[Newspoetry] Dandelions for Creeley

[DL Emerick]

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/creeley/online.htm
Goodbye
Now I recognize 
it was always me 
like a camera 
set to expose 

itself to a picture 
or a pipe 
through which the water 
might run 

or a chicken 
dead for dinner 
or a plan 
inside the head 

of a dead man. 
Nothing so wrong 
when one considered 
how it all began. 

It was Zukofsky's 
"Born very young into a world 
already very old..." 
The century was well along 

when I came in 
and now that it's ending, 
I realize it won't 
be long. 

But couldn't it all have been 
a little nicer, 
as my mother'd say. Did it 
have to kill everything in sight, 

did right always have to be so wrong? 
I know this body is impatient. 
I know I constitute only a meager voice and mind. 
Yet I loved, I love. 

I want no sentimentality. 
I want no more than home. 
"Goodbye" first appeared in The Exquisite Corpse (1996)
Online Source: http://www.princeton.edu/~euphorb/Issues/Spring96/works/GOODBYE.html



*****for william as for robert,
*****a tuning out of time*****

Hello

Welcome, home!
The doombell rings
Its taps out on a door knob,
Dead pan its greetings.

Hello, again, hello,
It's nice to have you home,
You must be exhausted,
Drop your bags and stay (awhile).

We all were wondering
When you’d come back
And what you’d bring
Home one final time.

A last few words,
Battered as your bags
>From jaunts that stretched out
On lawns where minds lie, in being tended.

You could see them out there coupling,
Every pair in wild pleasured pain
Coming headily, mouths full of tunes
Making nouns into verbs.

Still, the politics of love
Admits in its oral contracts
The feats of love impressed
Into processes and purposes.

Nothing is ever more rational
When there is nothing to explain,
Not even one of the quiet nights
Of kissing, hugging, curling.

News of love is spreading fear
That its noise irks all others
Who have ears free for listening,
Having no hearts of their own to hear.

Returning home by jealous caresses
Wind and rain and sun had touched me,
But more touching were your words
Inside me, driving to be born again.

You'll not leave me home alone ever again,
As you never would leave home alone.
*****