in my drip-dry kimono,
I kick off the morning’s dance of hours with you,
Natalie, doyenne of the daily calls,
Master-mistress of crisis and charm.
Contentedly we chew the cud of yesterday’s
Running feud with what part of the self
Had been mistaken—yes?—for someone else.
And grunt. Or laugh. Or leave to stir the stew.
Then talk behind the world’s back—how, say,
Those friends of friends simply Will Not Do,
While gingerly stepping back (as we never would
With lover or stranger) from any disappointment
In each other. Grooming like baboons? Perhaps.
Or taking on a ballast of gossip to steady
Nerves already bobbing in the wake of that grand
Liner, the SS
Domesticity,
With its ghost crew and endless fire drills.
But isn’t the point to get a few things
Clear at last, some uncommon sense to rely
Upon in all this slow-motion vertigo
That lumbers from dream to real-life drama?
You alone, dear heart, remember what it’s like
To be me; remember too the dollop of truth,
Cheating on that regime of artificially
Sweetened, salt-free fictions the dangerous
Years concoct for tonight’s floating island.
V.
Different friends sound different registers.
The morning impromptu, when replayed this afternoon
For you, Jimmy, will have been transcribed
For downtown argot, oltrano, and Irish harp,
And the novelist in you draw out as anecdote
What news from nowhere had earlier surfaced as whim.
On your end of the line (I picture a fire laid
And high-tech teapot under a gingham cozy),
Patience humors my warmed-over grievance or gush.
Each adds the lover’s past to his own, experience
Greedily annexed, heartland by buffer state,
While the friend lends his field glasses to survey
The ransacked loot and spot the weak defenses.
Though it believes all things, it’s not love
That bears and hopes and endures, but the comrade-in-arms.
How often you’ve found me abandoned on your doormat,
Pleading to be taken in and plied
With seltzer and Chinese take-out, while you bandaged
My psyche’s melodramatically slashed wrists
(In any case two superficial wounds),
The razor’s edge of romance having fallen
Onto the bathroom tiles next to a lurid
Pool of self-regard. “
Basta!
Love
Would bake its bread of you, then butter it.
The braver remedy for sorrow is to stand up
Under fire, or lie low on a therapist’s couch,
Whistling an old barcarole into the dark.
Get a grip. Buckle on your parachute.
Now, out the door with you, and just remember:
A friend in need is fortune’s darling indeed.”
VI.
Subtle Plato, patron saint of friendship,
Scolded those nurslings of the myrtle-bed
Whose tender souls, first seized by love’s madness,
Then stirred to rapturous frenzies, overnight
Turn sour, their eyes narrowed with suspicions,
Sleepless, feverishly refusing company.
The soul, in constant motion because immortal,
Again and again is “deeply moved” and flies
To a new favorite, patrolling the upper air
To settle briefly on this or that heart-
Stopping beauty, or flutters vainly around
The flame of its own image, light of its life.
Better the friend to whom we’re drawn by choice
And not instinct or the glass threads of passion.
Better the friend with whom we fall in step
Behind our proper god, or sit beside
At the riverbend, idly running a finger
Along his forearm when the conversation turns
To whether everything craves its opposite,
As cold its warmth and bitter its honeydrop,
Or whether like desires like—agreed?—
Its object akin to the good, recognizing
In another what is necessary for the self,
As one may be a friend without knowing how
To define friendship, which itself so often slips
Through our hands because … but he’s asleep
On your shoulder by now and probably dreaming
Of a face he’d glimpsed on the street yesterday,
The stranger he has no idea will grow irreplaceable
And with whom he hasn’t yet exchanged a word.
VII.
Late one night, alone in bed, the
I kick off the morning’s dance of hours with you,
Natalie, doyenne of the daily calls,
Master-mistress of crisis and charm.
Contentedly we chew the cud of yesterday’s
Running feud with what part of the self
Had been mistaken—yes?—for someone else.
And grunt. Or laugh. Or leave to stir the stew.
Then talk behind the world’s back—how, say,
Those friends of friends simply Will Not Do,
While gingerly stepping back (as we never would
With lover or stranger) from any disappointment
In each other. Grooming like baboons? Perhaps.
Or taking on a ballast of gossip to steady
Nerves already bobbing in the wake of that grand
Liner, the SS
Domesticity,
With its ghost crew and endless fire drills.
But isn’t the point to get a few things
Clear at last, some uncommon sense to rely
Upon in all this slow-motion vertigo
That lumbers from dream to real-life drama?
You alone, dear heart, remember what it’s like
To be me; remember too the dollop of truth,
Cheating on that regime of artificially
Sweetened, salt-free fictions the dangerous
Years concoct for tonight’s floating island.
V.
Different friends sound different registers.
The morning impromptu, when replayed this afternoon
For you, Jimmy, will have been transcribed
For downtown argot, oltrano, and Irish harp,
And the novelist in you draw out as anecdote
What news from nowhere had earlier surfaced as whim.
On your end of the line (I picture a fire laid
And high-tech teapot under a gingham cozy),
Patience humors my warmed-over grievance or gush.
Each adds the lover’s past to his own, experience
Greedily annexed, heartland by buffer state,
While the friend lends his field glasses to survey
The ransacked loot and spot the weak defenses.
Though it believes all things, it’s not love
That bears and hopes and endures, but the comrade-in-arms.
How often you’ve found me abandoned on your doormat,
Pleading to be taken in and plied
With seltzer and Chinese take-out, while you bandaged
My psyche’s melodramatically slashed wrists
(In any case two superficial wounds),
The razor’s edge of romance having fallen
Onto the bathroom tiles next to a lurid
Pool of self-regard. “
Basta!
Love
Would bake its bread of you, then butter it.
The braver remedy for sorrow is to stand up
Under fire, or lie low on a therapist’s couch,
Whistling an old barcarole into the dark.
Get a grip. Buckle on your parachute.
Now, out the door with you, and just remember:
A friend in need is fortune’s darling indeed.”
VI.
Subtle Plato, patron saint of friendship,
Scolded those nurslings of the myrtle-bed
Whose tender souls, first seized by love’s madness,
Then stirred to rapturous frenzies, overnight
Turn sour, their eyes narrowed with suspicions,
Sleepless, feverishly refusing company.
The soul, in constant motion because immortal,
Again and again is “deeply moved” and flies
To a new favorite, patrolling the upper air
To settle briefly on this or that heart-
Stopping beauty, or flutters vainly around
The flame of its own image, light of its life.
Better the friend to whom we’re drawn by choice
And not instinct or the glass threads of passion.
Better the friend with whom we fall in step
Behind our proper god, or sit beside
At the riverbend, idly running a finger
Along his forearm when the conversation turns
To whether everything craves its opposite,
As cold its warmth and bitter its honeydrop,
Or whether like desires like—agreed?—
Its object akin to the good, recognizing
In another what is necessary for the self,
As one may be a friend without knowing how
To define friendship, which itself so often slips
Through our hands because … but he’s asleep
On your shoulder by now and probably dreaming
Of a face he’d glimpsed on the street yesterday,
The stranger he has no idea will grow irreplaceable
And with whom he hasn’t yet exchanged a word.
VII.
Late one night, alone in bed, the
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