Yellow, a thesis on everyday life.
How you yellow.
Stopping the patient among us, as if we
were actually anyone or you, the smart one
with a degree in spelunking
and not enough change or reading Tasso
you discovered what a tropism was, let
the journalist in you have his idea of what
the vehicle should be called, asked
about it, hurrying us to our home
to figure out just what gives
every part of a building its just dimensions.
And in the evening, side by side
we have just discovered the change in our lives,
a hunch that a hand waved in the weather
would remain aloft, proof any reduction
Dawn spills out of
slate sky. But It's a dawn of moldy words, old
fingers: colors of knives and concrete.
My skin waits
for an orangejuice sun, to be struck alive by
different weather.
Still the room drowns. He said, Baby you'd better
choose now.
Beating, beating. Under the mountain of grey
sheets, no answer.
Verbs of dust
hurt my eye. But I don't see how to
go with him.
Or how to stay in these walls I can't live in
where everything
falls with the frostbrown apples, where an
see each
thing
one
combination
or
another
possibilities
of rain
I figured that some degree
of evaporation could be
expected
even in cool twilight
turning my collar up
and buttoning the last button
Defiantly she slipped her
step-ins off twirling them
on her finger
there's a weather map
she said, at the bus station
I remember distinctly
low barometric pressure
is predicted for the Northwest
portion
I figured, I admitted, something
what's gray and comes in quarts
is an elephant or my brain;
what loves or walks slowly in
the land is an elephant gray
and old, they have waited a long
time for her to give birth.
what i am saying is the age,
we live in, we grow old in,
grayness is not a state of mind.
you have red-blonde hair, another
is black, and there are jews with
orangey hair from the east of europe.
come to whatever you come to slowly.
haste makes elephants gray before
their time, routs the bears from
the caves before their time, turns
during the past few months become monastic
content. this
unseemly phase
is im sure a function
of space
of having only the weather
to contend with
& i embrace it & hang the bells
i make of its wind
over your side of the bed
Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.
Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.
But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.
That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.
Today’s whether report
calls for increasing perplexity
in the morning hours,
followed by intermittent
quandaries in the afternoon,
with wonderstorms tonight.
Tomorrow ought to be fraught
with absurdity, though there’s
a possibility of patchy meaning late.
Twice, perhaps, I have awakened surprised
by snow in the wide field. November: bare oak branches
like cast iron. A long breath drawn
down a blue canyon in my lungs.
A superb stillness, plenty of room.
My mind sits in a corner of such weather.
It sees a few men in brown clothes
cleaning an auditorium. They slam
metal folding-chairs back into two-dimensional
space. That sound echoes like gunshots across
the bare field between November and March.
Someone incinerates a newspaper
containing today’s weather forecast. My eyes
follow cinders and smoke into a pale sky,
into a dream of weather in which a storm
descends to devour my mind’s desires
How much do you love me, a million bushels ?
Oh, a lot more than that, Oh, a lot more.
And to-morrow maybe only half a bushel ?
To-morrow maybe not even a half a bushel.
And is this your heart arithmetic?
This is the way the wind measures the weather.
I have seen a lovely thing
Stark before a whip of weather:
The tree that was so wistful after spring
Beating barren twigs together.
The birds that came there one by one,
The sensuous leaves that used to sway
And whisper there at night, all are gone,
Each has vanished in its way.
And this whip is on my heart;
There is no sound that it allows,
No little song that I may start
But I hear the beating of dead boughs.