Moving towards you , Talking Poetry

You are the You

You are the you in this poem,
Mon amour.
Harrisburg mon amour.
Boats break.

So-and-so asked me,
To whom does the you in your poem
Refer.
I said, Are you feeling well, So-and-so.

I can’t believe I said.
It. So sue me.
I said, It’s the beloved, So-and-so.
Oh is that all.

Well, I said, she wouldn’t think
It was so little.
To look up into your face
Is like looking into the devastated stars.

Lights of all kinds I traced,
You and you and you and you.
You are the you of this poem, mon amour.
Boats break.

(in: After a Lost Original, 1994)

***

Henry Hudson Looks at the Hudson

Henry Hudson turned to me and said:
Be expressionless and strong as me,
Be grim and green, stout as Cortez,
Double lock yourself within
Like a warning wife, and be divorced
From nothing, at last be a statue
Of a self, and threaten at night like a landing,
Turn to your river, like a monist on a raft,
And always found your river on a fault,
Be blind and copper, a mania on a column,
Obscured, finally, by a single cloud of brick.
I love you, that is why I do not talk
About your humorous desire to appease.
Rather complain, like a man, that there is no river.

***

After Asturiana

On the road to a door
On the way to a window

I saw nothing like a soul
Only the dust in competition

Lifted by the air
That was like a sailor joking

Nothing carried to nothing
A sailor was bouncing

In the world's salt: Now dance!
Now you are dancing like the world

Nothing equals nothing like a word
I get lost and make mistakes in your grace.

***

To An Idea

I wanted to start Ex Nihilo
I mean as a review of sorts*.
It's too much of a burst for some,
Too unanalyzably simple for others,
As one called perspective that vicious
Doctrine, but is it: to know nothing,
To taste something, dazzled by absence,
By your chair, by the chair of Salome?
Or yet another familiar dedication:
To an idea, writ in water,
To wild flesh, on the surface alone.
To you who carried me like mail
From one house to another.
Now the cars go past the lake, as if copying could exist.
The signs shine, through the Venetian blinds.

(in: To an Idea, 1988)

*this might be a reference to the Book of Genesis

***

Poem for you

I am jealous of the sand
beneath you
around you
what you see

bright things erased lady
sparkling and traveling without luggage
liquidity
before X
you are tattooed on my back music
dies down

I too grew up in
the soft hands
of the gods

and a little donkey will lead them

Tears, tears, and I know
just what they mean
honeysuckles at night

I wrote this poem for you and haven’t lost it

Copyright ©: David Shapiro

As the poet said himself, "This poem was inspired by love, the ocean and the doomed donkey in Robert Bresson’s film, "Au hasard Balthazar."

***

Unwanted Poems

Shyly he asked you if he could write you
poems
Can't remember her reply
I said Nothing is worse than unwanted poems
In the Navy you may be prosecuted for
Unwanted poems or rather sending
Or speaking through unwanted poems
Poor poetry! I always wanted to write
That poem entitled Unwanted Poems
Maybe I've gone and done that as the unwanted poet put it
But look at the snow as gift: hated by commuters
snow is finally loved and compared to poetry
there's an economy to snow-hatred
Finally, snow lightens worlds like (your) teeth
in your smile as you accept my perhaps necessary poems

(in: In Memory of an Angel, 2017, p. 79)

***

Cathedral

And oh the difficult languages!
and oh the easy languages!
Then you left.

When you were a boat
and I was a boat
We hid so much and so well we were finally

unable to find ourselves at all
Yes we left the keys
Your fingers were our cathedral

because everything you did was sacred to me -

(in: A Memeory of an Angel, 2017, p. 66)

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