RHE poems

Sonnet

2012-01-29T04:35:00.002-07:00

Across the bay there must be people washing
And cleaning bathroom grout and drinking tea.
There must be pastors painstakingly crushing
Hormonal eloquence; but I can't see
Through all that fog and curvature. Despite
Long reading in patristic poetry,
I'd rather they were stomping on their fate
Than knitting bills and purling dirt. Like me.

Let them smash windows. Let them all eat cake
And fart like camels. Let them swive like heroes.
I've had as much of me as I can take,
The careful serrying of ones and zeros.
Let them dance jigs. Let them curvette and break
Upon their shores like Abelards. And Neros.

Do Paradise Last

2012-01-26T04:16:00.002-07:00

This appeared in Orbis.

Departing them, He shut the door. Both Angels
and patriarchs whined something fierce. The prophets
yelled, "Doom!" and spilled their ashes on the floor.

The First of Us looked calmly out the window,
trusting he'd do a better job than God.
If He knew what came next, perhaps He'd share.

God Himself, all 3 of Him, essayed back
in His recliner, checking what They'd done.
"It's good," He said. "Did We make Sin O'Death?"

"Depends," said Raphael. "He wrote us down,
so He made you, but You made Him and knew
what He would write when He was just a sprat,

a nod, wink, wink. You knew it before Time."
"Still," said God, "We're in, He's out. We don't know
what We were thinking. Uncreate Him, shall We?"

"Can You do that?" asked Adam. "Can You make
a rock so big You can't remember why?"
God hates a riddle, makes up His own answers,

and, anyway, the scansion coming clear
to His blind eyes, the Author of them all
returned and shut them up and sent them out

to view creation as if they had breathed
their first iambic transpiration, world
before them where to choose, and they were His.

Meanwhile, on the Coast

2012-01-23T06:33:00.003-07:00

"O heiliger St. Florian verschon mein Haus, zünd andre an"

Maybe it’s not exactly candlight.
Stars are lights, too, and burning yews, and yours,
Fire consumes. Light kills a little bit.
Darkness is cool. It grows, They say, and time
Chooses the side of nothing. Figures. Got
Nothing? Invest it. Darkness futures pay
Dividends, if some more of what you have
Is what you want. Or burn a little light.
See clearly what is going on for now.

Wood burns because it’s meant to, full of ash,
The forest made of fire-stuff. The streams
Are water-soluble, the hills are hard
To fathom. Which old Greek said fire starts
Your day, your every day, your morning toast?
When wind smells like the end of days, your house
Is green belt in potentia, the song
The sky is singing, Burn your baby, burn.

Wait Till Your Cow Comes Home

2012-01-20T04:03:00.002-07:00

The winter cows are coming home
To roost. From fields of cinnabar
They file a-lowing. Near and far
They look the same and sound the same
And know their antecedents are

Preposterous. In barns tucked tight
They chaffer over wisps of hay:
O have you heard the news today?
LaToonya will be coming late
To tea, and why, no one would say.

They cannot hide and are not heard.
In dreams of petitpois they rouse
The King of Cows to build a house
Where he is warm and they are ward,
Where cats surround the shrinking mouse.

Nepotism? Anyone?

2012-01-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

If any of you regular readers (you know who you are, all 3 of you) have close family members who are like Carly Simon's father, don't be embarrassed to point them in this direction. I'm like Arlo Guthrie -- "I'm not proud...or tired."

Permafrost

2012-01-17T04:18:00.002-07:00

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 for 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.

The Dead on Arrival

2012-01-13T04:21:00.002-07:00

The number of the dead in Pasadena
Exceeds the grasp of man. Who would believe
You couldn't fit another body in
Another hole, the green so green, a sponge
Extended to its fullest? And the dead
Continued to arrive. From Ypsilanti,
Louisa, Chillicothe, and Gig Harbor,
The dead, the poor, the affluent, the dead
Came rolling in like breakers, but the shore
Declined their cold attentions. Thank you, no,
The living said, and didn't say much more,
The declinations, courteous, ignored.
So many, light, and losing heft, their last
Ride a return. Where was that ticket home?

For Dr Feldman: After Martial

2012-01-10T04:20:00.002-07:00

Your standards, Burton, force you to condemn
A verse not passed into an apothegm.
Forgive me, will you, if I do not die
To earn the moist approval of your eye.

People, Get Ready

2012-01-07T04:27:00.002-07:00

This morning I can taste air.
It tastes like fall and resin. Spring
Is gooier. No need to share
This news with birds, who already sing
Insistently. The seed is swell,
They say. Bring more. And make it fast.
They sample the air. A guy can tell.
Black Bird is coming home at last.

It Takes a Villeinage

2012-01-04T06:13:00.002-07:00

This appeared in Plainsongs.

In high dudgeon, as horsehair crests exude
Manliness and confidence and ye olde
Tyme-iness, the warriors each produce speeches,
Spontaneous and metrical and crammed
With tropes, the bridge across Antiquity
To Meriwether Lewis Junior High.
It doesn't span it, quite. Into the cleft
Fall sleeping children, doomed to curse and rail
Like Thersites and feofor-princes. Better
To be a live shoe salesman in the Loop
Than eloquent in school libraries, pent
On clammy shelves in dusty inglenooks
Where Edie strips and Bobby Millstone waits.

Tales from Sycorax's Wood

2011-12-31T05:04:00.002-07:00

Once split, twice shy, the tree
Will not disclose the plight
Of those condemned to be
Embedded out of sight.

They never speak of her.
Whatever once occurred
To make a prisoner,
No one will say a word.

Only the bark is warm,
In places bark is not,
And when lush Carpo’s storm
Shakes the wood, the lot

Of trees exempts such places,
No motion and no sound,
No sense of human faces,
Except the wetted ground.

Expunging the visible world

2011-12-29T06:57:00.001-07:00

From an obit for Helen Frankenthaler in the WSJ:

Frankenthaler belonged to the second generation of the New York School, whose guiding light was the critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg held that the essence of modern painting was the expunging of all references to the visible world and an emphasis on painting's purely formal elements—the flatness of the canvas support and the colors arrayed across it.

I post this just in case you're lying awake at night, wondering why "modern painting" doesn't interest me.

From the mailbag:

2011-12-27T08:18:00.000-07:00

The end of the year does not mean the mailbag is overflowing with copies of Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners.

"RHE, have you ever wonder why nobody cares? Maybe because no one can understand ennything you say?"

I have. There was this one guy, once, who understood something I said, but he died.

"Yo, could you write a sestina about Un ballo in maschera ?"

Yo. No.

"Who's better, Auden or Frost?"

Lou Brock. I'd give up Ernie Broglio just to get him on my team.

Occupy Christmas

2011-12-25T05:08:00.002-07:00

That was some night. The world went black.
We never got our feelings back
Below the waist. The frost descended.
All of the stars were apprehended,

But not by us. The cars refused
The roads. The birds of prey, confused,
Flew into clouds, and there they stayed.
The householders were sore afraid.

Since mangers would be closed this year,
A sensible wise man would appear
On other stages, baggy pantsed.
And all the stars in Heaven danced.

Rising Expectations

2011-12-21T04:20:00.001-07:00

Given some rope, they've torn the statues down
To piss on legendary heads, the groins
Bedecked in amaryllis and ablaze.
(Who would have guessed that amaryllis burns,
And colorfully?) The shoppers fill their carts
With freebies. (Who'd have guessed they wanted phones
Far more than sandwiches?) The songs they sing
Are short on lyric wordplay, long on scat.
We made no plans to emigrate, but have
Our havens in the hinterlands, where treats
Are plastic shoes on Sundays, where delight
Is puddings made of pigs and doughty men
Pray to the forest just because it's there.
(Who knew that gods had green cards or that wolves
Wanted our wives for bon-bons in the smoke?)

