Free Civil Elegies: And Other Poems by Dennis Lee

High Park, by Grenadier Pond
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Whatever I say, lady
it is not that
    I say our lives are working — but feel the
ambush of soft air —, nor that our
    rancour & precious remorse can be
surrendered merely because the earth has taken
    green dominion here, beneath us
                                the belly of grass is real; and lady
    it is not that
    lovers by the score come sporting
fantasies like we had strolling
    bright-eyed past the portulaca — we could
whisper messages, they would be
    snarls in our own blood;
                                                    and I am
    bitter about our reconciliations, we panicked, we
                  snowed ourselves each time. So lady
    it is not that
    I hanker for new beginnings — confession and
copout, we know that game, it’s as real as the
            whiskey, the fights, the pills.
    And I do not start this now because the grass is green,
                  and not because in front of us the
    path makes stately patterns down the slope to Grenadier and all the
                random ambling of the couples hangs
                           like courtly bygones in the shining air;
                the old longing is there, it always will but I will not
                        allow it.
    But there is
                you, lady. I
     want you to
                be, and I want you.
                        Lie here on the grass beside me,
                                      hear me tie my tongue in knots.
    I can’t talk brave palaver like
                          I did 10 years ago — I
                 used up all the words — but now I
       sense my centre in these new
                  gropings, wary, near yours lady,
                            coming to
                                          difficult sanities.
                   I want to be here.

The Morning of the Second Day:
He Tells Her
    How will you handle my body?
What will I do to your name?
New selves kept tramping through me like a
herd of signatures, I mislaid
sentences halfway, the trademark was
ummm
… ?
Which one of me did you want?
    Hey but that was another life, and donning the
one-way flesh, now glad and
half at home at last in the set of your neck,
the carriage of your thighs, I believe I sense
the difficult singularity of the man I
am not ready for.
    But how will you handle my body?
Some day ten years from now we’ll both
wake up, and stretch, and stare at somebody’s ceiling —
our own, sweet jesus our
very own