Tracking the Engineers

Engineers, and they make and drive the train,

Design the clacking parts and with them move

Through unlit fields of soy, past pinhead towns,

Into garages where they draw up specs,

To prove that motion is perpetual,

If expertly believed. They know that rods

Connect the wheels. They’ve seen how the harvest moon

In North Dakota polishes empty track,

Their iPods left at home, loaded with funk,

Earth, Wind & Fire, Little Anthony,

And Mantovani’s Permanent Regret.

A can of Sterno for a souvenir,

A pen so fine you cannot see the point--

No layman can—those they carry around

To dim sum hangouts on the frozen plains.

And when they fade, and when they are defrocked,

They live in rathskellers and rumpus rooms,

Where late at night, baffled by bells and horns,

They learn the trick that makes their whole wash white. 

Nostalgie Pour La Boue

 

Naive to think the upturned earth

Disgorged the spoils of the Spanish mains.

We’re landlocked here. For what they’re worth,

Wormcasts abound. Rewarded by rains,

Robins rejoice in booty, loot

They’re engineered both to digest

And to expect. With wormy fruit,

The unimaginative do best.

Tough to play pirate with these clumps.

Compress them into diamonds, sure--

I did that every day and proved

Mountains by increments were moved.

Nothing comes easy but the pure

Projected source of perfect dumps.

Not Always to the Swift

 

Consider the bees.  They toil lots,

And, boy, they spin from fleur to fleur,

Pollinations as they were,

Floribunding the hot spots,

While I watch here, unverbed, unnouned,

Except for remembering what I hear,

A taste of honey growing near

And sweat.  It is an elder sound,

The sound of since, not without sting.

The bees head home.  Say, come again,

And be what you have always been,

Sweetness of bloom a living thing.