The Worms & I

 

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 earthly 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.

Reading Yeats For Greats

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.

Talking Pictures

 

His spurs would jingle when he brushed his teeth

Or dusted. When he bent down to remove
Clean silver from the dishwasher, his hat
Would hit the floor, 10 gallons all at once.

He drilled the Jack of Spades clean through the eye
At 20 paces. Right handed. He left
A slew of weepy dance-hall girls behind,
Their garters disarranged, their fishnets full.

The rustlers swung from greasy cottonwoods
Or, planted upside down in alkali,
Displayed their soleless boots to noon. Though cured,
They went unclaimed, black villains, black and blue.

The Chirikawa called him Brother Love,
Notorious as they were for irony
And tropes of understatement and reserve.
He hailed them from a distance, clad in white

With crimson trim. The dry-goods store in Fort
Pauperis did his dry cleaning for free.
(He'd saved them from the Crippled Kings last fall
At 2:30 on Main St., dentist time.)

Sunday a.m.s he offered himself brunch--
Chicken satay and crepes and papadoms.
He rubbed his boots with neats'-foot oil and planned
Retirement along the Jemez Springs,

Where no one asked for favors, no one died,
Except in winter, firewater brought
Dreams of the schoolmarm larnin' little boys
How Cicero betrayed himself for fear

And sent out letters wetted by a slave.
(Additional Effects, he called them.) Spring
Fell late on Jemez, cutthroats coming home,
Packed to the gills with stories of the snow.

The Age of Heroes

 

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.

Virgil & the Bees

 

appeared in Angelic Dynamo

we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax;
thus furnishing mankind with two of the noblest things, which
are sweetness and light.
--Swift

A flat gray stone absolved of dung and schmutz,
Warmed by the sun and near, not in, a grove,
Proximate to a meadow, not to sheep,
Unthinking sweaters on the hoof, at hand
Running water for sound effect: then sit,
And you will find the bees. Theirs is a mind
Unfit for your accommodating self.
Like physicists, they are absorbed by thoughts
Too pure and rarefied for you. They work,
The autumn ever coming, honey from
The dandelion, and excrete a light
So fine it makes divine commedias
A piece of cake, a holiday of dusk.
He listens: you can see him move his lips,
No buzz, no hum. Hexameters like glass,
The shape of cells, coincidentally—
They were invented to store wisdom, wax,
And pollen effluents. Thus you have flowers,
He thinks, stung by the notion Dido walks
Amidst gray flowers she can never touch.

When Nighthood Was In Flotsam

 

The staff has snapped; the flag has been misplaced.

The Coconino County Bar & Grill

Breaks both its windows, locks the doors, and posts,

Send me a kiss by wire. Bourbon flows

Through the arroyos. Canteens burst with beer.

The news does not report. Tequila leaks

Upstream. The fish are dying for a drink.

No, sir, my realism is not an art,

Says Jenny Wren, the brickbat in my pie,

The neon in her undies, my patootie.

She shines from both sides now. The Bar & Grill

Has set cane chairs out on the promenade

And pointed them with seashell, which it sells

By the seashore, if only it were there.

About Mucking

 

Roses do not dissuade

The fall, no petal stayed

For what it has displayed.

The leaves, believing dying

Superior to trying,

Prefer the dun drab lying

Of mulch that they have made.

A Way, A While

 

When winter came, they were not ready. No
One is. And though they'd seen it all before,
They never thought of winter any more.
That time had gone, and no one heard it go.
What did they have? A leaf or two to show

Succeeding generations, who would smile
And think how quaint the Old Ones were, who never
Took off their clothes or painted something clever
Or died for love or died for peace, whose style
Was okay in its time, away, a while.

Loaves & Fishes

 

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 Men Who Would Be Kings

 

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 necessary 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.

Manon

 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.

Their Widened Apertures

 

Girls in dresses on bicycles with baskets,

Streamers from the handlebars. A wet April
In a dry year, and they pedal warily
To market, to market, to buy like a lamb
Their new décor, more than observers deserve.

Higgledy, they head home here and there, thither,
If that may be permitted, stilled by the eyes,
The boys’ widened apertures, the precursors
And post-. Into the sun with them, pink streamers
Streaming, spring girls the headstones of the winter,
The corpus of the fall, where they wend, ridden.

Treasure Islands

The frontons bet on sonnets, good

To the last foot, unlike Lord B
Or LJS, whose syncope
Turned flesh and blood to strap and wood.

Each foot expands the club, the start
Of each sestet a lucky act.
The shape is bowing, hunched with tact,
By present pulse and present art

Betrayed in novel ways. At last
She is a rose and he a stag
Or he the hunk who freed the hag
Into her dewy, virgin past.

The Hellespont swum, Ben Gunn goes bang.
I sing the song my masters sang.