The Books of the Dead

2011-12-18T04:36:00.002-07:00

for Stuart James

Jesus, Stuart, look
What we have come to, thick
And tired, brought to book,
Brought to ground, and sick
With authors. I had read
Every single one—
Recited them in bed
And taught them to my son.
Now they look away.
It’s just as they had said,
They never meant to stay.
Jesus, they’re all dead.

On the Lam

2011-12-15T04:16:00.002-07:00

Less, as he travelled down the broken map
To where the creases made the names a mess,
Than he remembered, still some fun, the dogs
A decorative nuisance, shifty signs
Ambiguous in all respect save mileage,
And roadside stands with contraband for sale.
He bought a stolen hat made in the Bronx
By emigrants and wore it for the wolves
Who counted campers, praying for the lame.

Where he would go from here, his dapper car,
Less suitable in every state, would say.
He hoped for string bikinis and the tang
Of salted sand. Tonight he'd settle for
A hero high on rye and pay-per-view,
A six pack of a beer nobody drinks,
Still in its plastic semiotic sling,
And wind that made the cheap storm windows creak.

The Year in Review

2011-12-14T07:28:00.001-07:00

 I did not win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 I did not get a 10-year extension from the Angels (or, come to think of it, the Devils).

 I am not going to be the Republican nominee. Probably.

 I did not read any of my poems at the Super Bowl halftime show. (N.B. I have written new poems since then.)

 Neither Brad Pitt nor Tilda Swinton is playing me in a new biopic. (On the plus side, neither is Cee Lo Green nor The Swedish Chef.)

 My new budget is deadlocked in committee. If it isn't passed (and funded) soon, I may have to shut down.

 Last time I looked, at least 3 of the authors on the NYT bestseller list were dead. (In several more cases one just couldn't tell.) This offers me promise for the future.

Foundation Myth

2011-12-12T04:24:00.003-07:00

Leastwise, they said, they had a proper book,
With “thou” and “withal.” Under a fruity tree
They read and didn’t understand a thing.
She had her hair -- her tresses, she was told;
He had the muscles God might give a goose,
Were He so minded. They thought they looked swell.
It rained, but they did not know wet from warm.

One day the sun went elsewhere, and the leaves
Showed them no comfort. One day she was sick,
Of nothing, really, and then she was gone.
He blamed the varmints, critters in the dark
Who laughed at her and told repulsive jokes.
He said he would remember who she was
And what they did, but what they did was made

A part of where he left, and who she was
He told so many times that he forgot.

Fanks

2011-12-09T04:53:00.001-07:00

I don't know most of you who follow this blog -- don't know you at all, so you must be here simply because you like the poems. That's the best kind of reader there is. So thanks. If you have a passion to read more of me, when I'm being prosy or foolish or speaking ex cathedra -- the categories are not exclusive -- I am on Facebook. Sorry, Mr. President, I don't tweet.

Storyville

2011-12-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

"Storyville" 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.

The Likely Lads

2011-12-05T04:27:00.002-07:00

Elegant we, the eidolon of eyes,
Superior to the threads we bear, the hope
Of parents or custodial trustees.
We are the ones on whom the trees shed leaves
And amber bugs; we are the likely lads
Who hear the bushes when they conversate.
For us the swans make hearts, the dogs and cats
Balance their cans of beef heart on their noses.
Nobody knows us, records our pithy mots,
Or sees that we are flexing in our skins.
Never you mind. The day advents when trolls
Will serve us lemonade in stainless steel
And maidens wish they weren’t. The days will come.

Growing My Own

2011-12-02T04:13:00.002-07:00

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 knows if you can bear to watch them work
Or how many widows lay an extra place.

The True Meaning of Christmas

2011-11-29T04:52:00.002-07:00

Can we expect the box of books to come,
Pat by Twelfth Night and just in time to save
The meaning of Christmas from The Tartar Kings,
The Merovingian Mayors, and The Last
Of the Mohican Princesses in a brief
Deerskin corset, stiletto moccasins,
And arrows Nessus's poison painted pink?
Lebkuchen while we wait. You watch the door.
The FedEx guy's already late. He stopped,
I'll bet you anything, to sneak a peek
At Lord Jim on the Road to Mandalay.
He's cracked the spine of Christmas, Baby J
And paper, bound to tell the death of kings,
The sport of lepers calling round the world,
The time is right for reading in the street,
And we are dead and dying for a word.

From the Mailbag

2011-11-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Dr. or Professor Epstein,

Is marriage between two siblings, one adopted and one birth, forbidden by the consanguinity laws?

Who exactly do you think I am? In any event, I'd refer all such questions to Jerry Lee Lewis and Dick Clark.

RHE--

How long are you going to keep this up?

How long you got?

RHEpoems,

WTF?

Try a comma after the W.

Early Onset

2011-11-26T04:35:00.000-07:00

Lordly dinners and waistcoats made of fust,
Gold, and the kind of glue schoolchildren use.
Gardens of flowers chosen for their names--
Verbena and wisteria and rue.
Cigars and women and women and cigars.
And ice cream, said the little boy. You do,
His father said. And so the women, too.

Yet I’ve forgotten everything that counts.
Without my mother’s maiden name I can’t
Access my bank account or climb the tree
From aunt to cousin, cousin to The Manse
Wherein the steamer trunk of crowns and pounds
Is kept for an emergency of love
Or kidnapping. It never will be missed.

Genre Friction

2011-11-23T05:20:00.000-07:00

Latex, the private dick opined, but whether
he’d noticed wall paint or the lissome pants
which clung to her like wall paint, I don’t know.
When he said Dames, I guess he didn’t mean
a thespianette once sanctioned with a gong;
but, really, only every second line
he uttered, like a water-damaged page,
registered. He was grousing about hollow
points. Perhaps Quintilian had reentered
his recollection. Sometimes from a dark
outcrop of fiction odd things clamber up,
with strappy shoes, peroxide hair, and net
shielding the violet eyes. Probably not
Quintilian, though. Psyche with a quirk,
trysting the night away, seems far more likely.
He offered rye. Who now drinks rye? The flask
restored him for an exit, nothing more,
and soon the transom, last light left, went black.

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

2011-11-20T04:54:00.002-07:00

This one appeared in the British magazine Candelabrum.

I started a list of what you never saw,
dead before Epsteins lived, dying while yours
wore roundheads, dead a long time, dead so well
your stones look more like sponge. I gave it up.
Who wants a list of cars and compact discs?
Who could explain epinephrine to the dead

and chronically short of breath? Still in their spheres,
the stars were not impeded by your lights;
but lacking National Geographic, you
never pinned up the Horsecrab Nebula.
It says here you’re not lost, but G N B RE.
Someone has trimmed this turf 300 years,

and still it wants to grow. The River Wye
asks no eponymous questions, flows while green
returns to grass, which is the epitaph
other grass grew. That they’d be picturesque
in increments of centuries would make
the dead rise, if they could. I wait. They can’t.

Notes for the Volume Left Unfinished

2011-11-17T04:23:00.000-07:00

*Albinius says otherwise. He errs.
His sources for an ill-conceiving creed
Are elderly ex-chamberlains and eunuchs,
Village crones and plods deprived of the sense
Announced to a scarecrow, those who took their cues
From discount chickens, virgins secondhand,
And scholars from the farmhouse provinces.
As every schoolboy knows, the archers filled
His orifices with their arrows. Pray
For him, but do not emulate his art.
He burns in Hell and weeps black tears of ink.
(It is no sin to benison the damned,
Whatever El Chimayo says, the damned.)

