Song

When thin recruits come pushing up   

   And sun spreads through the soil
And puddles in the footprints gleam
   And shake like hopkins-foil
And dreams of leaving lift the hands
   Of boys with homespun hope,
Then boundless scope and fluid shape
   Of green and possible escape
   Make the blossoms boil;

And color is the consequence,
   The road a second sky.
The tethered and the tedious,
   Exasperated by
Their dun and tan and beige and sand,
   Begin to feel obscurely hurt.
   Spring thrives by root and dirt.

Not Conversion

 

One of the elderberries of the tribe,

Domitable, but tart. What I expected—

No, never mind. Not more or less and less,

Less saucy than a pilgrim berry. Drop

The bogs. They are not coming back. The old

Berries are what we call a souvenir,

The madeleine of fruit trees, for the loss,

The least instructive, dispersal of the juice,

The streetwise remnant abandoning the street,

Forswearing home and all that garden truck,

The radish and the relish on the vine,

The creepers and the hoe, the rake and rose.

The First Hotel

The first hotel

Where the angels did stay

Was a Holiday Inn

On South Broadway.

They brought their own myrrh.

They brought their own gold.

The frankincense was

The stories they told.

They phoned out for shepherds,

They prayed for an ox.

It’s a Wonderful Life,

They watched on the box,

But the straw in the manger

Projected a blaze

They could see from their room.

And it burned days and days.

They never got close.

They sang from afar.

And they spent all their myrrh

On drinks at the bar,

Till their halos dispersed

Like the peal of a bell,

And the stories flowed out

From the First of Noel.

Jenny Kissed Me

 

What of that? I'm not alone,
Tasting rose and bubble gum.
Years and boys, there must be some.
Some I hate, some unknown,
Time has made them dry and dumb.

Under clocks and amber trees,
What they think of in their years,
Ever Jenny, never nears.
All who did their best to please,
Kissed and captured, cold and tears,

Distant smiling, fresh and close,
These are flushed as any flower.
Real and given to the hour,
Jenny kissed me. No one knows
Jenny distant. All that power.

from Days of Our Lives

 13

At the hoity-toity entrance to the George
Cinq, a grand guy, looking George his own
self, opens the door, and bows me inside,
past Ms Deneuve or Ms Bardot or someone,
a U-Drive sabled hooker, as it happens.
The desk sneers at my jeans and cowboy boots,
just as he ought, unmottled by abuse
in perfect idiomatic French. He waves
a boy over--this creaking, spavined geezer
buttoned up like an organ-grinder's monkey.
He barely lifts my beat-up leather gladstone.
The concierge scowls, but blushes as I pass,
Bardot attentive to the suite assigned.
I hear this on the Middle Fork of the Salmon,

14
the yarning boatman bitching that his degree
in fluvial geomorphology
wasn't worth a sou in Paris, grinning
that he'd said, "sou." Explaining to a dude
that this entire valley had been dug
as part of a WPA project by
starving painters and that the river flowed
under the ocean, hooking up with China,
he said that the worst was, when she finished up
and smoothed her francs into her reticule,
she wanted to discuss her pension plan
and whether ECUs would appreciate
against the yen. Them Frogs, he said, and spat
his plug against the current, steering right.

Burritos Before Bed

Damned by the first and undressed by the next,

Preferred by neither, settled for by both,

This may not be true love. But then who is?

Juliet is dead and hadn’t yet begun

To grasp Home Ec nor rallied over pep:

It’s Die or Dulcinea for the rest;

And blanketed by down at two a.m.,

I don't know which is worse, I who have watched

The best and brightest looking somewhere else.

We are what we have overlooked, neglected,

Misprisions of vanity. At two

They all seem just the same, no rapprochement,

Walking reproaches, fuzzy and opaque.

I doubt that I am falling back asleep.

Astronomy: An Introduction

What if the stars are singing like the bats,

Too high a song to hear, but full of clues,

Like whodunit and why I dream of girls

Too good for me, I never even met?

Maybe it’s all the same, and what they say

Who say such things, one nation, full of bonds

And stock responses, they who never saw,

Though bangled to the max, a stellar mouse

Absconding with your name and your address,

Home to a star part gas and all white flame.