With These Beans

The conqueror of conquerors, the suave

Rapier, the diligent seabee, fat
Alcades, and persnickety CFOs.
I lack downtrodden populace, but those
Are everywhere, a litter at the curb,
Ripe for the patting. Grow No Paving Stones
Will be the motto of my beans. If tanks
Are what I offer, they can chant, You're Welcome
Between siestas and the native pulque,
A cardinal in each town to lead the cheers.

My fighter planes write Phantom on the sky,
While street urchins must reason out the weeds.
Salt beans, they'll grow with tears. A few will do.
A palace and a harp, a grand vizier,
A minstrel and a harem of the few,
The proud, the pink, the hopelessly obliged.
Let them grow pancakes out there in the sticks,
Aged fathers trying to tell the tales
Which make young people strong. They won't regret:
There never was a time to call Before.

The Well-Read Man

         This appeared in Poetry Bus.

Teach me no more. I know enough.
Of Dis and that and other stuff
Found on these pages no one's read
But dead descendants of the dead,
I've made myself a treasure hoard,
Dust like an asthma of the word.
Ceres does not search for me.
She does not call and cannot see
I bear seeds, too, and I should plant
Green fields in volume; but I can't.
The shelves are brown; the air is sere,
No months there and twelve months here.

Goodbye to Poetry Month, And About Time, Too

They asked for something simple.

They asked for something plain--

Something about a flower girl,

Something about the rain.

I really don't do simple.

I really don't do clear.

That's not what these eyes look at.

That's not what I can hear.

Obfuscatory nonsense,

Effete and out of touch,

They told me, and I thanked them.

I thanked them very much

And offered them a sonnet,

Recondite and blue.

They said they didn't like it,

Not that it was untrue.

Rex Anglorum, P.I.

 

1.

First the canary died, and then the light.

There was no heat, but it was June, okay?

He didn't need hot water any day,

But Mrs Hornet fetched the severed head

UPS had delivered overnight:

Then Rex believe coincidence was dead;

And he thought deeply and went back to bed.

When he was roused, he put that scum away,

In theory. Still, he knew just who had done it.

He took some DNA and made them run it.

The lights resumed. The boiler flamed. (The bird,

Too bad.) He thought that he might buy a hound

To save the villeins who had gone to ground,

Who’d share his common cause without a word.

2.

The type was set in Baskerville, the hair

A blonde’s – Cinnamon Smoke. He knew his stuff.

The ash a Turkish pre-war brand of snuff,

Now unobtainable, from God knows where.

His trenchcoat buckled, Rex went out to share

Info with the outwitted perp. Enough.

Dim Sum, the sign. So many are undone,

So few for whom a sleuth will do the trick.

Some muscle, maybe, or some patter, slick

As Wildroot Cream Oil. Never, though, the one,

The permanent moll, the sempiternal pick.

Rex pats his pocket; there the trusty gun

Mollifies the most strident of the senses--

A picayune per diem. Plus expenses.

Desk-Waller

 

When I awoke, you weren’t so great,

Not hell on toast, not fixed as fate,
Less than high sentence, more than fair,
Too cute to cry, too young to care.
You weren’t all that. I saw that some,
Of little fame, were twice as dumb,
Stuck out as far, and rode as fast,
And had no skills, and had no past,
And were both free and kind. They came
Before I called; they knew my name
And were available right now.
I didn’t want them anyhow.
The heart is hard, concealed and stark,
And whores in alleys after dark.

A Ballad for Willie

 

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.

Brasso & Marble Cleaner

 I write this with a steel dip pen,

terribly old fashioned,

They wrote like this—remember when?—

painful and impassioned.

I don't.  They wrote on close stool walls

and phone kiosks and cardboard.

On creaking slats of cattle stalls.

At Metro State.  At Harvard.

They wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote

of lost wills and abortions.

At epic length.  By train.  By rote.

In whopping festal portions.

The pigs ate most.  The silverfish

six-stepped across the rest.

Frau Bluebird, fluttery and swish,

and very red of breast,

has carried off a stave or two

in rapid, darting trips

and mumbled them into a glue

and long dependent strips.

As Every Schoolboy Knows

 

        Everyone knows that Plato

        in the tenth book of his

        Republic, proposed to banish

        poets from his ideal State

            —Sven Birkerts

It goes to show

what everyone knows.

Well below

The practical city

of laundered prose,

the tired and tatty

poets conspire

in solitude.

They set afire

pipe and cable,

They send up lewd

reworkings of fable

through manhole covers.

They mail out letters

petitioning lovers

to abandon their betters.

Everyone knows

they had to move on.

We heard in prose

the poets are gone.

