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.
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