When I look at you with the eye of flesh
I feel a warm hand just above my pubis
and another in the middle of my back.
I see small creatures running in circles—
they race or dance—quick with pleasure.
When I look at you with the eye of mind,
I see dogwoods repeating a succession
of bud, bloom, berry—and nimble light
dividing seamlessly through a prism.
Your understanding nature rises
like a moon over a stonewhite cliff.
Your thought ruffles the kingdom of birds.
When I look at you with the eye of spirit
you begin to vanish. Words shuffle by
like miners drudging to and from work.
A sycamore drenched in the patchy brocade
of its branches is abuzz with madrigals.
How radiant you are! What’s been funneled
through fifteen billion years of starlight
are the migrations of animals, the regenerative
cycles of trees, moonrise, moonset, flight
and labor, a man who opens his arms to me.
***
The pig was once New York’s official street sweeper.
I remember this when I walk down those narrow
streets below Delancy, streets that stop, pick up
again, move in indefinite directions—old Tory
New York. I enjoy considering how Whitman
on his many jaunts might have regarded these
trotting foragers and attended to their grunting
vagaries. They slept in alleys or behind taverns
or tenements, snouts at rest near overrunning
privies or beside slaughterhouses. Early mornings
Whitman must have heard first snorts, the grunts
gathering, the hoofs clattering on cobblestones
as a pack began its dawn-to-dusk rovings.
They ransacked crates of spoiled cabbages,
bins of potato or fruit peels, knocked over
buckets of ashes and slop the night-soil men
hadn’t yet collected. They were ravenous
for the tossed bones and scraps of their butchered
kin, the discarded entrails of cattle and sheep.
Peter Stuyvesant first ordered herds of swine
led through the streets as garbage removers;
by Whitman’s time they’d overwhelmed
their pens and lived unmolested, although one
could spot dog-mangled ears, tails chewed by rats.
(continued—no break)
Humans would bound out of their way, troubled
not to brush trouser or skirt against a filthy
splotchy-brown hock or flank. Those whom
Deuteronomy forbid keep or eat pigs, would
freeze at the sight of them. Even on Sundays
New Yorkers could gaze out the windows
of their churches and see, swilling through
graveyards, God’s cleft-hoofed scavengers
defecating at will, hear them mock their prayers
with guttural chortles and oinks, remote,
intractable. Whitman must have relished
how porcine nature could affront those who
put on airs, delighted in creatures blind
to ceremony, bold before carter and drayman,
deaf to fishmonger and preacher. I imagine
he floated his soul out toward them and joined
with them, especially when hogs or sows
with piglets wallowed in a mid-street mudhole.
***
I’ve always enjoyed watching the jouncing breasts
of a woman walking, the easy rise and fall of flesh,
so motherly or erotic, anatomy most personal,
and yet, at times, given so freely to lover or infant,
or palpitated by the inquiring hands of the physician,
flattened between the glass and steel of the x-ray,
fatty, duct-rich, nodular, capillarial, the biopsied
or augmented or reshaped, vulnerable to infection,
cyst, tumor; achingly tender at times and too
obvious or not noticeable enough, the coupled
(if she’s wearing a bra) or uncoupled (if she’s not)
harmonic oscillations, marked by size, firmness,
color of aureole, sign, signal, burden, shame,
always becoming old woman’s dugs, striated,
bulbous, drooping downward with age, unlovely,
grotesque, nipples attenuated or inverted,
the body now barren—all this in that graceful
motion, a woman walking past, ageless, primordial,
a Lilith, Miriam or Ruth, mother, sister, wife,
friend, an ordinary being, her breasts jouncing.
***
On his right side, half-curled, knees high,
left arm shielding his face, snoring lightly,
high-pitched calls, nor the baaing of infant goats.
All this going on and sunlight after two days
of showers, and he’s dull in such a deep
woolgathering, heedless to the crashing surf,
gull’s curlicues of caws, the scuff and scuttle
of a million tourists piling in and out of rental
cars, snapping scenic shots, pulling aside
on narrow roads in car-passing pirouettes
of courtesy. The man sleeps dressed, with socks
and watch on, on a pillow, on a bedspread.
He sleeps because he’s innocent of malice and
contempt, because he’s earned this sleep,
rejuvenating, capacious, a rest dreamt of, required.
He sleeps so deeply a winding stream could divide
around his neck, a river’s upper tributaries collide
across his chest, and where those narcomal waters
meet in feeder streams, in brooks, in creeks,
cross-currents flash with bits of turbulent dreams
his wife, watching him three days now, impatient
to see the world they’ve traveled so far to see,
can almost apprehend, as if what surrounded them
were dreamscapes more actual than the landscape
beyond the window, glints and flickers of an unseen,
there, in extreme sleep, potentiality first glimpsed.