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A LONG TIME I’VE WANTED TO SAY SOMETHING

A long time I’ve wanted to say something
and not know the next word until
it busied my mouth. Love talk, anger, consolation,
lies, mad hints at the edge of green
water where fish and snakes swam
weirdly away from my lonesome post—
five dozen kinds of greetings
and one of severance
entered this conversation
I am having with the earth.
O world, I want to love you
better than I do, forgiving
every satellite dish bolted to the roof
and pointed towards the
ubiquity of the sky,
and all it holds within it like a gravid cloud—
darkness first of all
and then the post-mortem flare of the stars,
and fixed between both,
satellites soaking our cells
with beamed, invisible pornography
and all its stark frustrations,
its spacey coupling, its theater of vicious hunger.
How many times have I gone
home through that rain,
my body perforated by
long waves of strange, practiced ecstasy?
World, I’ve wanted to box you
on your huge ear, or hide
something from you
that you badly want, right then, that instant,
this now. I’ve wanted
to pour you out
until you’re empty,
worth filling up again.
I am not talking to you,
anymore. Tired
as I am of gravity
and tired as I am
of my bones, the sullen sameness of their pain,
let me just whistle
a sad song
into the newness of the air.
Let me plan out,
let me devise and arrange
and braid one lost
path to the next.
Let me save something vague from peril.
It is all around us,
after all, danger,
or love, or war,
or spontaneous jamborees on a hilltop littered with fiddles.
I am thinking of love.
Which means in my tongue
that I am praying for it
to be saved from never knowing me.