Tell me some more
About the shore
Where Charon waits
To greet the greats
And poor and 'twixt,
Randomly mixed,
A penny apiece,
Without surcease.
Is it hard and bare?
Do spirits share
Obligingly
Or try to flee,
Each dark shape
Bent on escape?
Do come ahead,
He tells the dead,
No woo, no warning.
No more morning.
While birdies slept and
earthworms snored
And owlets stooped to swoopy flights,
You
the Teen Queen Max restored,
With endless make-up, endless
nights.
Our tygers pad the jasmined path
And cherries
fall from green green trees
And all our dead lay down their
wrath
As I awake through slow degrees
In shadowed
rooms to unfilled beds.
The clock, the clock. Across the
lawn,
In fact, the sparrows shield their heads
Till, chime
by chime, they rouse to dawn.
Help has been delayed.
The rescuers are lost.
Accountants have defrayed
Their compass at your cost.
The bears are up and running.
The bull has whet his wings.
Lifeguards outside sunning,
The happy hunchback sings.
Into the broken woods,
Then out again, chop, chop.
Illicit, knockoff goods,
Sold by your momma’s shop,
Are smuggled home by doctors
Discovering arbitrage.
Your robed and pear-shaped proctors
Wait in the garage.
Least of our problems is the nightingale,
Which will not live in Denver. It must be
The altitude, the air Professor Dust,
Or all the folks from Texas moving here.
Sure, I should like to hear him sing to sleep
Weary baristas, shaking on the grounds
They cannot keep a songbird of their own.
Yes, it might cheer my grandma, if I had one,
Make her recall that once her skin was snug;
But if its old plaint was only loss and love,
You amid roses, sweetpeas on your pants,
I'd just as soon converse with crows and grackles.
My love is like a partridge or a squab.
I tried to make that work, but she resisted.
This was a compliment, so I insisted;
But she, it seemed, was something of a snob.
She wanted peacocks. Lord, she wanted tits
With scarlet crests and wings of diamante
To fly ahead and trill of shantih, shantih.
Still I preferred to sing my greatest hits,
Honor roll of the commonplace, the same,
Sparkly in dun. Dressed down. The sure. The daily.
Nothing about me said, I love you gaily.
She flew in neon on a darkling plane.
And so I write to you from this far place,
Who misses most a hypothetic face.
To you a letter. How about q,
Always followed by u, as I
Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?
Too oblique, I know. I know it
Follows, not p to o, but where
We all align, in tidied rows,
Where there are diphthongs we can share,
On monuments a line or less.
O, I say, O. But no one gapes.
They keep, instead, their final shapes.
12 lines. Or several hundred more.
And never again what came before.
That light from underneath the wendy house?
Aliens praying for our human souls,
Which they use to recover old upholstery,
To plug the cracks in alien patios,
Through which they plunge for hundreds of alien miles,
And end up salting mines. They keep a light
On day and night, hoping they will be saved
From shopworn fates by spiritual human stuff.
I don’t know if that ever happens, though.
Our lawn is littered with the crinkled husks
Of something other, something not like us
In flannel shirts and wool sweat socks, and hats
Stamped Alma Mater, Stabat Mater. Pray,
You aliens. I wish you all the best.
Who can believe the luminous moon
Is lit by the sun? Here? In the dark?
Science is not some kids’ cartoon,
Where falling anvils leave no mark
On trees who are singing in the park;
And the dish runs away with the spoon.
It glows because it’s happy, bright
With sweat and pleasure from within.
It romances the earth at night,
Wolf-whistles at the frabjous sight
Of you in bed, and shines with sin
At second hand. You light the sky;
The moon absorbs. What science knows
Ends at the treetops. Wonder why
At night, between the breast and thigh,
Your silver duvet glows and glows?
It wouldn’t take me long to build
A monument—to stuff, then gild
A cassowary or a grub,
To stain a fence and plant a shrub,
Install umbrellas all around,
Stick Latin mottoes in the ground,
And plat the place with a snazzy name.
Of course you would have died of shame.
Much better to lie in the dark,
Pretending night is a private park,
Charming the mob away, who knew
Nothing of me and less of you.
Last night the Truth Ferry
Put in as I slept
And left a verse in bed
And took the dime I'd left.
It wasn't printed neatly
And neither fine nor fair.
I read it only when and where
No one else could hear.
