Duck, Duck, Duck, Goose

 

1/

Ducks, the feathered biped, take to the air
And are transformed. We should keep faith with dirt,
Carpets and planking our relatives; but ducks
All but turn cartwheels, launching off of sky,
Air to air missiles. We are only earthed.

2/
You wanna buy a duck? You say, Duck, duck,
A bird. Who cares? I ain’t afraid of birds.
You say the secret word, and what you win
Is life eternal, if you’ll only die;
And who brings down the news, who marks the spot?
A duck, a duck. Your kingdom by a duck.

3/
We lay enmeshed in eiderdown, a pair
Professing satisfaction and perplexed
Our fluid situation had been stanched
And we were now what we were going to be.
She twitched the duvet, adjusting me, and hoped
I wouldn’t take too long to be re-lit.
A fire for my fireplace, she said.
She threw the cover back; unfeathered, made
A sight an angel would have molted for.
Ducks died so you could show yourself, I said.
What a canard, she answered, moving in.

I Am A Poem By Armand Crumple

 

I Am A Poem By Armand Crumple
is the name of a poem
by Armand Crumple.
I’m Armand Crumple.

Although I have a poet’s heart,
I am not a work of art.
You read my words. I come apart.
I, Crumple.

It’s easy to confuse the two.
I, Armand, do the things I do,
and some of them I write to you,
like this one.

And where I start and where I end,
though I pretend that I pretend,
I know I mean. Since light can bend
or crumple,

the things I mean, I mean to know,
and you can touch the parts I show—
bleak and barren, bare and blue;
exhibiting itself for you,
I am a poem
by Armand Crumple.

What We'll Always Have

 

Ah, zut, she said, we'll always have

Paris, where we were poor but brave.
And poor, I said. And sick of head.
You are not Gertrude Stein, she said.

Mais non. Agreed. The leaves were green
That spring. Horse chestnuts fell like rain.
I was not well. I know, she said,
I tried, and you were mostly dead.

Those were the goddamn days of yore,
I wrote. And yet you would not share,
She said. Too bad that we were bred
Gold to the bone, now flayed, now fled.

Noel, Noelle

 

As I wrote here in April, 2008, I found this poem in a drawer a while back. I don't remember when I wrote it, but it must have been a long, long time ago. It's pleasant to observe that my facility with blank verse has improved: this seems stiff to me, and the blank verse I write now is more limber—it can do tricks on the balance beam that this can't. On the other hand, I'm also pleased to find "Under the snow the dead are staying dead/again this year," lines I've often quoted without remembering that I was the one who wrote them. 



You claim that you live in Montana, somewhere
undisclosed but big, since it is Montana,
with dogs of course, under eponymous
big skies. It may be like The Ponderosa.
It may be just a little 50's house,
brick and right angles, all the rooms too small
for all the children's scheduled occupation.

Regardless, this is where you claim to be,
vacuuming dogs, shampooing your fiancé,
writing good prose, and waiting for the eve
of someone's savior's birth to change your world.
The eve will come, if not the savior.
Under the snow the dead are staying dead
again this year. Achieving the right tone

to talk about the still dead dead would tax
the festive certitude of anyone.
Your coming roster of visiting kin,
expecting nogs and cakes, presents and pizza,
won't want to hear about your doubts. They know
what Santa does and what he never says.
They like a creche. They like a mistletoe

above their heads, a Baldur's dart. You can
foretell what's coming, you and absent friends,
alone in your fashed kitchen, late late night,
toasting a yule, whatever yules may be.
The dogs asleep and snoring, dreaming dog,
you in your underwear and hoisting bourbon,
know what you know and not a nickel more.

Classical Education

 

Greek to me, it was just as though I read

A language I had never known, but wanted

To understand. Black squiggles on the page,

A scent of frat boys drinking beer on Sunday—

Pindar, Sophocles, and the Kappa Sigs.

I filled my mouth with pebbles—well, more like

Gravel: it lined the sea millennia

Ago, when I was still invertebrate—

Orating made me sound like I was mumbling,

Oatmeal and not Demosthenes. I thought

Of those of my friends who had studied Latin

While I picked Russian for its false prestige

And didn't learn even that. They could read Virgil

And think of Homer. I now read the funnies,

Laugh at them, too. I orated some oatmeal

And thought of slave girls, of the spoils of purchase,

How I could compliment in my own tongue:

Hey, baby, want to dance? I once knew Russian.

