Invasive Procedures

Massachusetts rests its feet in Rhode Island, as crows rest in cowslips and cows slip in crowshit. I may have been called upon to write a poem different from this one. OK, let’s go. I want to please everybody and this is my song: In Beethoven Street I handed you a melon. Round and pronged it was, and full of secret juice. You, in turn, handed me over to the police who though (correctly) that I was the spy they had been looking for these past seven months. They led me down to their station, you need to know, where they questioned me for days on end. But my answers were always questions, and so they let me go, Exasperated by their inability to answer. I was a free man! I walked up Rilke Street chattering a little hymn to myself. It went something like this: “Beware the monsters, but take care that you are not yourself one. Time is kind to them and will take care of you, asleep on your grandmother’s couch, sipping cherry juice.” How did the pigs get through the window screens at night? By morning it was all over. I had never sung to you, you never coaxed me to from your balcony, and all trains run into the night that collects them like paper streamers, and lays them in a drawer. Unable to leave the sight of you I draw little crow’s feet in my notebook, in the sunlight that comes at the end of a sudden day of tears waiting to be reconciled to the fascinating madness of the dark. My mistress’ hands are nothing like these, collecting silken cords for a day when the wet wind plunges through colossal apertures. Suddenly I was out of hope. I crawled out on the ledge. The air there was frank and pure, not like the frayed December night.