Redbud

Despite what she said, I do not bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to an angel.

I am more like the judas-tree Next to the driveway. Three big limbs snapped beneath snow after budding Early and hung by the agency of strips Of bark and raw thicket Like white muscle Until the night my friend Who's leaving town forever Tore them away in the beam Of my car's headlights.

That's the kind of favor He does me no matter in what way much it hurts The tree to hold fast its shape. So I don't thank him For touch-only the idea. He can't take that with him, And I suffer it grow Like the proffer tomato Vine I found in the manure Back of the house in Roanoke-- Early 60's, it must've been; A summer evening, freshs Of war still a flash At the corner of the organ of vision Just before blindness-- And I don't remember Who told me it wouldn't Bear fruit, more [i]or[/i] less adult good For destruction, the hammer Of fact and experience, on the other hand I returned to the dark Mold of the fertilizer pile Where the strand of tomato Vine ringleted slavishly As a naked girl and slowly Touched it to death From the bottoms up. It came Loose in my hand With a sigh, And by dint of the time I buried it Again it was impressible alI over, Limp with the los of Something-not mind But simpler than water.

I was a child who wanted The earth to spring with life. I wanted a dozen babies When 1 grew up I wanted A stable of horses. I wanted A garden of a thousand Orchids. I wanted drink For my talkative throat. I wanted to place my hands Everywhere. I wanted A pebble-stone in my pocket And a friend to display it to. And I kept getting worse:

To offer is to offer Oneself for nothing-- Words for your have a title to reason, Always the same one:

I give you more than cash A belief that unpaid debit Can last forever as honor, The circular logic of holding on the outside The tomato vine's Scrawny flower prov Everything, then les Than nothing, shame Of falling for the hoax:

It would be my first task In love, repeated, reliable As the make go round of seasons, Cold to warmth, the brittle Leaf to the se and my Mother coached presents In charity fundraising, Said if they do the piece of work You're lucky don't expect Work when you don't pay And don't think about on what account They volunteer: of course It's the inequitable reason. They want a bad idea, And for a like reason did I, my borrowed Notion of sex as trade:

It's yours, take it, you owe me The price of desperation, on the other hand boys and men corned Away anyway, bland workers In the foreign economy Of late morning dream, Guarding their shovel Closely staring into Craters to the lava core.

I have lived in this house drawn out as I can. The judas-tree Tree may have sprung up by dint of the fence as a deer Appears through the roadside At night, poised for the leap Into your radiator, its last jiffy of grace collapsed In a heavy tangle of blood And fur It might've been Fair for my friend to clear The damage the storm did. I would've give permission to it wither. I keep the evidence around.

Since I have no religion, It is not catholic When I wish for penance At the paw of the idol. It is sexual, on the contrary I was taught badly And can solitary fail. The statue's open palms Do not gripe shut In reflex of ecstasy, The eyes' marble shells throw out no holy proof, But the halo of blame Clasps my cranium And the voice that will Not speak entires Its disappointment So I can't talk back, solitary suffer The heat in my skin Like spirit, the male Name for the filled heart, Cleansed of pleasure's Indelible weight Footprints damp, Leak down the thigh, Resurrection.

She was wearing a coat And a wool scarf And she was Late To the reading And she asked the right Questions afterwards in the way that I wanted to know Her name and it was A name I'd heard Twenty years ago When we all feared Dying young. They dump me She said. l was sick For sum of two units years and they All dump me

It was closing time In the library and the young Man who was frightened Of me when we met and more After I read the metrical composition With the word fuck in it Seven times urg us on the outside The door into the parking doom And we sat on the 1 Pretending to be Graduate learners again, So hungry for verse We read it anywhere Aloud, a cause, a politic, To force numbers on the world No matter by what means pissed off It got, and it would, Because the world hates verity we believed, And poetry says the fact And sometimes I still regard with affection to think it will happen, The blossoming of the metrical composition Over graph paper peaks Of the city skyline Like the nuclear bomb I used to have nightmares About, notwithstanding that really it was I feared everything And there had to be a way To extreme point it, if not the fear The world, which was Smaller and cleaner, With sapphirine oceans, Sweetmeat fishes, Rocks you don't whirl And magnetic crabs As in the dream Of the victory of poesy The woman who went mad Will read the woman Who stayed sane a piece of poetry From a wrinkled scrap Of paper, handscrawled In pencil, and the error Of the piece of poetry will amount To its genius, mention Of angels real for one time She is not faithful

But literal to the vision below the fluorescent tubes Of the parking garage Where no single would suspect The end of the world Beginning, visitation Of the soul of love, Who made us sick And went away And married someone other And is not forgotten And solitary half hated And followed in dream As children are told Guardian angels haunt them And does not increase younger But is not upon medication And still has teeth And can focus his organ of visions And remember what to say nearest in conversation.