The Bridge

That there are things that can never be the same about

my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the

sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious

but also lacking in courage,

That from this yard I have been composing a great speech,

that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look

like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child,

that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides,

that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky,

That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows

the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds

and sparrows from the sky,

That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not

the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization,

that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself

beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had,

That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding

on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of

sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind

my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters,

and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke

from the chimney of the trees where I was small,

That in January, I met him in a bar, we went

home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard,

and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed,

That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was

the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars,

fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky,

O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still

these assignments in the night, to remember the texture

of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the

moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills,

That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of

crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen,

the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark,

blue, green, with shards of the Pacific,

That I do not know the dreams from which I have come,

sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the

willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside

the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the

sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house,

mammalian, no bigger than the herd,

That I wrote the history of the war waged between the

Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through

shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been

driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the

ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks,

beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having

grown up near the ocean.

Source: Ring of Fire (Salt Publishing, 2003)