Help has been delayed.
The rescuers are lost.
Accountants have defrayed
Their compass at your cost.
The bears are up and running.
The bull has whet his wings.
Lifeguards outside sunning,
The happy hunchback sings.
Into the broken woods,
Then out again, chop, chop.
Illicit, knockoff goods,
Sold by your momma’s shop,
Are smuggled home by doctors
Discovering arbitrage.
Your robed and pear-shaped proctors
Wait in the garage.
Least of our problems is the nightingale,
Which will not live in Denver. It must be
The altitude, the air Professor Dust,
Or all the folks from Texas moving here.
Sure, I should like to hear him sing to sleep
Weary baristas, shaking on the grounds
They cannot keep a songbird of their own.
Yes, it might cheer my grandma, if I had one,
Make her recall that once her skin was snug;
But if its old plaint was only loss and love,
You amid roses, sweetpeas on your pants,
I'd just as soon converse with crows and grackles.
My love is like a partridge or a squab.
I tried to make that work, but she resisted.
This was a compliment, so I insisted;
But she, it seemed, was something of a snob.
She wanted peacocks. Lord, she wanted tits
With scarlet crests and wings of diamante
To fly ahead and trill of shantih, shantih.
Still I preferred to sing my greatest hits,
Honor roll of the commonplace, the same,
Sparkly in dun. Dressed down. The sure. The daily.
Nothing about me said, I love you gaily.
She flew in neon on a darkling plane.
And so I write to you from this far place,
Who misses most a hypothetic face.
To you a letter. How about q,
Always followed by u, as I
Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?
Too oblique, I know. I know it
Follows, not p to o, but where
We all align, in tidied rows,
Where there are diphthongs we can share,
On monuments a line or less.
O, I say, O. But no one gapes.
They keep, instead, their final shapes.
12 lines. Or several hundred more.
And never again what came before.
That light from underneath the wendy house?
Aliens praying for our human souls,
Which they use to recover old upholstery,
To plug the cracks in alien patios,
Through which they plunge for hundreds of alien miles,
And end up salting mines. They keep a light
On day and night, hoping they will be saved
From shopworn fates by spiritual human stuff.
I don’t know if that ever happens, though.
Our lawn is littered with the crinkled husks
Of something other, something not like us
In flannel shirts and wool sweat socks, and hats
Stamped Alma Mater, Stabat Mater. Pray,
You aliens. I wish you all the best.
Who can believe the luminous moon
Is lit by the sun? Here? In the dark?
Science is not some kids’ cartoon,
Where falling anvils leave no mark
On trees who are singing in the park;
And the dish runs away with the spoon.
It glows because it’s happy, bright
With sweat and pleasure from within.
It romances the earth at night,
Wolf-whistles at the frabjous sight
Of you in bed, and shines with sin
At second hand. You light the sky;
The moon absorbs. What science knows
Ends at the treetops. Wonder why
At night, between the breast and thigh,
Your silver duvet glows and glows?
It wouldn’t take me long to build
A monument—to stuff, then gild
A cassowary or a grub,
To stain a fence and plant a shrub,
Install umbrellas all around,
Stick Latin mottoes in the ground,
And plat the place with a snazzy name.
Of course you would have died of shame.
Much better to lie in the dark,
Pretending night is a private park,
Charming the mob away, who knew
Nothing of me and less of you.
