Long, long ago, while humankind was still emerging from the Dark Ages, this appeared in the Denver Quarterly.
Homer was not Homer,
but a Homer whom
we, by mis-misnomer,
call a name the other's.
Histories assume
economy of mothers.
Fungible poets sink
into LaBrean bogs.
Editors may think
editees alive;
cockroaches and frogs
generically survive.
This, before some revisions, appeared in Staple.
More crystal chandeliers in New York City
than in the whole of Ecuador. I'm sure
that everything you ever saw for sale
they have here, and delivered too. The night
terrifies the inhabitants, all from elsewhere.
Thus it is told by Ahmed, who was once
a jazz man, but moved on from that. I saw
him giving Plastiklips to little kids,
asking them if they thought he should keep kosher.
Everything is different in the city,
he says: if you can think it, it has happened
and will again, though not when you are watching.
Thus there are Mayan gods in his apartment,
a defrocked priest named Twee from 502
with a baptismal font on layaway,
and Ahmed. He has been a breathetarian;
he snorts at all the riff-raff in the street.
Caste and kind are important in the city.
Love is on sale, returned if satisfactory.
Ahmed says not to stick to your own kind:
love across lines is all about distinctions.
There's more cash here than in all of Peru,
he learned, having once rented for a week
a girl newly arrived from Lima. She
did anything, without much wanting to,
and asked his help in managing to stay.
No help, but there are plenty others left,
all of whom can buy something, so can dream
of waking beautiful beyond their wounds,
thinking about, but never going, home.
This appeared in Chimaera.
A little town believes it is immune
From simony and tsores; lesser folks,
The big’uns from the City, pay to fret—
They’re born to fret, conformed to fret; the shapes
Of worry make the fortune of their faces.
A little town does not believe that woe
Is overnighted by the sun: the bill
Of lading comes due elsewhere. Yes, they know
About the sparks and how they fly, but still—
A little town? Our lucky life, they say.
Their daughters, up to Megaplex, keep pails
Bedside to catch the tears, while sparking boys
Think murder is an artform, and their spite
Colors the closet red. The roads escape,
Then disappear into an empty plain.
And yet the cornflakes keep on selling out,
The hotdog buns replenished. Say, the Post-
Gazoo is covering the Aphid Fest.
You’d think, the kind of life a small town leads,
Pies in each pocket, cakes in every bed,
You’d think the roads ran both ways, but they don’t.
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 two 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.
This appeared in the Deronda Review.
The pattern of the rain on glass
Is law bound, but I've never known
That law, and when the drops surpass
All reason in the shape and speed,
Only a textbook could have shown
An explanation or a need.
This is a horsie, that me mum.
There is Aunt Sophie, warped with pain.
I see three rodents, deaf and dumb
And blind. If God would play this game,
There would be floods on plains in Spain.
There would be dead without a name;
But God knows what God knows. He may
Have planned the shape of little drips,
Which drops abscond and which seek stay
Of execution. I don't know.
Stream after stream, the water slips
Where wracks of able seamen go.
I've heard it said that when the horn
Is played in court, the waters will
Reveal lost bones, and men reborn
Will dance upon their former veins.
Deep waters run till then and still,
The windows clean, those shining panes.
The clock knows way too well
Just what I shall be doing
At each bespoken bell
And what I'll be eschewing.
Taking out the trash.
Remembering your breasts.
Converting leaf to ash.
Reordering bequests.
The elm tree knows the time
Just fine. As do the grasses.
I've blown all mine on rhyme,
And still the winter passes.
The robins have returned
With noisy tufted tits.
I wonder what they learned
And where the big hand sits.
What she bought on the cheap,
Fairy tales and briers,
Taught her lying friends
What they meant by liars,
Burned her childhood down.
A matchless house of stone,
Filled with hollofill,
She lived in it alone,
Until the ides of spring
Pumped birdsong into blood,
And then she kicked it flat,
Split rock, torn clothes, and mud.
Some suffixes get laughter and applause—
One play, one planet, playing to the back,
The peanut gallery, the groundlings' den,
Gins its own giggles. Maybe a full moon,
Heavenly body, always good for grins.
And why not here and why not now? This snob,
This long-nosed, weak-chinned, double-breasted buns
Of steel and flexing mama's boy deserves
Banana peels, which hadn't been invented.
His sword is rubber and his cod. Tonight
The noblest Roman of them all except
For him and him and him and even her.
Tomorrow night will be Malvolio.
Here we have St Francis' tooth,
Extracted when He was a youth.
How do you know?
It must be so—
Look at the label: "Behold the Truth."
Here is a taxidermied bird
Who peeped to every holy word.
I disagree.
No faith, I see.
Under the dewy Dismas tree,
It stood, it chirped, it lent its song
To Good St Francis' fuzzy throng—
God, what a crock!
—Until His holy waterclock
Said, Move this gig to Little Rock
And then to Pierre and Battle Creek.
And here's the mike with which He'd speak.
Oh, I believe.
Now Saints be praised.
And here's some grass, on which they grazed,
On which whole multitudes were fed,
Church Live, Church Militant, Church Dead.
Oh, that I were.
The proof is Love,
Which motivated stars above
To send the rain St Francis felt.
And here's a vial. The smells he smelt—
Are bottled there.
If anywhere.
The world's a relic. All things melt
To one thing, Faith and Hope and Bees,
Kine and Kin, Foals and Fleas—
and Fools.
Who would believe is none.
St Francis is not meat for schools:
He is the voice of everyone,
All shaved and sheared. Thus here—take these—
I'd rather not.
I'll be the man the Lord forgot—
His Greatest Hits on 2 CD's.
After this bitter row,
Things are worth fixing now,
The rosebush propping up,
The shutter bolting down.
Time that I learned to know
All that I had let go,
The gutter's steady drip,
I might need them again.
Assuming you will stand by,
The wood can be piled high;
We needn't count on hap.
I'll be bringing the chilled plants in
To spend this bitter night.
Things still could come out right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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?
Let's hear it for the frenzied fritillaries.
They flit, yes, I am sure they do, but look—
Their wings make boys in Paraguay run backwards
And girls at St Lestrade grow maidenheads.
Have you no hope of following? Well, no,
Not with that punim, marked with freckled dust
Of sweet and sweaty apocalypse; but I
Shall soon arrive, accomplishment no go
And expectation up for sale, reduced
To realistic, pure disapparation.
So grab my hand, descend to Pluto's cave,
Where slopes are slick and trees have been conjoined
And mica and basalt are felonies.
There we shall break our fast. We'll beg to stay
Trunked and taut and parallel forever.
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.
