ISSUE: Summer 1985
I don’t want to confuse the world
any more with songs about love.
They sound like the giant creakings
of a wooden ship that never comes
into port these days. And even if
there was one, we would be lost
before they decided who should board.
No, the air is vast on bright days,
and the sea full of myths and miseries
loose there in the transparent dark
like some relaxed dead thing pulled
and pushed. No, let us stop telling
each other stories about love.
Of naked bodies facing each other in
the room lit only because another is.
(How quietly and slowly they approach!)
Let us leave out those visions. My job
is to keep finding quiet rooms in this city.
To know one move ahead so when the owner
arrives I have a sense of real direction
as I walk to the next one,
and the one after.
