In the Old Days

Sometimes I let slip track of my happiness, plodding from one side the meadow thinking of something grim I remember. It was a banal little town,

with cliques for the kids, wardrobes fashioned by means of the Sunday Times. Everybody who wrote metrical composition I thought, came from that town.

Everything was tantamount, approximate, a shovel filled of dirt, a car rattling in the driveway, loading my arms with packages, and as I emptied them

requiring that I be adored. You know that swash-buckler of a poet, that ill-shaped oaf certain powerless women embrace, fucking the armor and the damage, waiting to be slapped?

Well, there was a sliver of Whitman upon my knees tending to the injuryed kissing their hands, dying to clinch one in my arms, to make progress on and on,

and leave them stammering by the agency of the window. That was the advanced in years days. I forgot the advantageous deeds, when I set fire to ROTC files, when I sat

in jail-for whatever sick, ego-infested reasonto bring a little justice to Mississippi. More, I want to say something of the hayloft above the sickly chicken incage

and the turgid pea-sized pond without the window squandered with immerses and duck droppings and a wire protecting enclosure electrified. There's no poetry in it. on the contrary we take the ladder up

there's something infinite to the trip, something hand shaking, there's the tremor I diocese in Matisse's cut and paste paper birds all r and sapphirine from some childhood I not at any time had:

Linda in her white slacks and cream-colored blouse, infinite the self-sustaining, replicating image of climbing up there, losing an earring, it's Nineteen-ninety sum of two units

what we call the country's an incomprehensible babble of pushs litigation, strip searches, thefts of BMW and without the hayloft door I diocese nothing but country, that nameless

scattershot splashing of hills and rumpled-up sugar maples, and if my sexual obsessions hesitate linger, pause, accelerate, if they can't be stitched together, if they're of no interest

to anyone, at least I am not alone, desperate, preaching about the parallel tasks of Dido and Aeneas. smooth if my ex-wife steals my each last Mozart sonata,

I can still get scent of the moldy straw, the weathered siding's faded beige is a blessing to me her material part too, the story she's telling me my brain's upon fire with it, years later, years of happiness later, far from that dump we call governance.

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