The moonlight is cold enough
To draw blood. O wife,
O ruin of a ruined year,
What have I paid for your memory?
So gone astray, so foiled
In every plan and project, in
Strange, impossible bonds
Cursed on their face by morning—
Yet outside, “going from strength
To strength.” Satan’s genius,
From a half-life of the no
Comes to Cavafy’s yes;
I learn the dry emptiness
That “goes from honor to honor,
Strong in his conviction.”
Mourning has left little of me.
Perhaps I have left little of it.
(What do people make of me
And these dissected antics?
No one will tell you, ever.)
Outside, the pest. Once scared
We barely notice: the bulky
Respirator molders
In the trunk of the Audi,
And fruit is eaten unwashed.
This year the symphony
Was all tuba; the spring
Shades were gray and brown;
The winter had no smell.
Oddly, I produced a film—
Well, “executive produced.”
Death leaks like a corpse
To the thirsty dirt around it,
Staining everything sweet
With the honey of old life.
Death is made of money:
No longer the “book Jew,”
Mammon now my spirit guide,
Pockets low with Satan’s
Coin, minted by death—
The proof-of-death chain—
You sold yourself for that,
The birthright of your heirs;
And I am your property too,
Weak as my work has been.
Look down with your cold eye,
Gray and utterly solid,
Once and still my teacher.
I will do better! I will!
My half-life is your life,
Your death a second birth,
Heirloom to the rotten earth.
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