The world is
not with us enough.
O taste and see

the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,

grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform

into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being

hungry, and plucking
the fruit.

Who are the other mammals
full of feathers
who miss their harsh
fathers like I do,

who collect leather pipes
& hoop dresses like I do,
who send their mothers
supermarket rose bouquets,

who prefer their bodies
ringed round with zippers?
Where are the other
animals that wallow

in purple fringed regret
like I do?
Who are the other mammals
with cloven cracked

chests who stitch
sharp darts
in their flesh like I do?
O, isn’t it a hopeless

loneliness of kitchens
when you don’t know
anyone
to give your everything to?

since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers.  Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other:then
laugh,leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

I burned my life, that I might find 
A passion wholly of the mind, 
Thought divorced from eye and bone, 
Ecstasy come to breath alone. 
I broke my life, to seek relief 
From the flawed light of love and grief.

With mounting beat the utter fire 
Charred existence and desire. 
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I found unmysterious flesh —
Not the mind’s avid substance — still
Passionate beyond the will.