I close the door, monkey with a hinge, 
I wish something better for the dog,
then turn to the children and think
of Margaret Wise Brown and her barn:
she assumes the reader is darling,
each page, each beast seems fresh
from the farm therapist: geese ass to ass
with ducks, dogs understanding cats, etc.
By the big red barn in the great green field,
there was a pink pig who was learning to squeal.
(In fact, a pig's orgasm lasts 30 minutes,
but this is difficult to believe.)
A barn of manners: no shit, no spillings
in the dust.
     The scene is fixed—the book like a smile—
the earth's breast firm but held from the sky,
butterflies' tiny cocks prudent for once
(their loins dry), even the lustiest
field mouse sails alone across an erotic
moonlit bucket. Barn as birth-room,
nothing more. How to tell the children
content with the bodies they don't expect.
The great doors open vaginally:
And they all lived together in the big red barn.



[Elegy for Randall Jarrell]

A man does not drive a metallic sand Jaguar coupe
without a strong wind behind him. Telling himself
like a bat in a room Out! Go out! the round and round
and round of the night suited his blood-plaid shirt and
devotion to dream analysis, Germany, and zoos.
He was a boy once, and he liked to write poems about that.
He grew and his wardrobe of Harris and herringbone tweeds
became like conquerings at sea. Pulled to the moon,
the bat will clutch at a corner of a room.
Poets tend to commit suicide: they make a square of the sky.
True, his poetry could be too sweet, but so
is the memory of things, and the zig zag work of mourning.
Cats, cars, opera, and tennis; libraries, football, French Impressionists.
That Times review may have killed him.
Hanging. Obscene. A bat is a bird of delicate darkness.




Diane Leo was a kind, big-eyed girl, and one wanted to know her big, untouched breasts.
(In magazines the breast was sweet, nude white.) I was there, in the dark, a hand-trap
of teen tugging and twisting. Kind as she was, she undid herself for me. I reached out...
what I felt were two curled, sleeping gazelles. Once in my arms, their bodies breathed
like small flames. I waited to see if I was sleeping, dreaming visibly. Diane, to her credit, did not explain. Above all, she was relieved. So we strolled into the moonglow, leading
them somewhere to softly drink. We crossed the sun-scarred lawns, past the houses
bought over better judgment. We arrived husband and wife, each gazelle birthed and
golden like a small scar or stain, their cries dry as paper. All belly

and panic and thirst,
they moved like new forms thought-up
for the dusty earth.