How Deep The Pain Goes Quiet, After

I WONDER WHERE

I wonder where they went

—all the people I used to know:

I wonder if they ever got to

where it was they said they were going,

or if they got anywhere at all?

And I wonder who it was that started

or didn’t,

or which of them stopped, and why…

or just plain gave up and quit—

because they

got scared

and

maybe tried to run away

to another place,

that they couldn’t fi nd anywhere

anyway

… no matter how hard they tried.

POEM

I wanted to make love to you
that afternoon—
you were
in the kitchen scraping carrots
… hurling tables over chairs.
Alone in bed I felt it
—fresh after a shower
and all my mind a haze.

Funny,
how we compliment each other,
like lightning and snow….

There is not enough of us here
—too much, sometimes.
But that will be:
and we leave it
to go begging…

I wonder, for what purpose?

BELATED VALENTINE

The fourteenth of February has come
and gone: I didn’t write you a poem.
As if that day were any less to be made of
… I don’t know.
Or more, for that matter.

Sometimes, and not even words or thoughts
will come:
the date passes.

Today is the twenty-eighth of March
—I still love you. And now…
what do you think of the war?

FOR DONALD

Many an old and bloodless moon
—time changes: we bend.

Hard to the root, persistence colds
stoney… will never die.

For there is always something in a wish
to keep turning over.

How by fractions, we may be forced to
cling or repeat. Will never leave us
alone…

no matter how deep.

Wherever you go… however we sleep.

PATRAS

One of the most beautifully erotic things
I have ever seen… Greece, in carnival

and on the street, some narrow cobbled
square in dim light… a young boy

reaching up
to kiss the pale, masculine throat… of
another kind of darkness.

Left me wondering—the influences
of all the world’s indifferences, the
frights

and how we have become not half what we
would have chosen… as if somewhere

for some, and they are right

not even drunkenness could ease the pain:
the way some live… others must fight.

The whys never completely answered even
by the doing—the journeys incomplete

by mere spacing… reaching. Yet to find
and to touch:
this then the end, the final greeting.

What invariables destiny has decreed:
while somewhere, someone… however hopeful
the teaching.