Time Is the Matterfor Jim, Peter, Horst, Frank, Michael, Dennis, Calvin,
Howard, Norman and Mel
for all my students, my friendsIn the highest room of the tower
where the season spills late papers
and late sun,
and a wind from the right side
rattles the louvers with cries,
our smiles lock to a stubborn line
and, distant by twenty years,
we find each other.
Oriental courtier, civil
and neat as evil, yellow tailor-learner,
with jacketed books and flaps to keep papers in,
clean car and handsome conscience,
though I tell over a paragraph
of your Japanese precisions,
I still cannot not love you.
Yet in this matter of love,
time is the matter.
The touch of your tongue in my ear
is quick as questions, warm
as the deeper English of your voice
inside where you hammer
ardent without the body of desire.
"Memory is an aggregate of images,
more than a representation, less than a thing.
Our minds lack matter for nailed memory.
Our love, that strums with answers from the world,
maps classrooms off anonymous corridors.
Nothing will ever happen to us
in backyards, beaches and streets.
We'll never unkiss the barrier.
No matter:
lines of sweet English,
transparencies, frozen analogues of love,
pile up magnanimous images in safe time.
And time is the matter.* * * * *
I saw the massive shoulders of Poseidon
in ruined stone,
a rinsed fragment of God,
a solid light that brightened
the great gallery where he drove
love down my throat.
Heavy with the hard knowledge in my heart,
I have stood at the grave of Yeats, raving,
wild with some kind of still, withering grief.