†Persona Claus claims 273,
Year of Our Lord. Persona Claus, who loved
Boys best, then men, was skewered, a flaming bowl
Of apple cores inverted on his head.

°Albumen, King, who found that history
Irenic--they had lied, the scribal tribe.
The Church Pacific strewed its road, on donkeys,
With palms and psalms; and all its paths were peace.
Albumen, King was thrown into a pit
Of Bulgars, Albigensians, and Swedes.
No fragments of him ever were retrieved.

•It sounds absurd, and yet proved true. I went
Myself, with native guide, and saw the place,
A dog to follow and a wife to heel.
I touched the Rock, the Rock was warm. My sense
Of touch is unimpeachable. What else
Explains the errors of the Early Crypts?
Deceived by Occam’s Razor Blade, they shaved
A world away and found a Heaven there.
I recommend The Liber Book, ƒ. 2.

§Cf., op. cit., to-wit, to-woo. Tra-la,
The placard on the temple wall proclaimed,
In Greek first, Latin after, sing tra-la,
The angels have been with us from the first
And bless the martyrs in their shattered state
And bear their broken bones away and praise
The bearded monarchs who have made it so.
Nevertheless, Albinius was wrong.

From the mailbag

2011-11-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

Are you for real?

No, I'm really not.

I like your poems very much and they sound intelligent but I don't understand them. What do you think I should do?

Read them just because you like them. I understand them, mostly, and it hasn't helped me all that much.

Are you available for children's parties and bat mitzvahs?

Sorry, I can't do balloon animals. The screechy sound the balloons make paralyzes my central nervous system.

Foundation Myth

2011-11-14T04:13:00.000-07:00

Leastwise, they said, they had a proper book,
With “thou” and “withal.” Under a fruity tree
They read and didn’t understand a thing.
She had her hair--her tresses, she was told;
He had the muscles God might give a goose,
Were He so minded. They thought they looked swell.
It rained, but they did not know wet from warm.

One day the sun went elsewhere, and the leaves
Showed them no comfort. One day she was sick,
Of nothing, really, and then she was gone.
He blamed the varmints, critters in the dark
Who laughed at her and told repulsive jokes.
He said he would remember who she was
And what they did, but what they did was made

A part of where he left, and who she was
He told so many times that he forgot.

Inspiration

2011-11-11T04:22:00.001-07:00

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.

Sonnetina

2011-11-08T04:49:00.002-07:00

A sort of summer cabaret
Performed by girls in little more
Than skin, just like the dress they wore
When they dropped in. A small hooray
From men with lawnmowers and shears,
Indrawn disdain from proximate wives,
Both lots of whom resume their lives,
Unaugmented by wishful tears.

Not girls in skin, not now, this late.
Good girls go by. Old ladies pass
This way at noon. They touch the grass
With shadow. They are gnarled of gait;
And yet without their clothes, within,
Concealed consent, they carry skin.

RIP Allen Mandelbaum

2011-11-06T13:38:00.000-07:00

Allen Mandelbaum, who translated Virgil and Dante, has died. He was a great translator. I remember quite clearly lying in bed in my basement apartment, some small time ago, reading his Aeneid, sent me by a publisher who wanted me to use it as a text. (I liked getting free books in the mail. Send more, Publishers: I am still reading, and I may recommend them to my pedagogical friends.) "The old age of a god is green and tough," he wrote.

The Tempest

2011-11-02T04:13:00.002-06:00

The air is full of music, but the isle
Gets bad reception. Under every rock
Scamper the grubs that were somebody else--
Will be again. The Ghost of Christmas Past
Or The Nobel Prizewinner for the Blues.
Thrones go unoccupied, but fires set
At twilight smell of camphor, and great moths
Sing little liebestods while sailing in.
The stars are green. True love never runs smooth,
But walks at a brisk pace. The wind blows warm
Across the bay, where seals on plaster rocks
Snore gently, dreaming dreams of fish. The eyes
Of magi close as well. The roads are waxed:
Young lovers slip away, concealed by mist
Imported just for them. It rains and rains.
It rains and rains, and ships capsize, the crews
Borne to the shore on water wings. They find
The aborigines, diaphanous
In raindrops, dancing pas de deux, de trois,
Wrapped round themselves and singing, Liberty.

The Ottoman Empire

2011-10-30T04:16:00.000-06:00

I occupy this couch and think about
Decline this fall. For nearly 30 years
It ruled the room, and now its springs have passed
From mountains into gorges, great depressions.
Where are the wales of yesterday? I bought
A book, and all the change clattered away.
I changed a child, and look what that has done.
The subject people wanted to engage
Was war. Well, sometimes love. And never death.
Not on a couch, which framed all matters thus:
When we subside, how can we rise again?

The Winter Vines

2011-10-27T04:53:00.002-06:00

In the garden lives a goddess,
Divinely minor, hidden amidst
The winter vines, all brown and crunch;
But she'll be clean and sleek and shy,
Fond of her hedgehogs, familiar with
The torpid and the underfed.
She does not need a mortal friend,
A man to see her candid breasts
And ivy hair, a man to beg
Those gifts a goddess has in hand--
The taste of apples, fertile soil,
The dried and scarlet chilies, still
Against the melting snow. She sings,
Of course, to greater gods. Forget
Me, please, her song, but leave me not
Too long when I am parchment thin
And dry as grass. I know that song.
I hum it as I turn my bed
Into a burrow, goddess-free.

From the Mailbag

2011-10-26T12:16:00.000-06:00

Here and at the other places where I read your comments you are such a know it all. You think you know everything don't you?

I don't know.

Now What?

2011-10-21T06:47:00.002-06:00

A little late for art,
a little weak for song,
I try my best to write,
and still it comes out wrong.

I looked within my heart,
I ate a peck of dirt.
I asked for extra light
and never shaved my shirt.

For every ancient blight
I found acoustic cure,
then shared it. Every part
of me was sound and sure.

It's late now, and the night
concludes a damaged age.
I guess I ought to start
to fill this empty page.

The Pisan Pantos

2011-10-18T04:53:00.002-06:00

The rain distorts my make-up, blue
The color of my hair and eyes.
(My nose is red, my heart is green.)
A scenist has prepared the skies
Ingeniously. I’ve come into
My own here--Look! A human bean,

A roly-poly in a cage,
The Widow Twanky on her walk,
Wishing the weeds would grow so high,
I could ascend my private stalk
And put all heathen in a rage.
This dragonfly my private eye:

He boos and hisses, laughs and cheers
As I perform the buck-and-wing,
Magic to find the state a spine,
Alchemy in chansons I sing.
I hope the ingenue appears
To change my homemade ink to wine,

To animate imagined books,
A smell of candy from the crowd.
This fence is higher than my art.
The roly-poly laughs so loud,
Guards come a-runnng, Demos looks,
And here is where my poems start.

October Roses

2011-10-15T04:19:00.000-06:00

It’s cold at night, or didn’t you know
This isn’t when the roses grow?
Under the hawthorns, in the shade,
The birds have gone, but you have stayed,
Underdesigned for taking flight.
Color cannot put all things right.
And now it snows, at which the frost
Declares that delicacy is lost.
And still you bloom, and for today
Keep ice and emptiness away.
So Keats, who failed, and failed in youth,
Let Beauty claim that it was Truth.

From the mailbag:

2011-10-13T05:56:00.001-06:00

RHE, you've got a lot of gaul.

Yes, they said that to Caesar, too. Come see me again in March, sometime around the Ides.