I thought, there must have been some Greek louts, too,

And they spoke Greek, even when they were toddlers,

But didn't say, It's all English to me.

They didn't know the stuff they didn't know.

Under the olive trees they thought of maples

Not even a little, wished to grasp the form

Of The Infield Fly Rule not all, nor thought

Of leaving home for Hollywood. Not once.

That made them classical, even with acne,

Even when sure they were misunderstood,

Phallically challenged, or divinely sent

To free the boy next door from some damned girl.

Waking Up the Bears

 This appeared in Raintown Review.

It’s just as though the hills were breaking up,

Freeing the little men to roam and search

For little women in the barns and byres,

To ride the cows across the salty marsh,

And cook spaghetti in our barley fields.

The hills seem stout enough. A bit of steam

Is natural; and if at night the songs

To Trinken send the black bears out in search

Of warm and quiet hollows, I am much

Like bears. A hot wind chivvies everyone.

The children say it’s party-time. They claim

That steam makes clouds, and clouds make rain, and rain—

I can’t remember what rain does. I’ve seen

Melted rock like stone soup. What if the bears

Get hot feet? There are 30 little men

In caravans on Brother Framley’s verge,

With duckpin sets and pantomimes and tall

Hats the shape of fungi. We are packed;

The mare has her best bridle on; the dog

Has wrapped his ball in grass to keep it cool.

The little men will have this place. I’ll miss

The fireplace I built myself, the slate

Hearth, and the smell of clover overnight.

A little man dressed in my boots has rung

The bell. He wants my whetstone and my wife.

Besame Mucho

 

I slept, but that did not improve

My circumstance.  Mostly the stars

And ceiling fan had stayed in place;

And Ursa Major barely moved.

I dreamed of you.  Sometimes you made

A different moue or sprayed your hair.

Sometimes you ran away.  Or cooked,

Patisserie or oxtail soup.

But I knew what I knew and woke

To bracelets tossed on your pillowcase,

An amulet on the ceiling fan,

And Draco Major roaring by.

Called Upon by the Professor

 

I was paying bills when Professor H.,

dressed in his salt-and-pepper tweeds, appeared

and clucked, too long a victim of catarrh

and clerical miscues. The wrong iota,

sense goes awry, the statement gets misfiled.

He raised a saturnine brow. “O loveliest

of trees,” he said and decrescendoed. No

spot of ink stained where he’d stood, no scent

of laurel filled the august empty air.

I turned myself to text and death, his two

permanent acquisitions. In the heat

the cherry blossoms fluttered, though no breeze

rattled my papers. Unhappiness, he said,

is best unspoken. Sweet are the uses of

pomposity. Pains and chains and silence.

I Thought of Mr Pickwick

 

Just then the phone rang. It was Tiny Tim,

Tiptoeing through the snowdrops for a goose

The size of Uncle Scrooge. He had a heart

As big as individual distress

In every house and hovel. He had news

Of trials and sponging houses, and his dad

Had totted up the reckoning at last.

I thought of Mr Pickwick, who redeemed

A condominium in Venice Beach,

Where all the sunny blondes were wearing smiles

For Michaelmas. He beamed benignantly.

Remember Mr Fezziwig? he asked.

His claret was to die for, and he sent

Jacktars around the globe and back again.

He died in chains and stalks the streets at night.

Archival Studies

 

The cherubs in the margins smile and wink,
All rosy incunabula; the winds
Blow puffy cheeked from four directions, there
To warn you off the edge, whence you could slip
Into oblivion, no name, no scribe.

One of the i-dots seems a smiley face.
Nature is natural and carries on,
Despite instruction. “Conjunx” is misspelled
And might mean anything, though nothing good.
The ink is mixed with blood. By DNA

We know he was related to a Name
Still snippety by Domesday Book. Some fee
Installed him here. It wasn’t all the smarts
He evidenced: one comment we translate,
CALL GWENTY FOR A GOOD TIME. Great. Woo-woo.

Over the page the scent of sanctity
Still hovers. Must be subject-matter, all
Those humble dragons, saintly beasts with scales
Who found no virgin wanting. It is not
The ideal cursive hand. Those drips. That smudge.

