School Days

 

The teacher said, My love is like a rose.

Aspirant students knew down to their shoes

Their loves were nothing rosy and their hearts

Clogged as river silt. When the teacher said,

I’m large, they hoped he’d prove ephemeral.

They wanted cracks in which to hide and dust

To camouflage the beating of the blood

Disclosing where they were. Only the small

Survive. The teacher claimed the just smelled sweet

After they’d gone to meet the Biggest Cheese;

But sweets were out of reach or out of stock

Or someone else’s. They loved honor more;

And iron bars made quite a nifty cage,

And stone walls kept them warmer than the wild.

Cardiac Arrest

 

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.

Wolf Howls the Blues

 

The wolf remembers being big and bad.

Down comes the rain on trees penned in a park.

Dreaming of little children makes him sad.

So tasty, toothsome, in the woodsy dark,

The crunch of bones, the fellowship a pack

Affords: who, fed now from a keeper's cart,

Savors a salted girl, the perfect snack,

Some innard put aside, a treasured part?

Do not, thinks wolf, settle for metaphor,

The skirtchaser, the fairy's tale, the lone

Arranger who waits snidely at the door.

That kingdom lets a goose sit on its throne.

No, to be wolf is wolfkind's greatest good,

Here where the world is run by Riding Hood.

The Descent of Man

 

    This appeared in Poetry Proper.

In Abel‘s garden green prevails.

No. More than that. Green triumphs. Rules.

The handles of his garden tools

are stained. The moss is thick and slick,

and time has greened the very nails

that fix the trellis. Every stick

is smothered as it is tamely laid,

shaded while it is making shade.

Nothing of sere is sensed or seen.

Eden stood up and voted green.

The grass is master in this place.

The trees resist, but not for long,

where blackbirds wear their color wrong,

their rites revoked, each note, each word.

The bee permitted hides its face

in foliage, its dapple blurred.

Green, says the rose, and bends back down.

Sorry, says brick, for being brown;

I‘ll change, I will. The sun is gone.

It tried, and failed, to burn the lawn.

Whimsy, to think that man was meant

to rise above his verdant grace.

He raised, and he regrets, his face—

pink is not creature color. Vast

cities and tombs beneath the bent

blade: and he occupies them last.

Ask a man what the heavens mean,

he‘ll answer; ask him, Why is green?

he‘ll colorlessly turn away.

We‘re left no clue; we leave no clay

undecorated. In the mud

we build with sweat, we fail to note

the color builded thick by rote:

home is green. In the failing light,

the tide of green engulfs the blood,

thickens the pulse, promises night,

and keeps its word. Trees never go.

Grass does not leave. Leaves never show

regret. We are becoming less

than oak and shrub and fern and cress.

Traditional

 

It’s late.  The birds have tucked away

Their worms.  The spiders fold their silk.

Monuments tell stone dogs to stay.

The galaxy pours out its milk.

And you, you lie there just as still

As prayer.  On the other hand,

No ring.  The stars, though falling, will

Not change our course, nor ever land;

But day will break, and, broken, leave

Us petrified.  And first the lark

And then the sparrows will receive

A vacant and a timeless park.

Renaissance

 

The timbers rotted and the close rooms stank.

Pomanders did no good. Out in the stables

The horses held their noses in the dank

And straw. Laid out on the damasked tables,

The joints turned green, the bread grew hard and died;

No lady could spend such a spring inside.

The cuckoo on the move sang in hysterics;

The hawthorn sucked in air and stained it pink;

The garden walks were seasoned well with clerics;

The poets hid in hedges with their ink

And rhyming paper. In the elmtree shade,

Vertically, a man knocked up a maid.

Heads would depart before there came a June,

And no man knew the faith that in the fall

Would be allowed. Red-ripe and out of tune,

Wind in their blood made lyres of them all.

Men died, who let their mustaches relax

Or thought of a conundrum worth an ax.

The Buried Life

 

The buried life of immigrants, obscured

from sight by Grandma Hortense's Pall Malls,

came to a stop in her, when she declined

to tell the stories her mother told her

to Dad, or when he didn't care to hear

his own voice bearing tales to me. Somewhere

in Germany—we were too proud to be

from Eastern Europe, or, may God forbid,

that Tsarist place—the Epsteins went to shul,

if given leave, and Grampy made a minyan.

It must be so. They all grew old and gnarled

and must have built portable roots, but we,

the Friends of Crockett, Boone, and Hopalong,

we weren't to know what they had heard and so

in our turn, shtum. The Indians lived once

where we had Sunday school; the Gentiles bore

no adverse rights in our town. Grandma knew

unlike that Mrs Feingold, she belonged.

Suffering Succotash

         

    This appeared in South Ash several hundred years ago

 

Let us enumerate some things which move you
(one, two, three, five—let’s only count the primes,
the ones that really count). Your daughter’s hands
stained to the wrist in peas and carrots, saying,
“Mommy, can you do this?” Your husband stopping
and getting back out of the car and coming back
to the house to say he won’t be home for dinner.
The thought of the lover you have never met
thinking of you and wondering what sound
you’d make if he turned you this way first, then that.
Your husband calling, saying, since they serve
fresh fish tonight on Burma Airlines, he
might miss dinner tomorrow, too, and if
Air Kampuchea takes his Mastercard,
he’ll send a postcard back from Angkor Wat.
The sight of your fingers telling you they are
your lover’s in extremity. The voice
you haven’t heard paying you that one praise
you always wanted not to have to seek.
The airline calling, asking if you are
the beneficiary whom he called
aloud to, somewhere over Bora Bora.
A footstep at the doorstep, at the door.
Your daughter asking if someone could please
change her, isn’t anyone going to change?

What, This City Park?

 

            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?

The Intelligence Community

 

    This appeared in Staple.

A place where each room glows by lamp at night

as buildings grumble back into the ground,

groomed, but no longer supple, as they gray,

where docents sprinkle sets of books with dust,

and privilege is lectured on by experts

in bespoke suits and coats of arms, where rubes

like me can listen from the vestibule,

absorbing facts and accents, but not charm,

contempt both for themselves and others, not

a hope of Heaven, but twelve names for grace:

this is a college comfy with itself.

Punts in the current, gals who've been to dances

with one's new roommate's brother, not with one,

they go together like the sound of cash

and knowledge of vocatives. I can be turned,

bought and subverted, for a vowel sound.

Treachery leads me to the place where we

must pay to be shown over the great hall,

the gallery, the messes. Up above,

in bedrooms, something else is taking place.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.