I took one of your poems to class. My teacher said it was blank. I told her it wasn't and tried to show her, but she is a teacher and does not listen.

Many teachers are honorable practitioners of a noble profession. Not all. You should have told her it was a printer error.

Why do you like Kipling so much?

Aw, come on--this is just too easy.

RHE

In That Great Gettin'-Up Morning

2011-10-12T04:33:00.002-06:00

They came in caravans, like mushy peas
Lined up on a table, stuff you wouldn't eat,
No, not for anything, not even if
You had to sit there till your plate was clean--
It was, but moving peas onto the wood
Surface, which doubled back globular green,
Didn't much count--and you couldn't go out,
So there you sat, and they came on in files
And filled the fields in rows, one after one,
As if for concert parking; but the songs,
Sweetest when never heard, made dead birds fly
And unseen eagles fall out of the clouds
Onto the roofs of Minis. As they sang,
The caravans, of John Brown's Body Wash
And Vengeance is A-Coming Like a Go-Go,
The smell of sacrifice, the trampled dust,
The blue smoke of electrics ill installed,
Rose over hills where harts skipped and the roe
Carried their heads like trophy wives and posed,
The ungulate mission. Psalms of praise abound.

Motley Carew

2011-10-03T04:16:00.000-06:00

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.

As far as I know, no one knows,
When August leaves, and leaves the rose,
When leaves turn pale and fall, and fall
Replaces flesh with down, and all
Your fallen friends are raked away,
Who's going to go and who to stay.

Ask me to find where fall bestows,
Week after week, la vie en rose:
Where sun is weak and hope is faint
And even dawn would chill a saint,
It's sacked and set aside and waits,
Before cold comes, till cold abates.

Generations are each the same.
They sport; they sun; they look to blame,
On frosted fence, the smitten vine.
It will be their tale. Now a mine
Is set of seeds: without a sound,
It plots resistance underground.

That Old Black Magic

2011-09-30T04:36:00.002-06:00

Ants, they may whisper, but they’re hoping for
Something preposterous, something more the size
Of Cincinnati, something which can catch
A mortgage in mid-air and snap its neck.
They may say shadows, even in the dark,
But what they mean are little men with knives,
Carving their names in the venetian blinds,
Altering light. Dressed up they may exude
The confidence of snipers, but they wear
An amulet of frog hair on each wrist,
Boasting that they walked miles to cure DTs.
Under the bed the suitcase is packed, the tag
Tied with a chain cased in a plastic sleeve,
Directing it To Whom It May Concern.

Alone in the Afterlife

2011-09-27T05:18:00.002-06:00

At least the leaves are crispy, and they smell
Of cinnamon. Kick them aside, they float
Like butterflies and settle on the trees
Who held them last. There are no promises
Of stars beyond the stars I see. The fox
Rolls on the patio and shakes himself,
A Canis Minor. Everyone I know
Still loves me -- better, loves me now, at last,
At once. The fox trots back into the woods,
His little dance insouciant desire.
My coffee smells like it was made for leaves.

Manon

2011-09-23T04:50:00.002-06:00

Dear Abbé:

We are pent up in our loft,
Too stippled to sing, too poor to buy new clothes,
Ladies and gentlemen, too sick to beg.
We tell each other stories. I'll be quiet,
She'll be at peace, and when the fairy says,
A plugged sou for your thoughts, then mum's the word.
Orchids could never change our little love.
Once she is dead, I'll be a notary
And practice barratry; when I am dead,
She'll move to customer service for the mob.
Someday, God willing, there will be crème brûlée,
Amoxicillin, and some warmer clothes.
Till then they hum, who do not know the words.

Edible Arrangements

2011-09-20T04:50:00.001-06:00

Our friends are celery and thyme.
They’re acorn squash and coriander.
They used to pass the oddbox rhyme;
They used to copulate, philander,
Sweat out of every pore, and curse.
Now they grow grass, and we grow worse.

Our friends are honey locust, and mud
Becomes them. No more shop and dance
With anyone who warms their blood
And shtup the lot in true romance.
Eggplant, maybe, and Queen Anne’s lace.
No one grows with a greater grace.

Yam and bo, they were once a pair,
Love in an atmospheric venue.
R ♥ J on a bark is their
Gnarled and edible hostel, menu,
And home at last, the beetles say,
Leaves in the fall and flags in May.

They Flee from Me

2011-09-14T05:42:00.002-06:00

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.

Burying the Survivors

2011-09-11T04:21:00.002-06:00

They buried the survivors in a hole
Just big enough for almost all. Waste not,
The adage of the moment, after years
Of blood extravaganza, seemed all right.
The one left over got a monument,
A roundabout about him, and a sign
Pointing the way to Points of View and All.
Homies broke down there every day, from age
And penury and flats, with rubber bands
Holding their hearts together and their clothes.
Lucky the Caravan sold cups of joe,
Premeditated burgers, cannabis,
And shortbread local mommas wept upon.
Somebody blew him up one summer night.
He fell back to the ground in bits of spud.

Poetry Proper 3

2011-09-08T16:39:00.000-06:00

is now available online. I'll bet you can't imagine why I'm telling you this.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/64246923/Poetry-Proper-3rd-Issue

The Men Who Would Be Kings

2011-09-08T04:51:00.001-06:00

We were a caravan, the score of us,
Camels and dogs and rugs. We infidels,
We passed for what we were, a flea-brained bunch
Determined to be wise, and if we failed,
Experienced at least. We heard that the sands
Turned ruby when they were wet, but they were dry.
Advised that the womenfolk were glorious
Beyond appraisal, we saw only men,
And they saw us and were not over pleased.
Far, far too many stars for urbanites:
We missed our meals and thought that we were brave.

Perhaps we were. A little foolishness
Is necesary for the gentle born.
Four of us returned, we four who returned,
We held our tongues and spent a year or two
Deciding what was dream and what was not.
It all was dream, the four of us conclude
And watch TV and nod our grizzled heads,
And some of them were probably attached.

Jenny Kissed Me

2011-09-05T05:50:00.002-06:00

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.

Tarnish Town

2011-09-02T05:31:00.000-06:00

The potentates are marching from St. Paul,
Wearing the hats they stole from desert kings,
More of them stuffed inside a tiny car
Than Billy has Spaghetti-Os. The nurse
Flaunts her prosthetic sword, says Opioids,
And all fall down. In wheezing lungs, shaved heads,
And intubated families they fail
of faith. The potentates ride in, clean up
The tarnished town, a sink of billyclubs
Ad graft, and scrub the spangled bedroom doors--
They manage with panache and housemaid’s knees.
The little children smile and pack their bags
And hide under the porch until the bus,
The friendly yellow bus with plastic seats,
Opens its doors and swears it is today.

Following

2011-09-01T07:22:00.000-06:00

Thanks to those who, mysteriously, are "following" this blog, especially since I know almost none of you, so, as Gatsby might say, there's nothing merely personal about it. Much obliged.

The Worms & I

2011-08-30T05:17:00.001-06:00

They do not come to see me in this hole,
My buds and bloods. Perhaps they share the shame
And largesse of disaster. Who would bruit
His kin's confinement in an earthy cone,
Tapered for retribution? All the worms
Are laughing, mind you: they don't see the sense
Of wider welkins; blue just makes them blush.
My Uncle Thad threw rubbish on my head,
The Daily Mirror wrapped around a bun.
Perhaps he meant to plump me. Kindness comes
In kits, to be assembled as you like it.
Aunt Alice led him off, her voice the twin
Of heavy rain on mud. There is no bed,
No sleep, no sanitation, whereat worms
Stand up and cheer for everyone but birds.
I pray for commutation, they for dirt.

