This morning I am ready if you are,
To hear you speaking in your new language.
I think I am beginning to have nearly
A way of writing down what it is I think
You say.  You enunciate very clearly
Terrible words always just beyond me.

I stand in my vocabulary looking out
Through my window of fine water ready
To translate natural occurrences
Into something beyond any idea
Of pleasure.  The wisps of April fly
With light messages to the lonely.

This morning I am ready if you are
To speak.  The early quick rains
Of Spring are drenching the window-glass.
Here in my words looking out
I see your face speaking flying
In a cloud wanting to say something.
 

    --W. S. Graham, IMPLEMENTS IN THEIR PLACES (1977)
 
 
 

to the whore who took my poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
here'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
 see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Charles Bukowski 1974

Sleeping With the Net-maker

She speaks to me when she's asleep.
Her lips move but do not mean
anything against the dark,
each word air on my fingertips,
each breath a twitch in her chest.
At night I am another boundary
containing her in her sleep
like the blue linen ducks flying
beneath her spreading hair, the sheets
twisting between her glowing legs,
the wooden frame holding her
above the cold wooden floor.
I watch her when she cannot know.

Tonight I watch her hands weave
a winding net over us.
They float above the lines of her stomach
tying each knot and squaring it off
until the room is filled with twine.

Soon she'll be the fisherman
seining air for loaves of fish.
She casts her net with arms spread out,
feet together, hair swirling.
Outside the water cracks
against the glass to catch
her throw. It gives up its form
to take her net and washes over
into the room teeming with fish
and bread, thick with what she wants.

I watch her cast for hours and learn
to live beneath her grey water.
She spills redfish at my feet
but I tell her I'm not hungry.
Her lips still move for me as she pulls
the net toward us. I lie down
among her piles of bread.