Survival comes in packages too strange
To be secure. So say the sheep who died
For the appointment faintly on the verge.
A lunch, perhaps, or matins. By strong light
We can discern that something lies beneath.

News Break

 This appeared in The Poetry Bus.

Iffy, but rain more likely than disaster

Tonight. Disaster later in the week.

Volcanoes on the cities of the plain,

A flood and instability to follow

Cold, like the primal disengaging wind

Across the surface of unlighted skies,

Empty and without hope of being filled,

Expected, as is promised every year,

Delivered rarely. Make your reservations.

Eat first. Say ‘bye. Dress for adversity.

The cormorants are coming. They bring news

From Iowa: new prairies have been found

Studded with galleons, like golden nails

On inky beds. Wind freshening, the east

Surprised by dolphins. Three old men walked out

Of an abandoned mine in Agate, late

Last Tuesday morning, asking for a beer

And word of Good Queen Bess, fetters around

Their ankles. More on this if there is more.

They Flee From Me

 

And the small birds flee. Me, I lurch
Down the brick path, as though the fence
Were a destination, low church
Of last resort. Sing in past tense,
I warn the high birds on high branches.
They can feel light. I can feel dense
Bricks and palings, boundary chances
To stand firm. And the small birds sing
Inexplicably. See, they search
For song, they say, in everything.

But You're Not There

 

I thought of you a while. It didn’t have

The consequence it did. Upon a time,

Upon a bed, the thought of you would raise

The spirit levels of the cold: they praise

Famous men who will, I own a brave

Preference for the something like a dame.

But not tonight. Perhaps it’s the cold rain

Stippling the cherry tree. Maybe the bills

Unpaid, the trespasses still indisposed,

The door unlocked. The window never closed.

Somebody needs to troll Memory Lane.

The phone. But I’m not taking any calls

Tonight. Tonight I thought of you. Forget

Our debts. Tonight the world is getting wet.

Populist Politics

 

This is the country where a commandant

Discovered persiflage and flavored it,

Enlisted Cherokees for crowd control,

Good local color, founded an orphanage,

And called it Huxley on the Hill of Beans.

A modernizer, they say now, who stored

The name of every voter in a barn

Shaped like the Trianon, then burned it down

To prove he was sincere. From the insurance

He bought a trotter and a Brahma bull

With erysipelas and crooked horns.

They wouldn't get it on. He claimed a spread

Deeper in Texas than he ever went,

Who spent his twilight out on old Cape Cod,

A victim of the Zeitgeist and detente,

An advocate for antinomians.

Miracles & Wonders

 

Adventure-free, Odysseus

Amusement Park. The sirens sing

To la-di-da policemen cars

Surveilling everything in sight.

The vendors have been turned to swine,

And dressed in kale and collard greens,

A one-eyed guide eats hot dogs whole.

A madman in a sandwich board

Proclaims an epic fail, predicts

The fall of toys, a wooden hearse

To ferry us to Neverland.

The line advances one by one,

Extended to the violet hills,

Towering braggadocio.

Pie Are Round

 

I wanted to use perpendicular,

But settled for hypotenuse. I know.

Euclid is an old street in my home town

And Archimedes was a wry old owl.

This didn't help much, not in plane or solid,

Distinguishing which was my chef d'oeuvre. Right?

Jump cut to way back. You know Archimedes

Was slain, yes, whacked, while doodling in the sand.

Slow fade to years uncome. I cannot add

Quaint quiddities to peonies and mums,

Just so a sonnet seems to terpsichore.

I tried fried pi. Oh, it went on and on,

And never, like me, proceeded to conclusion.

Crisps for dessert. I am too square for pie.

A Little Delivered

 

Nothing more gorgeous than her gardening,

Which needs no barge or poop, just steer manure

And leafmeal crumble. Mulch is promised us,

Not always promptly. What we grow takes time,

Then flowers in the night. Conservators

Have failed their catalogues; Linneans weep,

Knowing somehow they've given it no name.

Ignis fatuus, some pink scholar said,

But he cared more about the Amazon,

One-breasted warbler, clear cut first, then mute.

She works the soil, not knowing if the fruits

Will see her, call her by her name, or care.

At Canterbury Gate

Beside the Canterbury Gate
Starbucks offers up caffeine
To pardoners and well-bathed wives
And those who've flown from other lives,
Guilt and pottage on a plate,
To worship where a Lord has been.