Today's Reading

2011-08-26T04:26:00.002-06:00

Said Job, It's tough but someone has to do it.
He boiled. His kids went AWOL. And the grass
Shrank as if cursed, a mumbo-jumbo lawn.
A snapshot of its photosynthesis
Was all he had: he propped it on the mantel.
The mantel broke. The rooftree split. His wife
Yelled and drank and tore up the laundry room
And split for Abu Dhabi. Praise the Lord,
Said Job, who had the faith, a nasty rash,
And more regrets than camels. Said the Lord,
Aha. This was a test. Had it been real,
The seas would have been emptied, deserts spun
Like bubbles in a centrifuge. His kids
Returned for dinner, fired up their bongs,
And lived in expectation. Job believed,
Yet noticed that his lawn was not the same.

Civis Romanus Sum

2011-08-23T05:28:00.000-06:00

This appeared in Plainsongs.

The immigration man will let you through
Because you’re white and smell okay, but not
So Customs, who keeps profiles on a lot
Of funny types, including some like you.
You will feel funny, if he wants you to.
You’ll act as though your Henry James were hot.
That biro is suspicious. You forgot
All that old stuff, which looks like something new

When undeclared. So make a speech: I deal
In artifacts of the mind. I’m odd. I write
At painful and eccentric times of night.
I smuggle into books a way to feel.
I bear impediments of no appeal.
I am a citizen. I transport light.

Good Morning, Betws-y-Coed

2011-08-20T04:31:00.000-06:00

Here is the world on fire,
Sun or flames at morning,
Roofs ignited dawning,
Cries in bedrooms, smoke
At short-order breakfast windows.
Pity the children, widows,
The crippled aunts with one hand free,
And the anxious dogs barking, Liar! Liar!
And the diving ducks breaking the lake.
All the new men aflame,
Nothing the sun will see
Set them aboil and aburn.
Look, from laburnum and briar
Smoke is getting away,
And the sun clears the jacketed hills,
And the wild aunts concluding their tea
Pray for rain and cull their banished yards.

The railway is escaping.
The broken chapel rooftop, sleeping
Doves enough for level spirits,
Shines as good as gold.
Water is on the move.
The aunts are dressing, according to their merits,
And the roadway coils into the wood,
At least as good as gold and old
Enough for kestrels born to love
A tamed town, a tired, to remove
The sun with drapes and scrub the singing floor.
You hear, the slam of every door,
And the aunts march, visiting the cold.

Garden Gods

2011-08-17T04:49:00.002-06:00

Leis festoon my Queen Elizabeth
this morning, so she is both pink and coral,
one unexpectedly. Who would do

such a thing? The contractor next door,
him with the hemi? The SEC lawyer,
retired from niggling? A stranger,

hell bent on whimsy. Saints preserve us
from the drunken fey, the determined oddball
hoping to go Wilde and run to fat.

I think it was Zeus himself, eagled
as he has been bulled and pissed, leaving a gay
reminder that gods are not solemn,

except when they want something special—
grilled bones, sobbing virgins, grim obedience—
and prefer a boner to doctrine.

Bees back off from the paper hanger,
annoyed by mimesis and crude deception.
They own a queen way too fat to care.

Tales Out of School

2011-08-14T04:58:00.001-06:00

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.

Memorial Park

2011-08-11T05:14:00.000-06:00

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 leave,
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.

Taken at the Flood

2011-08-08T05:18:00.002-06:00

This appeared in Angelic Dynamo.

Later the yard boys dyed the new growth green.
Nobody knew it wasn't grass but ants,
And who were they going to tell? They didn't speak
To other hills, impossibly soigné.
The trees were propped back up, the roots tied down,
The stream was re-recorded and the wind
Instructed not to blow its obligations.
New men arrived. They never guessed a thing.
If told that they had been replacement parts,
They'd have discovered fossils and designed
Evangelists to praise the status quo.
It wasn't said that apples used to taste
Preposterously sweet, that knuckleballs
Danced polkas on their way up to the plate,
Or that the dogs would talk about the day's
Prodigious hunt. The brand-new women wore
The chic fall fashions, still a little damp.

Anything Goes

2011-08-05T04:20:00.002-06:00

Some of the souvenirs began to squirm
As hibernating gods shook off their sleep.
Their naps had been profound, their dreams so vague,
They didn't know where parts of them had gone;
But shelves in Indonesia and Brazil
Let down their severed heads; and in Duluth
And Lower Slaughter little shiny coins
Twirled. It was more than mildly disconcerting.

Poseidon had a charley-horse and Dis,
Occluded vision. Iris saw her dress
Change colors, as the label, Roy G. Biv,
Turned inside out and backwards. Down below,
A village suffered instant disrepute
When all the hausfraus ran away with birds.
In Rome the statues changed their legal names,
And some converted. Venus wept real tears,

The tiny tears of dolldom, small and briny.
Green, like the eyes which they obscured, they fell,
But raised no fruit. It was her elder name
Which founded Paris, where the horses reared,
And no one knew what anything meant or cost.
The souvenirs dissolved, and mighty Zeus
Stroked his oiled beard, but did not wake. The heads
Of headless torsos speechified from dust.

The Age of Heroes

2011-08-02T04:17:00.002-06:00

Unrolled, the ball of twine will reach from here
To Sunday next, maybe a little past,
As strong as faith, and supple. Place such string
In hands like yours, you could subvert a world
Of passageways. The monster has to smell
Both us and exit. That’s a lot to ask
Of demi-men and semi-livestock, see?
Somewhere along the way it will sense grass
Or wind on open water, then forget
Its murderous intentions. Clover makes
It sleepy; birdsong, and it drops its guard.
You, with a chunk of rope, a .44,
And proper shoes, could be back home for tea.

And then what? When the monster has been foiled,
The maiden slaked and handed back to dad
To foist her by-blow on a little prince,
The whitecaps braved, the Welcome Home endured,
All speeches, leis, and fatty bullock thighs,
We’ll frame your twine and hang it where Aunt Vi,
The Tutor, and your nubile cousin Daph
Can hardly miss it. What then? There are new
Monsters, of course, but, really, they’re not much
But bags of bone and teeth: blood is a bore,
Philately in person, so to speak.

Reading Yeats for Greats

2011-07-30T04:29:00.000-06:00

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.

Attenuations on a Theme by Yeats

2011-07-27T05:25:00.000-06:00

All right, it hasn't really been six weeks,
And I've been busy. When the circus left,
I was about my less enlightened craft.
Now every motion of my body lacks
The sense of singing. All the animals
Have gone to entertain the shopping malls.

A prisoner can gild a caliph's house
He can't inhabit. Old, I bear the name
I gave myself before my art had come;
And I live in a lodging without lease.
I buff the floors, and still the floors declare
They head nowhere I have not been before.

The cages of the animals collapse;
The clowns have wheels beneath their living rooms.
Too late to try out any other names
Or board the caliph's azure sailing ships,
I sit before a battered desk and wait,
The sound of words like incandescent light.

Quiet Flows the Don

2011-07-24T04:50:00.000-06:00

They hid the old professors in the sub-
Scriptorium, in carrels made of wood
And chickenwire, gave them wi-fi, let
Them roam the stacks, as long as they were late.
They were, they always were. Was found: puns bent
To fit into the pretty bursar's door.
The bursar's gown was torn and gluey, stained;
Her person was a vacancy in time
And apprehension. Dr Rathbone wrote,
The Oxford comma marks the gentleman.
We cannot find a one about her person.
Condemned, he was, for pronomial pride,
Then built a stand behind Collected Works,
Blue and maroon, with peeling paper labels,
Accessible to none and dead to all.

