Shall I tell you about the dead,
Who have no alibis,
Who do not care what’s said,
Bald truth or naked lies,
Who have no sense of loss,
Who do not groan in grief,
Nor grouse beneath their cross,
But won’t confess belief?
See for yourself? No fear
(But you won’t miss your eyes);
And though you disappear,
We shall feel no surprise.
This first appeared in The Chimaera.
Wednesday
Among these sparrows, frogs, and chickadees,
Finally warmed by sun instead of steam,
Too early for the shift to certainties,
Pentameter to prose, maybe I dream
Of sex and violets. Perhaps I know
What scientists on salary forecast:
This Thursday, patchy fog and early snow.
Their spring comes early, but it does not last
Forever. So I’m told. No season does
Which lies beneath the dirt today. Tomorrow
The violets will be the spring that was.
They lend me verse. Whatever else I borrow,
I offer back, as though I had a choice.
First day of spring, this is my winter voice.
Whensday
Dr Dee and his chicks, that brood who read
Fire and numbers, every comet signed,
What good are they? Their sun is not a head
Of state. Mere shape lives only in the mind,
In digs where violence dwells, sex of a kind,
Like ringing changes on these lilybells.
He knew his time, he told his time. And then?
I heard the answer. Like the heart, it tells
The count. It told the weather, but not when.
I take my time. It will be small and soon.
He only heard the pitch of notes that men
Are built to hear. I think I heard that tune3
Performing here. The feeder and the grass
Bear the refrain: “A lass, my love, a lass.”
Wedsday
Nobody claims that flowers are untrue
Because they claim their pollen from the wind.
Imagine being proffered that you--
“It was the zephyr did it. I’m unskinned,
I’m virgin as a stone.” Of course you are.
The hyacinths immaculately flower.
They took their color from a passing star
While you were sleeping: some ungodly hour
When spring believed that nobody was watching.
Tulips push through. The grass begins to sweat.
Troo-loo the song the songbirds have been hatching:
Tra-la the song they urge us to forget.
Trust is a cycle. If we do the same,
We get it back. And no one knows its name.
Wendsday
A pilgrimage, spring having sprung, we go
The places we go every day, to see
What sun has done to change the world we know:
It starts from scratch, except for me and thee.
We are now what we have been, more and less,
Parts shed, augmented, by and large forgotten.
We can still flower—there is that, God bless--
So fertile we, so much to work with, rotten
Right to the corps. They call these zephyrs. Feel
Commotion in the ground? No? I don’t either.
From this point forward, nothing much is real—
No pilgrims, Aprille, smalle foweles neither.
Spring forward. Fall back. Either way we stand
Right where we are, not sky, not wholly land.
There at the Federal Courthouse they love Shakespeare.
They quote him often, and they quote him wrong.
“The quality of mercy is not stained,”
A PD said. “This kingdom is no horse,”
A prosecutor pled. “In every hamlet
they know the great clichés.” I have an itch
To stand and rectify, but I do not,
Suspecting that the local lockup holds
No friends to friends of bards. The judge looks down,
His lifetime tenure harbored in his gut,
And quotes, “Victims have died. Why, even worms
May have their day and turn. But not for love.”
It’s hard to argue with a thought like that.
I don’t know any worms who disagree.
Kicking
the leaves aside, I find a garden
Waiting,
pale and helio-thwarted, seeds
Gone
wild, which hasn’t henceforth proved a guerdon
Sufficient
to combat saracen weeds.
Oh,
till us, quoth they, fork and petty plow
A
weaponry that fallen earth believes.
With
pail and can they may be good enow.
When
weeds are yanked and die, sir, no one grieves.
Unto
a flower root and stem aspire,
Which
then will seed to make a root a stem.
To
probe so low, they needs must hie them higher.
I
like the parts best, still unseen of them.
Thus
is it often, paladins unknowing,
Consequence
witnessed. What inaction forces
Lies,
time in earth. O lovely flower showing
Benighted
us, the dim tree light immerses.