My host explains that caramel
And latte make a lovely pair.
And an anti-oxidizing scone
Will help me keep on keeping on.
He patters his tale very well,
Better than Mr Clark can bear:

“My, aren't we posh. Those charabancs
Of spivs and chavs just bought a ton
Of stuff they never read nor will.
So put you sweetener in their swill—
The inhumanity of gangs—
And offer them a Cinnabon.”

He’d smoke, but it is not allowed.
He’d drink, but it is half past eight.
His sallow fingers touch his nose
And Geoff’s his uncle when he goes
To worship in a bumptious crowd
The spivs and chavs who died in state.

The same stone that his father walked
Bears his weight now. The changing chimes
Tell the same time his father heard,
A very parfait gentle bird.
He talks the talk Old Adam talked,
Grimm’s Law excepted, crops and crimes.

Dinner at the Dog

 

The devil at the Dog ‘n’ Suds was hot,
But he was down with that, and he took long
Views, eternal darkness, and blah blah blah.
There wasn’t much imagination blessed
By Heaven. Here, though, he found beer and red
Hots, which helped the hopeless to feel at home.
Nor was it such a bad world, fallen grit
And unarticulated anger. Back
At home a pit for every sin and points
Deducted. Here the dry winds ate away
The names of everything and everyone;
And at the last were rock and gray and mud.
Why, then, would he mind dinner at the Dog
And acid reflux for his angel food?

Inspiration

 

The spirits circled high above the house

And dropped surprising words like fennel seed.

Never before, he thought, and could not write

Fast enough to keep up. There slipped away

An observation on the rites of men

With women and a pun on Little John,

And still the spirits strewed the house with verbs

He did not know he knew, until, at last,

He called it finished, although it couldn’t be;

And then the tutelary angels left

For Calgary, by typo drawn away.

Not one agreed to read a word he wrote.

Reading Yeats for Greats

 

Imagine that it’s been
A century since Yeats.
Imagine, and conclude
How meaningless are dates.
All of time gone by,
And not a second passed
For you who saw him first
And you who read him last.

He stepped outside to say
A line or two. It was
Out of time and place,
But no one cared because
No one had built a wall,
Nobody tore one down.
Beautiful women merged
There in Lissome Town.

When you are given away
Another century hence,
Your comely wisdom combined
Worth a couple pence,
The women still will walk,
And rebels stop and stare,
Nothing much to say.
Helen will not care.

Growing My Own

I’m growing heroes this year, each with vim

And rectitude.  Too proud to wear their masks

Or call themselves The Spanielled Cavaliers,

They will be known by what they do: The Lute,

My Sugar Beet, The Man from Polymath.

Muscles are nothing, candyland.  Their feats

Are vitamins and tiny nebulae

And comfort for the shopworn.  And the seeds,

Like starfish in a cup of broth, their shapes

Superfluous to what they will become,

Wait till it rains.  Wait till the worms have made

Them room to move.  Once they have sprung their shoots,

Who know if you can bear to watch them work

Or how many widows lay an extra place.

Pastoral Care

 

Rough winds on premises to let,

And summer’s lease is triple net.

The cuckold goldsmith in the sun

Makes melting pots of everyone,

While Amaryllis in the shade

Regrets the choices she has made.

Her bowered beau regrets no more

The nights he spent in days of yore.

Though Amaryllis shine too hot,

He will be spent when she is not,

Which, he suspects, the flock has known

Since they were fleeced, then left alone.

And greener pastures beckon.  Soon,

She will exclaim, this prick of noon

Will feel his autumn felix frost.

Then she is warm and he is lost

In fields of blasted corn and clover,

Rough winds at hand, and summer over.

No, Hope, Not Me

 

No Hope, No Hoopla: this is Low-Key Hell,

Where Glum’s the Word, the cocktail hour comes,

But the town is dry, the duck who guards the gate

Has three heads, as he ought, and devils are made

Of cooking oil and pink asbestos fluff.

There’s no spare change. There is no change at all,

Only the psalms of praise for other folks,

The ones who did not care enough to fight

For White After Labor Day or Rules Against

Perpetuities for everyone.

It isn’t fair, which, really, is the point.

Storyville

 

     This first appeared in Staple.

Just once? Upon a hundred million times
he woke and learned to speak and knocked her up
and watched her die and ran away and hid.

