Thursday, November 28, 2019

Major Bear


Although I'm cracking wise and quoting Yeats,

explaining all the voices Kant can't do,
the damn bear won't look back. He has a den
accessible to meat- and berry-men,
but not to those whose popcorn-covered cates
feed just themselves. He may live in a zoo,

which is his loss to bear: but one must buy
goodwill from prisoners. He can smell my heart,
so fat, so crowded, from this far away.
When I go home to betty, he will stay,
a bear among men, a bear who will not try
to rise above his nature. Take your art

to some museum, where a red Matisse,
resigned to gilt, rectangularly framed,
hangs. Never shuffles. Never craps or roars.
Blinks not. As squares dance in the in-of-doors,
my bear is moated by such white police.
Die, will you? Do. The bear will not be blamed.

Monday, November 18, 2019

Only Labor Day

Look at the falling leaves.
It's only Labor Day,
When crabgrass half believes
We've scarcely finished May.

The chickadee is demanding
Every surviving seed.
The hollyhock still is standing,
Old habit now, not need

To make the bees attend
And propagate.  We say,
Look at the leaves descend,
And then we look away.

Tuesday, November 12, 2019

A Ballad For Willlie

My name is William Butler Yeats.

When young, I spoke to faeries
and sang of ponds and leprechauns
and lips red-ripe as cherries.

Now my glass is cold and cracked,
my verse a fine steel wire.
The faeries all have been served with writs
and flung out in the mire,

shot down at the Post Office door,
blown up by the IRA:
a city man in a country house,
I'll make myself a play;

taut for my Maud and statesmanlike,
I perne me in a gyre.
I'll bear it all for drama's sake
and set this house on fire.

Thursday, November 07, 2019

Decomposition

Scraping away their sod, you find--

The time-intoxicated dirt,
Rich in polysyllabic orts
And nutrients, like red roe deer
And tallow chandlers--roots and bones.
We have those here. Around a shrew's
Skull you can see the withy threads
Of something growing somewhere else.
Our soil is fed by little songs
Of composition: Here lies one
Whose name was never writ at all,
Genius and species, gone to seed.

Saturday, November 02, 2019

Burritos Before Bed


Damned by the first and undressed by the next,

Preferred by neither, settled for by both,

This may not be true love. But then who is?

Juliet is dead and hadn’t yet begun

To grasp Home Ec nor rallied over pep:

It’s Die or Dulcinea for the rest;

And blanketed by down at two a.m.,

I don't know which is worse, I who have watched

The best and brightest looking somewhere else.

We are what we have overlooked, neglected,

Misprisions of vanity. At two

They all seem just the same, no rapprochement,

Walking reproaches, fuzzy and opaque.

I doubt that I am falling back asleep.