I / Conversation
The tumult in the heart
keeps asking questions.
And then it stops and undertakes to answer
in the same tone of voice.
No one could tell the difference.

Uninnocent, these conversations start,
and then engage the senses,
only half-meaning to.
And then there is no choice,
and then there is no sense;

until a name
and all its connotation are the same.

II/ Rain Towards Morning
The great light cage has broken up in the air,
freeing, I think, about a million birds
whose wild ascending shadows will not be back,
and all the wires come falling down.
No cage, no frightening birds, the rain
is brightening now. The face is pale
that tried the puzzle of their prison
and solved it with an unexpected kiss,
whose freckled unsuspected hands alit.

III/ While Someone Telephones
Wasted, wasted minutes that couldn’t be worse,
minutes of a barbaric condescension.
—Stare out the bathroom window at the fir-trees,
at their dark needles, accretions to no purpose
woodenly crystalized, and where two fireflies
are only lost.
Hear nothing but a train that goes by, must go by, like tension;
nothing. And wait: 
maybe even now these minutes’ host
emerges, some relaxed uncondescending stranger,
the heart’s release.
And while the fireflies
are failing to illuminate these nightmare trees
might they not be his green gay eyes.

IV/O Breath
Beneath that loved    and celebrated breast,
silent, bored really    blindly veined,
grieves, maybe    lives and lets
live, passes    bets,
something moving    but invisibly,
and with what clamor    why restrained
I cannot fathom    even a ripple.
(See the thin flying    of nine black hairs
four around one    five the other nipple,
flying almost intolerably    on your own breath.)
Equivocal, but what we have in common’s    bound to be there,
whatever we must own    equivalents for,
something that maybe I    could bargain with
and make a separate peace    beneath
within    if never with.


 = David Hoak