This one's called Descriptive Passages.
It begins with-- begins with a line of conversation,
which I overheard at a party and--
OK, Descriptive Passages.
Your hair is drunk again, someone explains to me.
And it's not only my hair.
No matter how rack-natty my clothes were,
they're rumpled on my body, dressed up
like a child performing for its parents' guests.
How much of childhood is spent on tiptoe?
Clean up, wise up, speak up, wake up and act your age.
But also, one is uppity.
Something's gone to his head.
A bubble in the bloodstream, a scratch in the record,
a bad habit.
No theory can explain personality
which expands to include, if it can,
all its contradictory urges.
It's so hard to think about this fact that we don't.
We use crude code.
The one with a limp, with big tits, with the drunk hair.
And we loved so much to be loved or failing
that remembered that we limp a little
and thrust out our chests.
On me, it looks good, as the hunchback said.
Use description carefully.
For example, today, as I glower out at morning fog,
I can feel the fatigue of matter.
How glum a job endurance is.
The gulls over Lake Union look heavy and disconsolate
like office life.
Is this all there is?
I could ask, secretly excited, because if it is,
I've saved myself so much response and responsibility.
It's harder than we think to name our children,
but how could we be accurate?
They'll find stories to live by.
I envision my children sitting loosely in middle age.
I give them good wine to talk by.
I've lit them a fire if it's cold.
I can't leave them alone, I think from the grave.
A father's work is never done.
One son turns to the other and says,
you know how I always think of him?
I remember his drunk hair.
There's a pause.
It's harder than we think to name our emotions.
There were those sentimental poems
he wrote about us and his drunk hair, the other son says.
Proud for the intimate talk and sad for how
little such talk says, though it wasn't drunk that often.