Loaves & Fishes

2011-07-21T06:25:00.002-06:00

Abacus to zygote: this is just what
The god has ordered. Feed the multitude
On infinite combinations from a rude
Inception. C begins with Cookie, not
A tiddly crowd, made crummy with the bread
Recently risen. Read what we have read,

And you can bake your own. A dictionary
Portends all saints every witness each,
Erects more ladders than a man can carry,
And will not learn. We accidentally teach.
Mud is in our middle, and right before,
Mattress, the word that you were looking for.

I have one in my pocket, glad and good
Together. What I've spelled, I've understood.

The Goön Folk

2011-07-18T06:41:00.002-06:00

Their pilgrimage began before the light,
Before the squabbles of the little birds
Pilgrims forswore. And they were going where?
To where the road concluded. Since this was
Their latter days, that just might mean the sea,
The culmination, surely, of strange strands,
Pounding a plainsong once, twice, dot, dot, dot.
They’d rather it would end against a wall
Invisible to those of little faith,
Studded with jasper, joined without a joint,
And crowned with fire or with Dagon’s roc
In chains, something spectacular, without
Curios at the exit, something none
Knew substantives sufficient for. They brought
A change of shirt, a charger for the phone,
And water double-filtered to remove
Impurities. They sang car tunes without
The words, not all the words. They thought they’d left
The word behind, the first rest stop enclosed
By plastic fence. The map said, You Aren’t There.

from the mailbag

2011-07-16T04:47:00.000-06:00

Yes, I can write limericks. As it happens, I had occasion to improvise a couple this week. No, I rarely do, and I don't think the local paper would be interested. Perhaps Posterity will publish my occasional verses as the final volume of my Collected Works. After all the Major Poems, of course.

I get some very odd emails.

Critical Updates

2011-07-15T05:18:00.002-06:00

I’ve changed the voice commands. The poem starts
When anyone says “Artemis” or swears
By Zeus’s thigh. It finishes when rain
Intervenes, the puddles ex machina
Providing an escape. Between the prompts
Poetry sleeps. Hollering “Blood-dimmed tide”
As your Camaro races by won’t work,
Nor liquid-sifting nightingales atop
A satellite dish. I have allowed for that.
Nor saying “Venus” when you really mean
The foam-born goddess who made Helen fall
For that blond curly-headed twit, then watched
A local Hector dragged around in dust.
You can’t say “whale-road,” can’t pretend that Danes
Are good for more than video games. You must
Burn your own child to smithereens to save
Earth from the sun when what it needs is rain.

The Expatriate

2011-07-12T04:23:00.002-06:00

For extra credit he remembered much
That wasn’t worth remembering, forgot
The kinship he had promised to except
From discharge, and demurred at growing up.
It made him charming, like a short-term loan,
Lots of interest there, so he changed his name
To Amaryllis-in-the-Shade and wept,
Or said he did, at auld acquaintances.
The Times that try men’s souls, he did not read,
Other than archived, knew that butterflies
Were thinner on the ground than yesteryear,
But worms more frequent. Mr Lowly Worm,
There was a name for next week, if he made
Next week as Amaryllis-in-the-Shade.

Security at an Exhibition

2011-07-09T04:32:00.002-06:00

We stand where we are stood, assigned to fill
A vacuum till the posh begetters come.
Trust us for that. The portraits say their names,
Whereas our labels are not blessed with art
Or opulence. From pockets we spill keys
And gummi bears and Zippos from the war,
Absent the ruffs and velvet hats. Our skies
Are free of putti, pennies in a jar
Betray no pudgy burgher here. We stare,
But are not scanned. We are the dragons now,
Extant beyond the borders of the frame;
And look at this one, gilt and dark and grime:
The demigods are falling from the trees
Like caterpillars, waiting for the change.

No, Really, I'm Not

2011-07-06T05:35:00.001-06:00

This woman in her vinyl raincoat runs
Up to me--it’s not raining--and she asks,
Are you The One? (I hear the capitals,
The edge of majuscules, the sharpened height
Of serifs as they play about her eyes,
Wide to let all the light in that there is.)
I’m not. I thought I was once, but I’m not.
She coughs. No one should make mistakes like that,
She tells me, and she takes 2 backwards steps:
You might have missed your chance to save. The truck
Repaving Colorado beeps reverse,
And I shall never know what I have lost.
Her raincoat’s black, of course. I know she keeps
Asafoetida bags about her flat,
Merde du Diable; I know she cannot sleep
Because she has misplaced The One, the leaf
Marked with a grosgrain ribbon and a spoon.

The Scrambled Egg Principle

2011-07-05T05:40:00.001-06:00

It has been justly observed, that discord generally operates in little things; it is inflamed to its utmost vehemence by contrariety of taste, oftener than of principles
--Johnson, Rambler 99

I had a girlfriend once who liked her eggs scrambled hard. I liked mine scrambled loose. Instead of saying that we liked our eggs cooked differently, she insisted that she scrambled eggs correctly; I scrambled them wrong. From this I derived the Scrambled Egg Principle: Do not elevate differences of taste into differences of principle. I see that, as usual, Johnson has anticipated me.

Old Kings and Things

2011-06-30T04:21:00.001-06:00

Ignominy thwarts both
King Cyrus and his cook,
Whose name was Xx3.
I know, I know, you took

King Cyrus 101
and learned him in detail.
You had him for your tea.
You bought his socks on sale.

His bedpan holds your soup.
His cook is dust and hair
And someone’s sidewalk salt
And someone’s Dutch au pair.

Your Cyrus is an art.
His cook is a disguise.
It rains their blood and bones,
And slaves fall from the skies,

And children in their beds
Cootch up to ancient kings.
Old dogs on counterpanes
Bark at transparent things.

Geoffrey, P.I.

2011-06-27T05:33:00.002-06:00

Just moments ago the kings and princes left;
Priors pleading engagements to buy and sell
Indulgence futures, they commanded peals
And hautboys to blow them off. I drank my beer.
Pale enough, sure, but nobody would mistake
Moi for a prince, me for the high command,
The stuffed lark on my mantel for a hawk.
I ate some pretzels. Somebody's dead duke
Had fucked with the wrong archbishop's piece, employed
A crucifix between his jersey legs.
You shouldn't ought to do that on a nave
Made shiny and kept clean by novices.
I missed my lunch, and nobody seemed sure
If dukes were to be solved or disappeared.
My ex had opted for the latter, left
For some deer park outside St Smithereens,
And me and Buster sifted through the clues
In ashpits, huts, and shabby priories.
I could tell tales, but then I'd have to leave you,
Springtime or not or cherry-staining skies.

Against the Wall

2011-06-24T05:28:00.002-06:00

All that remains, the beasts having declined,
Is chum and chow, the wrinkles on one's feet
Smoothed by contraction, the lively little girls
Gone blonde from red, then white from blonde, at last
Telling lies of yore and splendiferous
Kindergarten snacks. It was a bad time.
We ate our ration cards. We had for sex
A kind of contempt. I saw a skeleton
Banging another up against the wall
And was not tempted. When our hetman sought
My vote for alderman, I told him, Once
I rode a horse across an undulate
And singing field, which he wrote down as Yes.

Garden Plot

2011-06-21T04:12:00.002-06:00

PHYLLIS
Come, leave your tools, those blades and hoses.
There have been daisies, will be roses,
Whether you feed and clip and spray.
Sufficient flowers strew the day
In which we laugh, while overhead
The sun approves when clouds are bred;
Gather you hoses: now I stay.
Tomorrow I may be away.

