With Your Back to Half the Day

Let's talk too much and wake up tonight and worry
how we get human every day.

Let's argue for the point we were going to make long ago
and forgot in words that change the room's dimensions,
whose shame is ours and imperceptible to others
holding forth, interrupting the unexpected.

Let's scramble the midnight eggs with gossip
and sit in the cinema at 9 a.m.,
whispering that mood where everything could become a poem
(not unlike the money in your pocket
suddenly flying into the river,
becoming the river, becoming
a back stiffening when the sun finally rolls off it
and then bliss ambiguous).

Let's not so much flatter the giants
(who aren't as ordinary as their tells and wiles)
but joke with them like hapless governors, old lovers kept in shape;
they own questions, too, and might
let those disappointments slip.

Yes my broken-windowed friend,
the burrs in Dante's fur need combing out
like the struggle to submit to each voice we might call mine.
And there's the old story we wanted told of childhood
that was another frank resistance to the now-shorter life.
On the corner, in that slight at the counter,
and the sense of luck
like a traumatized muscle,
the still beautiful abounds.

Sing how.
Even if boredom seems the way of all flash.
Shall we go down in flaming acquaintanceship?
Shall we balance our blood?
Let's isolate the matter
neither liquid nor solid nor certainly gas.
Let's help ourselves to the problem.

It's prideful, of course, but I admit I love poorly--
which is not the same as, in youth, confessing
I've been a lousy lover. Age makes us grateful for love,
so attention is welcome even by the suffering and betrayed;
even spouses will hope we might become what they think we were.
They don't want that so much as the poetry in our pockets now.

The spouses go to bed early, yes, at this time of marriage.
And, remaining, we're relieved and disturbed by not knowing
how to perform as we have for other years.
We might well perform again when shown how we undid.
There are things to say in this. But the things avoided
are not so much unsaid as wordless.

One sits alone and is not one. One does the last dishes
and wonders should the next page in the novel be turned?
Should the wine in the glass enter one? The triumph

is discovering that there's still pleasure and satisfaction,
though it's difficult without the unmockable look.
How far dare I go with this before I fall asleep and sober up?

How far does anybody go when they enter or receive?
No one knows when it's the beginning. Oh, the hands,
my hands, are assured in memory. My heart--
not much different from every protagonist.
I'm faithful to habit, hating its romance, and I'm breaking.
Love, I know you are, too, and just as frightened.
Yet there are no words because time is with us and against us.

To ascend the mountain day with white water at your shoulder,
with a berry-freighted gut and all bushes still drooping red.
To see the snake vanish into tart grass fit for teething,
to sit on a stone that does nothing to insist you move.
A walking stick, once a limb, rests against a spruce trunk.
A white butterfly flutters to show the bee it's not a flower.
No companion, this stream roiling against rock, this perpetual composure.

No love in the frigid clarity of flow wearing down infinitesimally.
You rise, step through it, over it, figuring how. You note the path.
What is it behind you, pausing, that watches from the aspen eyes?
What do you taste, cupping the moment in your hand?
Around a bright nothing, gnats whirl. And your balance?
Lean forward and climb, the sun a wheel between your shoulders.
No peak awaits, no summing up, no wisdom in turning back.