Danke redux

PRAISE

Your whole life might pass without thinking

of the debt of gratitude you owe, say,

Walt Disney. Thank you, Walt, for Goofy,

the man-dog hybrid, wherever you are

cryogenically contained, cheating death

in that bunker beneath one ride

or the other. In thinking of this, I’m invaded

by happiness. I can’t even sigh

as the autumn sky deepens like your breath,

anonymous former lover, to whom

these poems are always piping

up, in what no one has ever called the armpit

of the night. That means I think

of you when it is unbearably dark

and the world has drawn so close

my face no longer dreams of secret proximities

but of dull air. Thank you, lungs,

for abiding even still, for never leaving

your obscure posts within the pink

shell of my only, my aerobic, my life humming

like heat. And thank you, Godard,

for saying the only things

a good movie needs are a girl and a gun.

In agreement I admit I am

tingling. In the silver fury of the light,

I’m dreaming of the red haired

girl and the murderous gun, like a cannon.

Thank you immense Escalade, thank you German Tuareg,

for not running me over each day

I’m speaking to the dogs who hate me

beyond even an animal’s reason,

thank you in spite of your blessed velocity

and your thirst for oil. I am

thirsty, too, but this is no surprise

to the ones I loved, the ones who helped define

for me the idea of direct address,

for it is your hair that fans out in the waters

of each sad poem and it is your heart

that is amazingly cruel

and thank you, living world,

that you do not cease, that you go on and on and on.