CORYDON
You will be gone, like every she
Of every plant and every me.
Each flower fades; no flower cares,
Caught by the frost and unawares
That frost took Mom and Pop and Sis,
Took first that neighbor, then plucked this,
And will take you. As well you know.
If you must leave, well, all must go.
I shall come later. Come I will.
A garden grows where we keep still.

PHYLL.
You unappreciating drone.
If I be gone, and you alone,
I’ll find a mate who strokes and clucks.
Your hand is empty. When it plucks
A rose, the rose dissolves. The dew
Runs by your fingertips. Me too.

CORY.
Alone God made the gardener first,
His rising state, and not his worst.
I’ve been alone with these before,
Not less with you. Not any more.
If you push on, then I must turn
The water on. My roses burn.

PHYLL.
O little man, you spray too much.
Kid gauntlets on, you lose your touch.
Plants love like us; earth claims us all:
Rise with the spring, in autumn, fall.
You’ll make a fine mulch, fat and pure:
But love comes late, and death is sure.
Come straight inside: be quick, be bent.

CORY.
The roses speak: I hear the scent;
And I shall come before I go.

PHYLL.
How sweet the prick

CORY.
When roses blow.

You Call This a Miracle

2011-06-17T05:43:00.002-06:00

The sun shines, the stars shine, the breezes blow.
Yes, yes, the grasses do their stuff: they grow.
Leaves cycle through their tricks: first come, then go.

I'll bet the brook is babbling, birds are tweeting.
M. Nature, smiling, seems to bear repeating
With equanimity. Wow. It's just like meeting

Old Uncle Albert, who keeps telling stories
Worn when Trajan, new to his martial glories,
Heard them and giggled. As do all old tories,

Then praise the miracle of repetition.
And you are dead and given up to fission.
The oldest story. Used without permission.

The Complete Henriad

2011-06-11T04:37:00.001-06:00

Henry has disappeared, a man who mowed,
Unleaved the gutters, recovered failing trim,
Unturned no stone, and left no hole behind.
Everything takes his place, whose clothes were grit
And grass, and there is sun enough for all.
Hence scant despair. The Henriad is made
Curtal; the solo myth of sorts is saved
And spent on robins, maybe, and the brown
Spinners who walked out of his new-trimmed bush,
Patient and outraged, made to start again.
The past has passed. They spin a yarn so fine,
Henry may be inside, in visible
Distress. He's moved. Or Henry is just gone.

Plots and Sods

2011-06-08T05:17:00.000-06:00

Older than all of us, they say,
The little blades of grass. They'll wait.
Concrete may spall and roots expand
And fire hydrants blow away.
Smaller wins out. And ain't it great,
They say, that they are quite unmanned

By frost and promises? They brown.
Or they're lopped off, sometimes refaced
By maisonettes, by diamond shops,
And yet they farm. They go to town.
They have seen cenotaphs replaced
By plots and sods. Time never stops.

Fabulist

2011-06-05T04:31:00.001-06:00

My mother died before I was born,
My father before I was conceived,
All recorded on pages torn
From books not meant to be believed.

Raised in a house by an ancient aunt,
Who planted something new each day
And fed and watered me like a plant,
Until the night she went away.

Learned to read from a lexicon.
Learned to write in ink I brewed.
Saw dogs, saw snakes, saw jays at dawn
Who called my name, as though too shrewd

To let me pass. I burned it down
And let it lie. I took a stream
That floated me on past a town.
I found it flame and left it steam.

And then a path. And then a road,
And then another, till today.
This is the route the fire showed.
This is what works, the right of way.

The Vulgar from the Streets

2011-06-02T05:17:00.002-06:00

for HC

Such hieroglyphs are easy. This one says,
CATES IN THE MORNING and that swirly one,
NO PAIN, NO PAIN, today the practical
Feast-day of St Bartokomous, who wrote
God is most perfect, this His indigence,
And gaped in satisfaction, doubtlessly.
Over the air conditioner man hath sprayed,
HARM TO A WISE MAN IN HIS BROTHER’S FIELD.
Prefects prefer straight-shooters, schooled in plain
Annunciation, all lean and clean in tone.
The pink one pricked above the mansard reads,
DRAGONS FORGET THEIR EGGS. Who claims they don’t?
They disbelieve in swords, even in dark
And ribald festivals of patriots.
St Evelyn said, This ghetto is my stage
And squashed his inner pupa. He was mad,
This wight who wrote beside the padlocked door,
THE WORLD IS COMING TO THIS STAGE. STAY TUNED.

Decomposition

2011-05-30T04:05:00.001-06:00

Scraping away their dirt, you find--
The time-intoxicated dirt,
Rich in polysyllabic orts
And nutrients, like red roe deer
And tallow chandlers--roots and bones.
We have those here. Around a shrew's
Skull you can see the withy threads
Of something growing somewhere else.
Our soil is fed by little songs
Of composition: Here lies one
Whose name was never writ at all,
Genius and species, gone to seed.

The Missouri Shores

2011-05-27T05:40:00.000-06:00

Of all my poems, this probably is my favorite. It's not the best--I can see that--it's just the one I like the most. It appeared in Hidden Oak.

Looking out over the land of retired bison,
where Indians haven’t been seen a hundred years,
the farmers shift their chaw and think of changes.
Maybe the tractor threw another rod.
Maybe the banker’s wife had a bad night.

Someday, they say, the sea will reach Missouri.
But they don’t know. They’re tired of alfalfa
and soybeans and corn. They think they’ll sit
up in their lofts on rockers, watching the tides.
It’s all in plate tectonics, is what they say.

Me, I think that grasses and sycamores
are safer to be predicted here than tuna.
Somehow I can’t imagine Mom and Dad
parking their dory in the new garage
or rowing bagels to Grandma every Sunday.

I’d like to see the moon reflected back in spume
over the vanished town of Moberly.
I hear them wish that everything that stales
washes away and grows a coral shell.
I like to dream, but hopefulness has its limits.

The Book of Simple

2011-05-24T06:59:00.002-06:00

The Book of Simple instructs you how to make
Your gut behave. It tells a tale of long
And distant. How, without it, can you steep
Teabags of Life? Would you like her to be bleached
And buxom, do you need to make her love
The man you were, unlikely as that seems?
You've got to go there. Really. You go there.

Of course it isn't cheap, not having been
Online auditioned or a paperback
At Harold's Half-Price Inwits. There's a crone
In Crawford with a stack in her Tuff Shed,
Guarded by gargoyles and a papillon,
But drop-ins she doesn't like are mostly dead
And numerous. When Lifetime tried to shoot
A movie version there, the black was white.
I bought one at her jumble sale last May.
It changed me round. Now I can call to mind
The minor dramatists I never read,
And then some. And the foxes stop to stare.
They catch some scent, a brief response to pain.

It can't be memorized. It must be read
Each time as though from scratch. The crone once made
A golem in a golden-thread sombrero
Who danced at her command. The April rains
Reduced him to a plaster statuette.
Made in Crawford, it says there on the sole.

Ripe for Recruitment

2011-05-21T04:24:00.003-06:00

Under the bridges, then, where can be found
Men lost, bootless, unready hands on fire
And hair they use as lockpicks. Or The Last
Piazza, where the contract killers meet
Their lawyers, to insert a venue clause
And limits on assignability.
Down by the tracks, it's far too popular,
Crowded with scads of housewife-realtors
Who need time off for Botox and mojitos.
The Polo Club will take an application,
But not call back. And Kitty's 24
Prefers you dazed, emetic but aroused.
Or there's the crossroads. Sandwiches and smokes
Purchase apparent assent. Fruition is
Another matter: these are not the deans
Of Mayhem College; often they forget
Objectives, falling asleep on wiry doormats
Stamped with cardinals and black-capped chickadees,
Right at their victim's feet. Such tasseled shoes.
Nothing says loving like a drunken bum
Sprawled at the doorstep, hunting knife in hand,
Asking, if kicked, for dollar bills and beer.
Try beneath bridges. Covered in newsprint there,
Soldiers with stories, drumheads fast asleep,
Forage for excess, settle for skinny sweets.

