Poem With Lines From John Wieners

Poem With Lines From John Wieners

O poetry, visit this house often,
John Wieners, from “Nerves,” 1970

out of your graves, tell us what poetry
fields if not respect for suffering. You’ve taken the teaspoon
from the glass you stirred hurt in
and dropped it bowl-first in the sink. Now
two o’clock rolls round again. Tell us how the

cisgender man invented vajazzle and its drugstore
display. Make your most forsaken memento
the body you dove from at ten at the lake.
The old gods are gone. Your lookout for them,
scratched as it was on the crumb of a muffin, kept you up

days in the office in Leeds. Is he here? You can still hear
the whistling teeth of the secretary there.
Again under young middle-aged bellies in the summer
the furious men on your block
pounded with balls the vast strip of tar

until the net flapped in the wind. You drove back
by this house parking — lot talk of a poem,
and even in the rosebush breeze his shaven cheek
did not come close to yours. Tell us what poetry did
to proffer a Kleenex from air.