Friday, March 15, 2024

Catching the Ferry

 

Last night the Truth Ferry

Put in as I slept

And left a verse in bed

And took the dime I'd left.



It wasn't printed neatly

And neither fine nor fair.

I read it only when and where

No one else could hear.



This is the way the worm

I wonder how it ends.

Bangs and pine and dirt

And pale segmented friends,



Perhaps. I am afraid

I can't write in my sleep.

I cannot hear the sound

Of what is taking shape



In dark rooms growing darker,

Quiet, humid, dumb.

To every boy and girl

At night a truth will come.

Monday, March 11, 2024

The New Roadmap

 

I lived here once. I know

which streets went where. I ran

where this lane starts to go

to the left, where it began


to carry another name.

So I am not impressed

by maps. It's not the same,

your sketch. I think you messed


up my reality.

Where's Archer? Appleton?

The dogleg at du Pres?

I know now what you've done,


you've gone to see what's there.

You stood on my home ground

as is. That wasn't fair;

taking a look around


alters the memory.

It warps the past. It preys

on what we say we see,

It relocates what stays


to house, then to maps,

till we avert our eyes,

as though all routes collapse

below misfigured skies.

Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Changeling

    This appeared in Staple


If it isn't the roof, the plumbing's goes,

Or the showerhead, or the parakeet. Like that.

Sometimes the years of dry, furnace-forced air

will shrink the floorboards. What was glossy, grays.

Sometimes the one you turn to isn't there

in the bed; or perhaps she is, but gone

to ghost, and you can never be alone

more than you are right then, which is enough, thanks.



They told you nothing stays, claimed, as you found,

that change is what there is. But this is less.

Everything leaves, but not entirely:

the bird's cry from the elm tree high above

the dust of rooftrees laid down many moons

rouses the form whom you still try to hold.


Friday, March 01, 2024

All Tales Come True

 

 Is this one of those historical moments—

The Siege of Stalingrad or Johnny Van-

Der Meer's 2nd?  Decades hence, a hundred,

Two thousand years, will people say, Her linen

Shift fit like May between the spring and summer?


No one can tell what Helen did in bed

To make her Paris spring.  The men who lay us

End to end in expensive cardboard jars

Know squat.  They can't wait to be shoveled ash.


You pivot on the spike heels Dr Jekyll

Says women shouldn't wear—poor torque-sprung backs.

Your hair fans a like a runway breeze was blowing.

The men besieged behind their shattered walls

Drop their boiled leather, wave their horseplume hats, 

And scatter condoms from those famous heights.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Imperial Lives, Late

 

I dream of people I don’t like. Not when

I knew them, not now. Unforgiving, like

An emperor, pensioning off delators.

My dreams delate. They say, I am the one.

A pot of lampreys and a plot of ground

For anyone who didn’t see my face

Remembering. That girl. That test. That time

Nothing went right, and I was told a tale.

A ribbon and a farmhouse. A fast horse.

A purple shirt, imperial, for you,

If you don’t know me and you never did.


Tuesday, February 20, 2024

GAA

 

Never since that one night have I attended

A party as a mushroom—not that I'm

Too proud to be a fungus, though the absence

Of chlorophyll and the proud necessity

Of feeding on, what shall we say? defunct

Organic matters doesn't suggest ballrooms.

It's more that we are only flora once,

Some roses, spinach some, we soon outgrow

Our vegetable natures. Aged between

An ugly plant and lesser carnivore,

I fared better than most. And when I saw

The lamp and found my motor skills, I yet,

In the way of a vermiform appendix,

Concealed a mushroom nature. Though by night

They come and go, by day, if you can pick

The right one, they afford a minor garnish.


Friday, February 16, 2024

Permafrost


A foot of snow descended on the house,

All fall at once and we pretended joy

At such a purty fluffiness, and broke

Our backs and shovel blades, and prayed that spring,

Spring would arrive, but not because of us,

The snow grows grass and lubricates the bulbs

Stripped from their husks it promised and delivered.

Summer, which disbelieves in snow, will swear

Sweat is the moisture agriculture named,

But summer lies, and winter lasts: within

The master bedroom wall a cache of snow

Waits and concedes no melting, never melts.