Tinnitus

Like

Woe is blunted not erased
by like. Your hands were too full, then

empty. At the grave's

lip, secretly you imagine then
refuse to imagine

a spectre

so like what you watched die, the unique
soul you loved endures a second death.

The dead hate like, bitter

when the living with too-small
grief replace them. You dread

loving again, exhausted by the hungers

ineradicable in his presence. You resist
strangers until a stranger makes the old hungers

brutally awake. We live by symbolic

substitution. At the grave's lip, what is
but is not is what

returns you to what is not.

--Frank Bidart


Susurrus

I was naked this morning, so
there you were, mountain
or carpeted quiet. We know
what it feels like to roll over
surfaces, slate, macadam, awe
in cut asphalt, shale. Specialized.
Nothings. Tasteless, laundry-based
jokes, terrible quips of the lion
blood in the mail.

People say I look like
their fathers twenty years ago.
Are ration and reason synonymous,
or the pool beneath your hands?

How much everything tells me
about me, flies and bites, stet,
itch that off I will teach you,
saying neither can wear the wet
rope, becoming suspicious, if
that could possibly mean.