Dear what I’ll do,

We are all familiar with terror.

This produces the coming catastrophe
of mind or contagion; produces the cloud,
crowd’s roil overturning,

this discipline of questions. They don’t read, they don’t know—
the students,

lovers of terror,
voters, taxpayers,

anonymous commenters, ex-soldiers, future mothers, fellow citizens, customers of cable television,

Notes on a lecture, 3/2/11.

Felt through my hair for the missing comb. Kept counting three, knew
there were four. The blind side feels for itself.

• • •

“BOYS WITH FEELINGS” on Lowry Hill Liquors’ worn brick
It’s been the Eighties my whole life.

At the museum with my students
there I saw a nude reminded me of you, how powerfully he

swayed back from those hips where flowered

the firm or dozing, dowsing cock. Go on—I am always in mind of you; let me

“turn to each other” “turn to one another” “turn to

one another” (Spahr) this leaves so little to the political imagination

(eyes his profile on the pillow—finds in dark the
familiar outline but are his
eyes open or closed)

• • •

She doesn’t know, she’s never loved a man like you.

Loft a wrist. heft of lost self.
a sheaf of what wheat.

10/16/12. How my writing changed when I
began to need it.

So today I read
Maggie Nelson quoting Adorno (“Lyric Poetry & Society”): “the lyric I—

that is, the sound of an individuated self,
in all its privacy, individuality, & autonomy—is

always an excision.”

Yesterday I told you what I was thinking
promised myself I wouldn’t.

Hegel: a perfect self-expression will move society forward
p.s. assuming you’re not inwardly ugly?

(Kara Walker: “dear you insufferable cunt”)

 

• • •

Thinking about writing to Elle,
Dear friend, no, you really didn’t know
what I was going through
, it was different for me, I couldn’t just
hang on to the cliff’s edge
like Wile E. Coyote.

For one thing, we didn’t love each other. For another,

(acre of lemon trees)
I loved someone else.

Didn’t you notice?

A wife agrees. A wife agrees to conceal. She conceals a story. But the story unfolds inside her.

Can I express anger without doing only that?
But why not do that?