Each branch of this bears twigs, and each twig flowers.
The children live. The wife runs off. She finds
a man who loves her less and turns her out
to bus the tables of a mining town.

He makes a million - somethings. Dollars. Pails.
He trades the cow for beans. He plants the beans
and learns he loved her more than provender.
But it's too late. She's dead. Or wiping tables.
Or on her way to Jacksonville, where God
has called her to be Sister Angeline.

In one small blossom he is deaf and dumb
and sees his town in black and white reversed.
He finds her anyway. They stay. They live
ever after, just off Sueño Street.

When Lions Come

 

This appeared in Orbis.

When lions come to the door to drag you out
into the street, they won’t want elegy
or meditations on the Elder Breughel.
It’s commonsense and die with them: plain speech
is what they have time for. They’re not chimpanzees.

In camps, if you make it there, interrogation
occurs in prose, in real time, not in feet.
Elephants can do prosody; lions think
elephants have gone soft, wasting their gifts
on rumination, wallowing, and tusks.

Under the klieg lights lions want the truth.
They won’t even tell you, Soon you can go home.
Maybe they eye a haunch and hum a little.
Confess the truth and change for death: that’s all
the deal they offer, all they need to know—

lions don’t hope. They are. No note is sent
advising your next of kin you have been laid
with wildebeests and zebras in the pit
where herbivores accrue, praying, say lions,
they could be lions next. Not bloody likely.

A Muse Bouche

 

Least of all scruples, failure to remove

The restless ant by well-shod squashing, will

Refrain from formicide, grammatically.

So said the Muse pro Forma, who declined

Explaining further. Comme d'habitude, of course.

Bestowing roses, all the asters gone,

She smiled my way and spat, which must be something.

I sang her "Autumn Leaves," but I said "Auden,"

And she dissolved, bequeathing a hill of ants

Shaped like a castle, right there on the rug.

"Remember when we all were friends," I said;

But ants don't laugh or break into applause.

If they were singing, none of it would rhyme,

All of them buzzed by unison. They're not.

L'Eau Riders

 

"Il pleuve" is not the same

As rain come banging down.

The Seine is not the Strong

Brown God who came to town,

Arousing local song.

The worms rise, not the vers

De terre. It's just the way

Things are. The rainbow is

Our arch of triumph. Mud

Is everywhere the same,

The protein shake of blood.

Independence & Resolution

 

            for Douglas Wilson

Listen, he said, the sound of flies

Above the riffle, that bodes well.

The old man sat, in sad surmise,

And thought of revolution. Hell,

He told us, when the world was new

And we ran guns and gerunds sang,

I watched the mountains turning blue.

Ecclesiastics never rang,

And girls were disappointed I

Moved them along. Now I can hope

That when my grey habiliments die,

The Queen will wear a dab of crêpe.

The music of satiety,

Which has no wings and does not grow

In memory, plays endlessly

And only strikes the notes we know.

The Age of Gold

          This appeared in Angle.

And then, when the obliging sheep

In colors grow their ready wool,

And knickers fall like ripened fruit

Upon the shaven grass, and crêpes

Suzettes extend until we're full

From bramble bushes, and the flute

Sonatas of the shepherds toot

The flocks in file, the wolves will cull

The weakest for unconstructed suits

And long-johns knitted with extra legs.

Welcome the Age of Martial Bands

And Paperclips and Glitzy Digs

And Varnish on Arthritic Hands.

Mores and mores. Rustic now

Invites the wolf to buy his plow

For peanuts, and the Opus Coots

Disperse small crowds from roadside stands.

Chains They Forged In Life

 

The poems no one heard of populate

This verbosphere, invisible and bleak,

Dottering incoherently in dry

And crumby cupboards, turning bedsheets gray

On sleepovers, making little girls pale,

Afraid that they have accidentally bled.

Elegiac, embarrassed, and full of tropes

Disparaged by Seleucian kings, they tell

Stories of unrequited jealousy

Engraved on stone with sponges, vetted by

The underappreciated and the fat

Recipients of Golden Books and schmaltz.

A few are goodbye letters, never signed.

A few are tax returns, unaudited.

Some lisp. Some swoon. Some have these wild ideas

About the immanence of outer space.

They drool. They belch. Complain. Complain. Complain.

They like a mirror, write they backwards verse.