Against the Evidence: Selected Poems, 1934–1994

Coupling

from his loaded arms and bruise his feet. He trips. He could pick flowers, he could heap his arms, but with stones there is always the danger, the need to be alert. Night How good it is to feel the joy at last of oneself. It is like the full moon shining down upon the dark trees. It is like lit trains sliding by in the dark. It is the light of houses in the distance punctuating the night. The Men You 've Loved The men you've loved are one man, the women I've known are one woman; I hold your hand and look into your face with love, in peace. We lie down together and nothing matters but making each of us the first and the last. Coupling Wherever he looks, standing still in the city, are people born of coupling, walking in graysuits and ties, in long dresses and coiffed hair, speaking elegantly of themselves and of each other, forgetting for the moment their origin, perhaps wishing not to know or to remember. They dress as if having been born in a clothingstore. 747 They were born of men and women naked and gyrating from the hips and with movements up and down and with climacticyells, as if losing their lives in the pleasure and soglad, so wildly glad. From this rises the child from between the wet crotch, blood and mucus. He stands upright and pronounces himself humankind and steps from bed and clothes himself in a gray suit and from the next room ofbirth steps a woman in a long dress.They meet in the corridor and arm in arm walk its length in search of one room, empty ofinhabitants but prepared for them. Across the Room He was caressing the back and shoulders of the woman seated beside him, his head turned toward me in conversation, when this woman started from his caress and observed quite casually she was not his wife, who without his knowledge had changed her seat and waslaughing at him from across the room. Everyone Everyone touch everybody's lips. It's ritual, it's important. Now form a circle, everyone, and look at each other. What do you see? Another person, naturally, but what else? Yousee yourselfthrough the eyesof another. You see yourself as another, and these crosscurrents of sight meet and would cancel in passing through but are stopped to become entwined, tense knots of air. 742 | Poems of the 1980s ...