This is the way the worm—
I wonder how it ends.
Bangs and pine and dirt
And pale segmented friends,
Perhaps. I am afraid
I can't write in my sleep.
I cannot hear the sound
Of what is taking shape
In dark rooms growing darker,
Quiet, humid, dumb.
To every boy and girl
At night a truth will come.
I lived here once. I know
which streets went where. I ran
where this lane starts to go
to the left, where it began
to carry another name.
So I am not impressed
by maps. It's not the same,
your sketch. I think you messed
up my reality.
Where's Archer? Appleton?
The dogleg at du Pres?
I know now what you've done,
you've gone to see what's there.
You stood on my home ground
as is. That wasn't fair;
taking a look around
alters the memory.
It warps the past. It preys
on what we say we see,
It relocates what stays
to house, then to maps,
till we avert our eyes,
as though all routes collapse
below misfigured skies.
This appeared in Staple.
If it isn't the roof, the plumbing's goes,
Or the showerhead, or the parakeet. Like that.
Sometimes the years of dry, furnace-forced air
will shrink the floorboards. What was glossy, grays.
Sometimes the one you turn to isn't there
in the bed; or perhaps she is, but gone
to ghost, and you can never be alone
more than you are right then, which is enough, thanks.
They told you nothing stays, claimed, as you found,
that change is what there is. But this is less.
Everything leaves, but not entirely:
the bird's cry from the elm tree high above
the dust of rooftrees laid down many moons
rouses the form whom you still try to hold.
Is this one of those historical moments—
The Siege of Stalingrad or Johnny Van-
Der Meer's 2nd? Decades hence, a hundred,
Two thousand years, will people say, Her linen
Shift fit like May between the spring and summer?
No one can tell what Helen did in bed
To make her Paris spring. The men who lay us
End to end in expensive cardboard jars
Know squat. They can't wait to be shoveled ash.
You pivot on the spike heels Dr Jekyll
Says women shouldn't wear—poor torque-sprung backs.
Your hair fans a like a runway breeze was blowing.
The men besieged behind their shattered walls
Drop their boiled leather, wave their horseplume hats,
And scatter condoms from those famous heights.
I dream of people I don’t like. Not when
I knew them, not now. Unforgiving, like
An emperor, pensioning off delators.
My dreams delate. They say, I am the one.
A pot of lampreys and a plot of ground
For anyone who didn’t see my face
Remembering. That girl. That test. That time
Nothing went right, and I was told a tale.
A ribbon and a farmhouse. A fast horse.
A purple shirt, imperial, for you,
If you don’t know me and you never did.
Never since that one night have I attended
A party as a mushroom—not that I'm
Too proud to be a fungus, though the absence
Of chlorophyll and the proud necessity
Of feeding on, what shall we say? defunct
Organic matters doesn't suggest ballrooms.
It's more that we are only flora once,
Some roses, spinach some, we soon outgrow
Our vegetable natures. Aged between
An ugly plant and lesser carnivore,
I fared better than most. And when I saw
The lamp and found my motor skills, I yet,
In the way of a vermiform appendix,
Concealed a mushroom nature. Though by night
They come and go, by day, if you can pick
The right one, they afford a minor garnish.
A foot of snow descended on the house,
All fall at once and we pretended joy
At such a purty fluffiness, and broke
Our backs and shovel blades, and prayed that spring,
Spring would arrive, but not because of us,
The snow grows grass and lubricates the bulbs
Stripped from their husks it promised and delivered.
Summer, which disbelieves in snow, will swear
Sweat is the moisture agriculture named,
But summer lies, and winter lasts: within
The master bedroom wall a cache of snow
Waits and concedes no melting, never melts.
So
Auden married Erika, der Mann's
Daughter,
because that's what a bugger does,
Which
doesn't seem to have disturbed the plans
Of
anyone, except the beast that was.
Nice
story. Famous names. The gentile touch
Of
charity, and no Mann shared his beds.
Just
don't believe that we believe too much
Of
what such great men portage in their heads
From
Alpha to Omega. There were those
Abandoned,
which was not the fault of verse;
A
little more, perhaps, a debt that prose
Has
not repaid; but when the starving curse,
They
do not mention villanelles or myth
Or
those who aimed intentions, one by one,
At
celebrated, artificial kith
And
never felt contrition from a son.
