Provisionally "I" Practically alive Mistook signs for signified And so since have often tried To run them off the cliff like Gadarene swine And tied my thought-ropes in anchor bends Wondering whether we were someone better then Or maybe just better able to pretend And what better means to our inevitable end No, I don't know if I know Though some with certainty insist "No, certainty exists" Well, I'm certain enough of this: In the past fourteen years There's only one girl I've kissed In the blistering heat of the Asbury pier We sat quiet as monks on the Ferris wheel Until looking down at the waltzer and out at the sea I asked her "do you ever have that recurring fantasy?" "Where you push little kids from the tops of the rides?" She shook her head no I said "oh, neither do I" And with my grandmother's ring, I went down on one knee And the subsequent catastrophe, has since, haunted me Like a fiberglass ghost In the attic, my inconveniently selective memory As provisionally "You" Mercifully withdrew All the bearing points we thought we knew Day's run, day's set plot Our compass shot We sailed waywardly on Singing out midnight archer songs Until well past dawn It's still dark on the deck of our boats Haphazardly blown Broken bows, our aimless arrow-words Don't mean a thing So, by now I think it's pretty obvious that there's no God And there's definitely a God I dreamt on the rocks at the Asbury dunes And that you jumped from the top of the Log Flume And they gather like wolves on the boardwalk below And they're howling for answers no wolf can know I charged at the waves with a glass in my hand And was tossed like a ball at the bottle stand And landed beside your remains on the stones Where your cold fingers wrapped round my ankle bone While maybe ten feet away was a star Thousands of times the size of our sun Exploding like tiny balloons You'd throw darts at I slept until our chest was full Of yarn we spun from Shetland wool In socks from where the Dorset grows Sheared and scoured hours Before the rooster crows The price of German silver fell Threw disused thalers down The superstition well