Selected Poems. James Tate

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      They were the bread of life.

      Now your lips are moving, now

      your hands reach up at me.

      I feel as if I might be one

      or two thousand feet above you.

      Your lips form something, a bubble,

      which rises and rises into

      my hand: inside it is a word:

      Help. I would like to help,

      believe me, but up here nothing

      is possible, nothing is clear:

       Help. Help me.

Prose Poem

      I am surrounded by the pieces of this huge

      puzzle: here’s a piece I call my wife, and

      here’s an odd one I call convictions, here’s

      conventions, here’s collisions, conflagrations,

      congratulations. Such a puzzle this is! I

      like to grease up all the pieces and pile

      them in the center of the basement after

      everyone else is asleep. Then I leap head-

      first like a diver into the wretched confusion.

      I kick like hell and strangle a few pieces,

      bite them, spitting and snarling like a mongoose.

      When I wake up in the morning, it’s all fixed!

      My wife says she would not be caught dead at

      that savage resurrection. I say she would.

Coda

      Love is not worth so much;

      I regret everything.

      Now on our backs

      in Fayetteville, Arkansas,

      the stars are falling

      into our cracked eyes.

      With my good arm

      I reach for the sky,

      and let the air out of the moon.

      It goes whizzing off

      to shrivel and sink

      in the ocean.

      You cannot weep;

      I cannot do anything

      that once held an ounce

      of meaning for us.

      I cover you

      with pine needles.

      When morning comes,

      I will build a cathedral

      around our bodies.

      And the crickets,

      who sing with their knees,

      will come there

      in the night to be sad,

      when they can sing no more.

The Tryst

      In the early evening rain

      I leave the vault

      and walk into the city

      of lamentations, and stand.

      I think it is September, September.

      Where are you, Josephine?

      It is one minute until you must appear,

      draped in a grass-green serape,

      shorter than most people,

      more beautiful, baleful …

      pressing a hand to my forehead,

      slipping into my famished pocket

      the elixir, the silver needle.

Pity Ascending with the Fog

      He had no past and he certainly

      had no future. All the important

      events were ending shortly before

      they began. He says he told mama

      earth what he would not accept: and I

      keep thinking it had something to do

      with her world. Nights expanding into

      enormous parachutes of fire, his

      eyes were little more than mercury.

      Or sky-diving in the rain when there

      was obviously no land beneath,

      half-dead fish surfacing all over

      his body. He knew all this too well.

      And she who might at any time be

      saying the word that would embrace all

      he had let go, he let go of course.

      I think the pain for him will end in

      May or January, though the weather

      is far too clear for me to think of

      anything but august comedy.

Pride’s Crossing

      Where the railroad meets the sea,

      I recognize her hand.

      Where the railroad meets the sea,

      her hair is as intricate as a thumbprint.

      Where the railroad meets the sea,

      her name is the threshold of sleep.

      Where the railroad meets the sea,

      it takes all night to get there.

      Where СКАЧАТЬ