A Book of Job: Help Wanted

 

What a job. An eyeful of the lawful

Spectacle, bespectacled, is Plenty

On Wheels. I'd roll from whales, the mighty awful

Issue of the One God. Give me twenty,

A hundred gods. I'd take these glasses off

And turn my head when He asked me to cough.

This patchwork quilt of comforters is more

Than any single man should have to bear

(A married man perforce begins to wear

Away); but God's piternal band will pour

Changes on these brass symbols, men who bore

His burden slackjawed. I know. I was there.

O God Thou God too strong for me, You made

Earth yours. It is too good. I am afraid.

Memorial Park

Many have risen.  Not all oaks

are nymphs converted. Other folks,
their bite exhausted, left with bark,
arose again, to point a park:
not as a plant, but through a bole,
not as they were, yet as a whole.

They bear their branches. Who believes 
that green is all there is to leaves,
both food and feeder? In their arms
they cloud first, then support the swarms
who fancy live apartments. Birds
pay their respects, in other words.

They die, and some are seen again.
Some fall in cords, and some in pain.
These find no end, no fine full stop.
Dead at the root, dead from the top,
bent double as in desolation,
somehow some last. Some consolation.

An Anecdote of Middle Age

The stereo gathers no moss. It rocks
The lamp now bouncing closer to the edge;
My turntable will dump it on the floor
Unless I intervene. Why, you can think
A hundred divagating thoughts within
The couple seconds left to make the save,
Or not. There is a window to look out,
And spring is imminent. The Cyprian,
Who now wears lycra and a navel ring,
Instructs her votaries, commands the prone
Attention of the young and wish-they-were,
And favors sleeplessness by low-watt bulb.
Sequins are hers, and cottonwood like snow,
But pliable and weightless, borne by breeze,
Outside the window clearly, outside time.
I never liked that lamp much anyway,
Not much to rock by, at its shaded best,
Lava lamps having died so long ago,
Their tie-dyed coffins are as decomposed
As Toscanini by the grateful dead.
I save the lamp. You had to know I would.