ACCOUNT OF MY DAYS

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  keyword(s) in poems:

Sequence: 20

untitled
you know who...


THE GREAT WORKS
Reading one of the Great Works that you find annoying, you ...


SILENCE/WORLD
the silence is never a silence...


FRIGHTENED BY MY BOOKS AGAIN
they have in them many words to read...


12/13/12
the squrrels' efforts...


THIS LIFE
less led than lost...


FIRST SNOW
one might imagine Adam...


12/26/12
the wind moves along...


NOTES TO BEGIN WITH
noon on new year's day...


AFTERTHOUGHT
silence...


UNDERSTANDING EACH OTHER
the word for food...


STILLED FOREVER
the body of a mouse...


A CYCLOPS EXPLAINS TO A STRANGER POLYPHEMUS' HOWLS
every so often one of us here goes crazy ...


CONTINUATION
even zero has a hard time with nothing...


REGISTERED
from some abandoned clock comes...


DRIVER
are you still driving...


ABOUT THE FAMOUS COUNTRY
the leaves cover it...


NOT YET
not yet ready to write you...


A THOUGHT
the alley floor is cracked...


2/23/13
last weeks of winter...


REPETITION
those who in their agony of loss...


WAYS HE TRAVELS
the hastening traveler panting along the ways...


PERHAPS POSSIBLE
watch ...


STORM FORECAST
moss light under trees...


REPITITION II
die of grief make another grief...


ONLY AT NIGHT
only at night can I really see...


I KNOW WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE
the trembling you see...


REPITITION III
make another grief...


THE READER
the pages I turn sketch...


WONDERFUL
at the doctor's office...


LANDSCAPE WITH TWO MEN
in dark clothes walking over the year's...


REPETITION IV
...


4/29/13
barely light...


EVEN SO
a picture of least importance...


SAYING MORE
cold air on my skin as it leaves me alert pleases...


NEWS
the shamed man...


5/26/13
a penny drops on the floor...


IT RIDDLES
it isn't memory...


STORY
limbs of the tree gone astray...


JUST TO BE CLEAR
nothing wants to know...


SEEING
rain-centered region...


COMPARE AND CONTRAST
there is never just one crow...


I STILL ACHE
the little things said...


THE DIFFERENCE
an off-white sky...


PLAYING AGAIN
a store of chords held in the fingers laid...


THE TOWN
the town with its mildly hilly north side...


TO YOU
if it often seems...


IN TIME
to arrive in time with some of what you've packed...


HIS INTENTION
He left, lying where I would be sure to see it, a little written...


1937
the Ohio in flood...


STONE SYMPATHY
this large rock in the abandoned field...


ANOTHER KIND OF WIND I REMEMBER
the whirlwinds that used to come...


DREAMS
That was childhood, when I believed anyone could fly if they ...


WHAT THEY BUILD AND WHERE
they build their cities on the plain...


A PARTICULAR HEAVEN
after the end...


BORDERLANDS
In some of the places where boundaries meet there can be a ...


WHAT IT KNOWS
an invisible warning...


WHAT IF YOU WERE THAT MAN IN THE MIRROR?
no thoughts or feelings within you...


IRONY WATER
the irony water I drank in youth...


MY LIFE DOES THE MATH
my life poorer by a day...

Listen!


HERE BEGINS THE POEM OF MY LEFT HAND


My left hand is a child
moving clumsily and eagerly,
shy in company.  He lets his older brother
do the clasping and pointing,
all the most dramatic gestures.
Everything is a joke to him
because he knows he is despised
for being left, but all admit
that what is left is the best part.

My left hand is always excited
yet he claims to know nothing,
is rather silent when I question him.

He is growing so much more slowly
than the rest of me--that is why
he is not yet skilled, bold, and learned.
For every ten years of mine he matures one,
and I think when I die and am buried
my left hand will be alive still,
just coming into the strength of youth.
I love to think of him in the ground,
bold amongst the stones and clay,
his time of adventure come at last,

his music a man's music,
studying the worm's mouth without desolation
now that he has entered a time with no sun:
too deep to freeze, too cool to sweat.
He is never alone, he is in the great
multitude of life that has been waiting for him.
He has grown wiser than me through coming to know
the beat of the world in the center of his body.

From his house of clay he can watch
the stars and the stretch of space
beyond the farthest star.  He has graceful
years before he grows old, and even that
will be a blessing like a silk glove,
for as he softens the stones draw close
and cradle him and call him
their little old boy, so weak and in need
of voices to teach him how to die and become
a new mineral, moistened with forever.