven my car to a mechanic
to replace its ball joints.
I left it in Wellfleet, and now I'm walking every half mile
and crying, and walking every other the four miles out
to the harbor.
When I get there, I intend to pace the pier
and receive the appreciation of the fishermen.
This probably won't happen, and not
because I'm not good looking, and tender in grief.
In a way, the cry has become more like a detonation--
dry, brief.
It's all right.
I'm not doing this to forget.
And I feel great humor and communion,
standing on this pier.
Where my own two feet had been on similar
docks in Amsterdam, Biarritz, Nice, Athens,
I remember my mind wandered, even then, from the two lovers
I happened to have traveling the sun to serve our ends.
Tomorrow, why the hell on Earth even bring it up?
Like a tide, brackish, effervescent, pink, familial,
I'll be back in town with my freedom
to come and go geared to the misconception I want to.
I wrote a good friend and fruit grower,
Mary Fisher, a few weeks ago.
Mary, I'm on a red bedspread in the White Horse Inn in America.
You're on the other soiled coast, California.
I'm talking broke, Mary, and more beautiful than that
day you saw me leaving my husband many lovers back,
feeling rummy.
Christ, girls, art, money.
I'm 33.
This isn't TV.
And there's a war on.
Do you want to live forever?
Or is that poetry?
A wild iris I was sent wasted at the White Horse,
powerless to a fault, and one for everyone.