His Secret Notes

 

In Book VII of The Secret Notes

of Constantine Colossus

he summarizes what he's learned

from his 4 o'clocks with kings and queens,

from his morganatic wife

who sold their son to sausage men,

from his large collection of poniards

jewelled and venomed, and long use

of gnostic texts and lemon inks.

Life is short and wonky-ish, he says,

our felicity at all times

frail. Roses fade, but grass persists.

Love is ephemeral, plutocrats,

like the beggarman, must sleep.

Still, gold ain't all that shabby.

My edition of The Secret Notes

is dented, as though I weren't

the first who threw it at the wall.

My Republic

 

This one was in Plainsongs, a long time ago.

To my republic immigrants arrive
with no fanfare of paperwork; they come,
and right away they ask to be left alone.
They want to go where yeoman farmers live
and beekeepers and Latinists. Old maids
give them each maps and send them on their ways,
unstamped, unnumbered, all unphotographed.

In my republic each one makes a stop
at gift shops which sell baseball gloves and bats
with which they make their own ways to the dark
sinuous backroads of the heartland states,
thence to disperse to dry or forest places.
No one keeps count. No one’s allowed to do so.
You’ll hear them playing catch in summer’s dusk,

trying to learn to act like you and me,
even the ones who exit tropic climes
in oddball togs woven from unknown bolls.
If not at first, then soon. They must be just,
like us, and just a trickle, which is why
they all play ball, a sort of crowd control,
the only one allowed in my republic,
short on theologians, long on shortstops.

My Unravished Bride

 

Medusa’s head above the door

Has stoned the crows and salesmen, too;

But no one ever rocked me more

Than igneous, impassive you,

Though permanent now as headstones cut

With mottoes, there beside my walk,

So poets can imagine what

Art would sound like if it could talk.

Medusa once was fair herself

And drove the bright boys wild with lust.

Like you now, from her warden shelf

She flakes in petrifying dust.

Ferry Tale Ending

 

Tell me some more

About the shore

Where Charon waits

To greet the greats

And poor and 'twixt,

Randomly mixed,

A penny apiece,

Without surcease.

Is it hard and bare?

Do spirits share

Obligingly

Or try to flee,

Each dark shape

Bent on escape?

Do come ahead,

He tells the dead,

No woo, no warning.

No more morning.

Lullaby In Slumberland City

 

While birdies slept and earthworms snored
And owlets stooped to swoopy flights,
You the Teen Queen Max restored,
With endless make-up, endless nights.

Our tygers pad the jasmined path
And cherries fall from green green trees
And all our dead lay down their wrath
As I awake through slow degrees

In shadowed rooms to unfilled beds.
The clock, the clock. Across the lawn,
In fact, the sparrows shield their heads
Till, chime by chime, they rouse to dawn.

Verses Suitable For Any Occasion

 

Help has been delayed.

The rescuers are lost.

Accountants have defrayed

Their compass at your cost.

The bears are up and running.

The bull has whet his wings.

Lifeguards outside sunning,

The happy hunchback sings.

Into the broken woods,

Then out again, chop, chop.

Illicit, knockoff goods,

Sold by your momma’s shop,

Are smuggled home by doctors

Discovering arbitrage.

Your robed and pear-shaped proctors

Wait in the garage.

It Wasn't A Nightingale

 

Least of our problems is the nightingale,

Which will not live in Denver. It must be

The altitude, the air Professor Dust,

Or all the folks from Texas moving here.

Sure, I should like to hear him sing to sleep

Weary baristas, shaking on the grounds

They cannot keep a songbird of their own.

Yes, it might cheer my grandma, if I had one,

Make her recall that once her skin was snug;

But if its old plaint was only loss and love,

You amid roses, sweetpeas on your pants,

I'd just as soon converse with crows and grackles.

Tone Deaf and Dumbfounded

 

My love is like a partridge or a squab.

I tried to make that work, but she resisted.

This was a compliment, so I insisted;

But she, it seemed, was something of a snob.

She wanted peacocks. Lord, she wanted tits

With scarlet crests and wings of diamante

To fly ahead and trill of shantih, shantih.

Still I preferred to sing my greatest hits,

Honor roll of the commonplace, the same,

Sparkly in dun. Dressed down. The sure. The daily.

Nothing about me said, I love you gaily.

She flew in neon on a darkling plane.

And so I write to you from this far place,

Who misses most a hypothetic face.

U Before I

 

To you a letter. How about q,

Always followed by u, as I

Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?

Too oblique, I know. I know it

Follows, not p to o, but where

We all align, in tidied rows,

Where there are diphthongs we can share,

On monuments a line or less.

O, I say, O. But no one gapes.

They keep, instead, their final shapes.

12 lines. Or several hundred more.

And never again what came before.

Unidentified Fallen Object

 

That light from underneath the wendy house?

