Lucius Furius

Lounging in the dry warmth of the sun,
overcome by the beauty of the green cliffs
rising above the hypnotic blue water....
...

Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her,
Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams
And our desires. Although she strews the leaves
Of sure obliteration on our paths, …
...

I cried at Field of Dreams.
It wasn't Dad I was thinking of -
it was you -
us, lobbing that ball
...

I would have given you a perfect faith,
belief, unassailable and absolute;
joy's well-spring.
I offer only a substitute - these poems,
...

Here's to those who suffer voluntarily,
who rise above the mean and merely momentary
pleasure that we feel sitting on a couch,
eating Cheetos, watching reruns of 'The Brady Bunch';
...

Marco! One minute you seemed perfectly healthy,
the next you were sprawled on the floor by the drinking fountain
like a sack of potatoes.
...

Sweet Earth, each molecule of me has come from you.
Sesame seed, broken into amino acids and calcium,
became my tiny bones; bananas, potassium,
the cells of my brain.
...

How quick we move from labor nurses' hands,
wrapping us in a diaper, to taxidermists',
artfully arranging our limbs in the casket.....
...

If only I could do with my words what you,
with your arms and legs and hands, do,
girl of the Tzabarim dance.
...

O Babylon! Your God is a sport-utility vehicle, a VCR, and a two-car garage!
You delight in images of killing and artificially-large-breasted women!
Your arteries are clogged with Big Macs and a thousand pieces of Kentucky- Fried Chicken!
Your God is Technology. Your God is Progress.
...

(After Edna St. Vincent Millay)

Love is not all. It is not meat nor drink
nor slumber nor a roof against the rain.
...

My children, as you leave home little by little-
first grade school, then college,
your own apartment, perhaps marriage-,
I hope you'll think fondly of these walls which housed you,
...

... go out into the evening,
leaving your room, of which you know each bit,
your house is the last before the infinite, ...
(from Rainer Maria Rilke's 'Eingang', MacIntyre translation)
...

God waited for Abraham's arm to be actually starting down, the biceps fully tensed.
Nothing short would do; in extremity, we learn what's true.
With a good job, a good marriage, a fine son, I had everything one could expect.
And yet there was a lingering dissatisfaction; a malaise.
...

That magic summer where we first met and wooed
fades further from us with each passing year.
The words we spoke are gone; the words' tune lingers on.
...

It promised to be quite ordinary,
that old student/new student/faculty social hour.

I had come to Champaign with high hopes a year earlier,
...

Garden Parkway YMCA
Dallas, Texas
22 November 1963
...

I loved you
from the first.

I loved you
...

I will forget you, presently.
As leaves of this ailanthus tree, now green,
turn yellow, fall, and are covered with snow,
so memories of you will fade.
...

Never transplant a poet's heart.
It wouldn't start.
Or, if it did, would stop
at some seemingly minor shock.
...