Album
Irish castles, falling to their knees,
collapsing in the saturated light
in grass that looks white
in the wind, early Easter grass
like hair to frail for the comb.
In unkempt keep
sheep wander through—
the slattern gates ajar.
I stood in a lancet window,
a dolmen effigy in the wreck of a church.
My mother was taking the picture.
That was a funny coat
I wore—when I was thirty-five.
She cut my feet off
to get the ruin of the church in.
Her way.
And what will he do with the pictures
he’s taking of me?
There will have to be albums
no one sees.
Who will know him that knew me
where he goes? What reason
will there be
for opening
my page?
Sloth in the Land of the Puritan Ethic
Like Oblomov sitting his life out
between muslin sheets
laundered by kulaks,
here in America where everyone
who can work, works at two or three
occupations or their hobbies
obsess them beyond sense,
it is poetic to be meager and dim
about certain things
when everything is surging the other way.
Conservation
is a deliberate act of the will,
not the saving of flattened and greasy
tin cans for suburban virtue.
There is no guilt
to notice the incidents
one needs to,
how dust scales the lilac leaves
after their hearts spread out
a month in the raw of nature.
But to make the bank manager understand,
that would tax Thoreau.