Edgier, maybe. Nevertheless, I am
King of the Cowboys, Lord of the Saving Grace,
The Prince of Pizza, OMG Duke of Earl.
And late to my own funeral, if what
I see is what there is, reality
A cognomen for disappointment, cheese
Spritzed from a spray can, Gandalf with a sawn
Lady in half, too grey to sing the blues.
Birthdays! I tell me. Birthdays! Let them bring
Adoration and single malt and straw
Spun from gold on an old potholder frame.
Maybe I'll let them stay to pay the bills
For Gro-Lights that can't remember when to stop.
King of the Cowboys, closing down the range.
The worms are tapping out. The grass
Has taken all it can, but rain
Perseveres. Down the asphalt main
The cars sail onwards. No one has
Observed the like before, they say.
They have. But that was yesterday,
And rain evaporates. Our dreams
Will not hold water. When we dove,
We suffocated, and we throve
Beached. We are landlocked, and, it seems,
We get along quite swimmingly
Once, quite deserted, all at sea.
There enters January from the left,
A grinning rush of sudden death. I say,
Says January, You know that’s not true.
I kill the pine-bore beetles, and I spread
The grass with green—potentially. I turn
Away. I have no time for this. I’ve made
Friends with the spring. It promised me a shoot,
A pistil, and the grounds to make them work.
January wears cold around its lungs,
A heart of hoar, the frost that doesn’t care
Who freezes whom. It has its ice on you,
Its arabesques of cars out of control,
Its night where streetlights groan about the dark.
Somewhere the exiled cupids fletch their arrows.
Winter was all it took
To right the summer’s wrong.
It started with a song.
It ended in a book.
Neither could ever say
All that the snow explained
Or why the day it rained,
Geometry washed away.
What was unmoved was ice.
The song of summer failed.
The song the book retailed
Would never again suffice.
Happily
ever after, says the wolf,
Picking
his teeth with Granny’s rib; the Prince
Is
thinking he should let the zygal float
Against
the oobal, now a muttonchop
Graces
the front of his pink currency.
From
hard-boiled eggs and crumbly cheese and pears
A
girl can make a picnic, but a myth
Requires
meat, not osiers; the bird
Who
doles elusive clues is never served
Fajita-style.
Granny works best for that,
Digesting
in her aged, sinewy way,
Her
juices turned to lupine sentience
And
thigh muscle and slaver. When we grow
Old
ourselves and have grandchildren to tell
The
soothing psalms of bedtime, we shall lie
And
say, The woodsman split the wolf in twain,
And
Granny tumbled out and smoothed her dress
And
baked a cake and spread the counterpane.
The
child will sleep. We too shall check the yard
For
prints. And listen for the wolf. Aha.
In the Kingdom of the Blind the one-armed man
Got strangled by a python. In the dirt
The ants formed marching bands and bit the dust,
Then spat it out. The songs the flicker sang
Were all percussion, made my chimney ring,
And sounded like a salesman on the phone.
The ghosts don’t bother me. When we play bridge,
I am the dummy, and we all fall down,
Each time a little slower, till we rise
Like half a loaf. And half of me recalls
That we were promised ants, and it was kept.
The locusts don’t come round much any more;
But one-armed men keep showing up to ask
If I would deign to donate to the blind.
—Cisco, you are loco in the head
Cisco hath murdered sleep, the sheriff said;
But Pancho told him when the deed was done,
They were eating tortillas somewhere else,
In Mesa Verde, which was dun and bare.
Your hands are scarlet, said the deputy,
Incarnadined or something. Pancho said,
The tumbleweeds tell all you need to know.
Cisco brushed grit off his embroidery,
Adjusted his somebrero, and pursued
The banker's daughter, calling to his fate,
It is the east, and I am someone's son.
The sheriff was not all that mollified.
As usual, they had to flee the town,
Eat tepid victuals in a desert night,
And top their frijoles with unsummoned stars.
Entschuuldigung, she said, which was a lie,Excuses absent, and not wanting one,Impenetrable of motive and as stummAs onyx. Not a tear or comely dab.Just Tell me what you want, and I'll decline,A heavenly bosom heaveless. One supposedThat angels felt this way when sinners pledPost-mortem for relief, their ichor stillA differentiation from the dead,Though God had mercy, theoretically.Me a culprit? Well, I guess I am,But DNA's a bitch, and time will toll.