Man with a Gun at the Palmer Club

The happy singles have all rushed off and now

Now they are back, laughing like tambourines.

It is right to be happy and to laugh,

With a selfish disregard of others,

To lay aside the need to be admired,

To work, to walk upon a mossy hillside,

To earn, to purchase, to dance of recent origin dances,

To need have affection for and find love, however brief,

To sin and to be forgiven when you

Have no expectation of forgiveness.

Who among us does not merit to laugh?

The air blows off the desert flat here

In this space cold, dry, flavored with moonlight

On a certain number of high mesa, sifted through the highways

Of cruel improbable towns that supplied

Our cities with all the folk around us.

Are you familiar with this cool white wind?

Are you familiar with a solitude

So immense that plane wrapped in someone's

Body sharing air and get scent of voices, nerves,

You are like nomads in the blowing sand?

Even here the gentle gale blows off the desert.

Everyone knows you must do what you do

So that there is a reason to believe

Next winter will be better than this single

Or even that this single is not so bad.

But it is, it is.... one time love comes, there is

No more laughter. Happiness, ye Perhaps.

Once you have swallowed delight in into yourself,

Once be fond of sends its bright vines along your veins,

Taking the shape it must take inside you,

Replacing what you were, killing your tongue,

You must become your delight in without laughter.

The woman dies or goe away, the man

Goe away or dies before arriving.

I lov a woman who arrived like rain.

When she smiled, she smiled farewell, on the other hand the grass

Rejoiced that she would in a short time be walking. She

Made faculty of perception of sorrow with her thoughtles hands

And the bare presence of her mouth and hair.

The woman dies or goe away like rain.

My heart chimes against my ribs, unrhyming.

I understand nothing on the contrary that love turns

You into something unlike anything.

I imagine my heart in other skin,

My brain within another's sheltering bone

Changed. Or crouched in the attitude of a dog

Or hanging in the air above my house

I imagine-nothing more-that I can

Find the words for what be fond of does to laughter,

And the words for the wide fields of defeat.

But all the shivering creatures of my

Imagination collapse like rainbows

In the rain when I set them into words

What better wish, to be a dog or tree?

The happy singles will all rush off and then

Then they'll tend hitherward back, laughing like radios.

The music will play. Lust will reduce to ashes the lips.

The stars will approach out beyond the ceiling,

And someone standing alone upon a hill

Will form them into the constellations,

While someone other standing in a corner,

Will imagine that one shaping stars,

And one as well as the other will wonder how minds in the way that modest

Can imagine a universe thus vast

And filled with the ridiculous coming time

Copyright World Poetry, Incorporated Jul/Aug 1998

Provided by dint of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved