Pete Moore

ROBERT CREELEY

 

 

If you ever ask me out on a date, Robert Creeley

I’ll answer, does money spend. In the wave

there is either beauty or the labor it hides. In

the draft there are only inelegant phrases

picked up in native places. Purple bleats my vision

 

bearing down on soft paper. Walking the streets

we put to sleep, I seek you out in storefronts

so large, none of us could say it was our reflection.

The sushi restaurants of my boyhood go boarded up,

get them confused with boiled tenements—still

 

I will call this place with no sign, Koto. Still

the façade wears the Hokusai mural: blue wave

of bricks, surf pocked with wear, crest scrawling

under graffiti. It’s not that I don’t associate you

with labor, Robert Creeley, it’s just those

 

little rehearsals you mouth at the break of lines

bear a luster stronger than that normal to work.