LETTER

You with the long sad features,
Light touch, flat lip of the flutist,
Loving your neighbor yet living alone,
Are we so far apart?

Aren't we still fellow creatures?

You wanted news. The great god Pan's alive.

Don't ask where the days go,

The nights. His music blows through five
Ill-fitted lengths of reed I have become.

Shade thins, pure water

Dins where I woke to find your letter.

The others sleep on. It will soon be autumn.

These things are what I know.

I wanted nothing to change. You though--

Let me ask you where the years go.

The magic room

Between your lines (Syrinx

Upon the music stand,

Lemons, a white bowl streaking the flute,

The same low table with the flowers and drinks)

Has aged in small, trite ways. How not to guess

Its late propensity for dust and soot?

You "cannot lift a broom.

A flight of stairs is merciless.

Nothing helps"--and other, stranger words:

Hydrotherapy, codeine...

Your head behind you on the wall

(Younger, yet how handsome you still are!),

Cut from a full length canvas by the war

Or someone's better judgment,

Alone escapes, if not to tell the tale.

Dry-eyed it contemplates a scene

Across the room. Black cypresses,

A sea's parched blue, a cracking sail,

A girl in turn-of-the-century costume.

Was it somewhere you'd been?

Your body lies rolled up in Italy.

Mine for the moment lies in boundlessness

Outflung of plant and stone,

Brilliance, the thudding waterfall

Nail to the site.

The head is far down stream,

Dimmed by high concentrations drifting, white.

Over me, the sleepers, all,

Exults the fly chorus. Bottles thrown

Into the quaking water fill,

As I with you, slowly, against my will,

And sink. Where have the years gone?

Music, instruction, dream,

Living alone or not alone...

How often did the deftest mouth and fingers

Produce an answering tone?

Now he has chosen you, the great god Pain,
The lips he touches to it send
A scale of embers up your spine.
These are his harshest notes.
Your own lips whiten and the flute is hushed--
Cortisone, hypnosis, novocaine...
The laughter of his brother's goats
Fades from the hillside where I write.
Whorl of hair, salt nipple, wine,
Flat yellow eye that opens to invite...
Changed each so much, how can it be, poor friend,
We have not changed towards one another?

## Night

Has fallen on the city, a black rain,
Quills of the electronic porcupine
Whose poison pierces trunk and limbs like mine
Outflung past any dream of waking free.
One of those billion tiny cells made me.
I grew up thinking that to think was vain;
To choose, unthinkable—or was it choice
Led us on then, to suffer, to rejoice?

You with me here where I do not belong,
I there with you where all is real and wrong.