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Concrete
- Wesleyan University Press
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FROM New and Collected Poems 1970-1985 (1986) In Dream I died and called for you, and you came from a distance, hurrying but impassive. You looked long and steadily at my face, then left and strode back into the distance, rapidly growing smaller to the eye. You vanished, but where Ilay I could hear your voice low and quick, urging me to awaken to the sunrise at the window of the bedroom where we slept together. I rose up and followed you into the distance, and there heard the laughter and wit with which we had spent our days together. Then silence, and I knew we both were dead, for you had spoken to me in death, as only the dead could do, and so at last we were together. Concrete We roll apart, lie side by side, quiet. We talk of love, family and troubles. In silence we regard each other's life and check the time for school, trains, schedules, business calls. Getting dressed, we take our bodies with us 746 | Poems of the 1980s like heavy bags slung across our backs. Breakfast is food; words are conversation; lips kissing good-bye are flesh; cars starting up to take leave are of metal, and the road is concrete. It IS It is heart-rending to know a kiss cannot cure the world of its illnesses, nor can your happiness, nor your tragedy of being a discrete person, for the bodies fall like rain into the ground and merge only to make an ocean of bones and closed eyes, our identities merged, as we had wanted when we were persons in each other's sight and touch. The Principle Make no mistake, you cannot take my love without accepting my body, and you cannot accept my body without a claim to all that I am and shall always be, that which has determined me from the beginning, in the branches of the rain, in the blood of animals and trees. As you take me in your arms, you are making love to all the world that I am. 747 ...