Four Dream Songs

I don’t know one damned butterfly from another
my ignorance of the stars is formidable,
also of dogs & ferns
except that around my house one destroys the other
When I reckon up my real ignorance, pal,
I mumble “many returns” —

next time it will be nature & Thoreau
this time is Baudelaire if one had the skill
and even those problems O
At the mysterious urging of the body or Poe
reeled I with chance, insubordinate & a killer
O formal & elaborate I choose you

but I love too the spare, the hit-or-miss,
the mad, I sometimes can’t always tell them apart
As we fall apart, will you let me hear?
That would be good, that would be halfway to bliss
You said will you answer back? I cross my heart
& hope to die but not this year.

Them lady poets must not marry, pal.
Miss Dickinson — fancy in Amherst bedding hér.
Fancy a lark with Sappho,
a tumble in the bushes with Miss Moore,
a spoon with Emily, while Charlotte glare.
Miss Bishop’s too noble-O.

That was the lot. And two of them are here
as yet, and — and: Sylvia Plath is not.
She — she her credentials
has handed in, leaving alone two tots
and widower to what he makes of it —
surviving guy, &

when Tolstoy’s pathetic widow doing her whung
(after them decades of marriage) & kids, she decided he was queer
& loving his agent.
Wherefore he rush off, leaving two journals, & die.
It is a true error to marry with poets
or to be by them.

Scarlatti spurts his wit across my brain,
so too does Figaro: so much for art
after the centuries yes
who had for all their pains above all pain
& who brought to their work a broken heart
but not as bad as Schubert’s:

that went beyond the possible: that was like a man
dragged by his balls, singing aloud “Oh, yes”
while to his anguisht glance
the architecture differs: he’s getting on,
the tops of buildings change, like a mad dance,
the Piazza Navona

recovers its calm after he went through,
the fountain went on splashing, all was the same
after his agony,
abandoned cats had what to say to you,
lovers performed their glory & its shame:
Henry put his foot down: free.

Draw on your resources. Draw on your resources.
It’s not clear if I can. In a French town
Autun
where the grand cathedral stands, Henry’s mental gown
amazed the residents, and his mental forces
exceeded Verdun.

But he was not up to that ancient sculpture;
cold & uneasy witnessed he them scenes:
the figures put him down.
The figures figure what the lost soul means,
so long ago, in an acre of sepulture
insisting on the verb, not the noun.

I wanted so to go to the Windward Islands,
and I will never make it, stuck in this French
vaulting cathedral thought.
We’ve been here long, long, lowlands & highlands
but not as they have. Draw on your mere mensch
for the benefits we sought.