The Weekend Gardener

2011-05-18T05:17:00.002-06:00

You mock the flowers I can raise:
A grown man should find better ways
To sow his seed and harvest praise.

Mutual funds look good, and hiking,
Plumbing repairs, and mountain biking--
Hobbies manly and much more striking.

Adam gardened. Cain, who killed.
Onan bore seed, although it spilled.
John Ball revolted. First he tilled.

Let me manure. I fork. I spread.
Like harlotry, in white and red,
I raise commotion from a bed

For private pleasure, amply paid.
In shadow, color: sun and shade
Where Cain worked hard and Abel played.

What, This City Park?

2011-05-09T05:52:00.000-06:00

Potpourri printed this one.

Here is God’s plenty
--Dryden

I watch the garden mythologically,
predator swans beneath the victim trees
whose limbs still twist, the Zoo a generation
of sweat transforming semen. It may be
the tail of the tapir holds statistical
significance, as flexible as a god.

Look at the fountain, all carved heads and mouths
smiling in blindness, O-O’d in stone terror,
or blank, as though anomie were their defense.
The flowers soil themselves with seed: they once
cried to be changed, and now they are, they are.
The coral snake remembers better days

when he swam double-breasted in a rain
of terror. There are peacocks in my path.
Two antelopes who can’t elope because
Jove pinned them in begetting to the sand
until they begged in heat for hooves, they made
story. A bullfinch twitters. From my first

fable up to the present, who has been
transformed by hormones, given plumes, and sent
to brood odd young in armor? Who’s been paid
for charm in stars? Who started school but came
back home a tale of fantasy in feet
some free verse mortal thought too cute to count?

Marcus Antonius

2011-05-06T05:50:00.001-06:00

I threw it all away for love,
They say, but never what "it" is,
More important than what I kept,
Some qua superior to bliss,
That never, ever rhymes with "dove,"
And much more manly. Jesus wept.

You ever ride in a trireme, bud?
Better to fall on your sword or asp.
Drink while you can. Our day was done
The instant Old Baldy learned his grasp
Would not slip though slick with blood.
She can be my Rubicon.

What Do the Old Men Say?

2011-05-03T05:16:00.002-06:00

What do they mean, who say
The world has gone awry?
The trees leave every day.
I saw them in July,
As green as the heart of man.
I see men stiffly clad,
Colored in gray and tan,
Calling our summer bad
For insufficient shade,
Damning our leaves as small,
Making their wrath a blade,
Hurrying us to fall.
If only our lives were sad,
If we saw that we had
Outlasted our summer stay,
They'd happily love us all
And tidy us away.

A Poem Unrequested

2011-04-30T04:36:00.000-06:00

The mice knew first, the crickets and the small
Wrens, who muted their music in respect.
The Bigguns had no reason to expect
A coming, first or second, so they all
Went to the circus, laundry, or the mall,
To buy some smoke detectors could detect.
And then they bought a family to protect.
The beetles sang, We shan't shut up till Fall.

Somewhere the news was posted. In a paper
Of general circulation, someone read:
Death shall have no dominion, being dead;
But he was only someone, not a shaper
Of big opinion. Big opinion heard
Interruption and said, Shut up that bird.

Late last evening

2011-04-28T05:43:00.000-06:00

"Uh...Mr....uh...Upstum, this is Obviously Phony Name at Market Research Interminable with a short survey about your political opinions."

"I'm not an Anarcho-Syndicalist."

"So are you planning on voting in the upcoming mayoral election?"

"I'm not an Anarcho-Syndicalist. I'm not even a Wobbly. And I can't spell Czolgosz."

"All right. Well, Mr....uh...Ippstern, how would you rate the possibility you will be voting for Chris Romer in the upcoming mayoral election--absolutely certain, probably absolutely certain, or maybe absolutely certain?"

"If I can't vote for Baxter B. Stiles, I'm not voting. Goodbye."

Plus Jell-O with Tiny Marshmallows

2011-04-27T04:50:00.001-06:00

Better unnamed: the carnival of dark
Imaginary emperies, the rose
Unpurchased for the girl unasked, the night
You drove poor Dixie to the Greyhound lot
At 19th Street and Larimer, her ghost
A fraction of the spirits she possessed.

Nothing articulate can be recalled.
Faces go fuzzy when you concentrate.
Better to go down in a haze beneath
The Magic 8-Ball’s promises, behind,
Year after year, and only gaining ground,
Mortgages and the Mastercard, as room

Service arrives. It’s better you don’t know
The name of the town, whose Really Super 8
Desk clerk said The Golden Corral was good,
70 kinds of salad, so you can’t say
How your Unfinished Symphony will resolve,
Even if everyone else already guessed.

A Ballad for Willie

2011-04-24T05:41:00.002-06:00

My name is William Butler Yeats.
When young, I spoke to faeries
and sang of ponds and leprechauns
and lips red-ripe as cherries.

Now my glass is cold and cracked,
my verse a fine steel wire.
The faeries all have been served with writs
and flung out in the mire,

shot down at the Post Office door,
blown up by the IRA:
a city man in a country house,
I'll make myself a play;

taut for my Maud and statesmanlike,
I perne me in a gyre.
I'll bear it all for drama's sake
and set this house on fire.

Waiting for Monday

2011-04-20T07:49:00.000-06:00

He rose, but he did not feel resurrected.
He wasn’t doing Easter any more,
Just Sunday morning. If they wanted eggs,
He’d scramble; if they needed chocolate,
No problem; but what sermonizing dead
Itinerants had to do with plastic grass
And chicks collapsed in marshmallow--well, he

Knew, he really did. Osiris was
His middle name, practically, he wore
A golden sprig upon his sleeve and let
Sleeping gods lie, if that helped them advance,
Kings for a day in topiary groves.
Okay, he saw the sunrise--prairie light
Again this year. No matter where you are,
There always is an east. It’s over there,
East for a day. It’s always over there.

The children flexed their sugar-ridden thews
And made the windows clamor, all those panes
So light could be admitted and diffused.
It would move west. Perhaps the children, too.
And all of them would run out at the sea,
Awaiting new gods, who’d rise up from behind,
Out of the desert where the gods are born,
Into a heartland, where the gods subside.

When Dis is Done

2011-04-18T06:29:00.000-06:00

Nobody thinks about Persephone
That much, though here she is, a normal girl,
Stolen away and raped in Hell by Hades,
Betrayed by fruit, although her mother is
The goddess of breakfast cereal and toast,
Dazed, dim, and bleeding in a sooty place
Even the iron heroes couldn't stomach.
6 months off for good behavior, and 6
Back, was the best deal even Zeus could cut,
And you tell me you have no time to think
Of Proserpine (you see, even the name
Is changing), and the innocent's allowed
A line and a half of Milton, which is more,
My dear, than you and I are due for Hell,
And we were not that innocent, besides.

Cardiac Arrest

2011-04-15T04:25:00.002-06:00

When we were young, when we were less,
When you were poised and I a mess,
We were as we are now, apart,
Unequal portions of a heart
Broken for decoration, cute
As flowers trimmed above the root.
And one of us flourished. One did not.
But which was which, and which forgot,
I do not say. You do not know.
The flowers dried, the roots still grow.