Aliens praying for our human souls,

Which they use to recover old upholstery,

To plug the cracks in alien patios,

Through which they plunge for hundreds of alien miles,

And end up salting mines. They keep a light

On day and night, hoping they will be saved

From shopworn fates by spiritual human stuff.

I don’t know if that ever happens, though.

Our lawn is littered with the crinkled husks

Of something other, something not like us

In flannel shirts and wool sweat socks, and hats

Stamped Alma Mater, Stabat Mater. Pray,

You aliens. I wish you all the best.

Mystical Truths of Astronomical Illumination

Who can believe the luminous moon

Is lit by the sun? Here? In the dark?

Science is not some kids’ cartoon,

Where falling anvils leave no mark

On trees who are singing in the park;

And the dish runs away with the spoon.

It glows because it’s happy, bright

With sweat and pleasure from within.

It romances the earth at night,

Wolf-whistles at the frabjous sight

Of you in bed, and shines with sin

At second hand. You light the sky;

The moon absorbs. What science knows

Ends at the treetops. Wonder why

At night, between the breast and thigh,

Your silver duvet glows and glows?

Plot Points

 

It wouldn’t take me long to build

A monument—to stuff, then gild

A cassowary or a grub,

To stain a fence and plant a shrub,

Install umbrellas all around,

Stick Latin mottoes in the ground,

And plat the place with a snazzy name.

Of course you would have died of shame.

Much better to lie in the dark,

Pretending night is a private park,

Charming the mob away, who knew

Nothing of me and less of you.

Catching the Ferry

 

Last night the Truth Ferry

Put in as I slept

And left a verse in bed

And took the dime I'd left.

It wasn't printed neatly

And neither fine nor fair.

I read it only when

No one else could hear.

This is the way the worm—

I wonder how it ends.

Bangs and pine and dirt

And pale segmented friends,

Perhaps. I am afraid

I can't write in my sleep.

I cannot hear the sound

Of what is taking shape

In dark rooms growing darker,

Quiet, humid, dumb.

To every boy and girl

At night a truth will come.

Changeling

    This appeared in Staple. 

If it isn't the roof, the plumbing's goes,

Or the showerhead, or the parakeet. Like that.

Sometimes the years of dry, furnace-forced air

will shrink the floorboards. What was glossy, grays.

Sometimes the one you turn to isn't there

in the bed; or perhaps she is, but gone

to ghost, and you can never be alone

more than you are right then, which is enough, thanks.

They told you nothing stays, claimed, as you found,

that change is what there is. But this is less.

Everything leaves, but not entirely:

the bird's cry from the elm tree high above

the dust of rooftrees laid down many moons

rouses the form whom you still try to hold.

All Tales Come True

 

 Is this one of those historical moments—

The Siege of Stalingrad or Johnny Van-

Der Meer's 2nd?  Decades hence, a hundred,

Two thousand years, will people say, Her linen

Shift fit like May between the spring and summer?

No one can tell what Helen did in bed

To make her Paris spring.  The men who lay us

End to end in expensive cardboard jars

Know squat.  They can't wait to be shoveled ash.

You pivot on the spike heels Dr Jekyll

Says women shouldn't wear—poor torque-sprung backs.

Your hair fans a like a runway breeze was blowing.

The men besieged behind their shattered walls

Drop their boiled leather, wave their horseplume hats, 

And scatter condoms from those famous heights.

Imperial Lives, Late

 

I dream of people I don’t like. Not when

I knew them, not now. Unforgiving, like

An emperor, pensioning off delators.

My dreams delate. They say, I am the one.

A pot of lampreys and a plot of ground

For anyone who didn’t see my face

Remembering. That girl. That test. That time

Nothing went right, and I was told a tale.

A ribbon and a farmhouse. A fast horse.

A purple shirt, imperial, for you,

If you don’t know me and you never did.

GAA

 

Never since that one night have I attended

A party as a mushroom—not that I'm

Too proud to be a fungus, though the absence

Of chlorophyll and the proud necessity

Of feeding on, what shall we say? defunct

Organic matters doesn't suggest ballrooms.

It's more that we are only flora once,

Some roses, spinach some, we soon outgrow

Our vegetable natures. Aged between

An ugly plant and lesser carnivore,

I fared better than most. And when I saw

The lamp and found my motor skills, I yet,

In the way of a vermiform appendix,

Concealed a mushroom nature. Though by night

They come and go, by day, if you can pick

The right one, they afford a minor garnish.

Permafrost

A foot of snow descended on the house,

All fall at once and we pretended joy

At such a purty fluffiness, and broke

Our backs and shovel blades, and prayed that spring,

Spring would arrive, but not because of us,

The snow grows grass and lubricates the bulbs

Stripped from their husks it promised and delivered.

Summer, which disbelieves in snow, will swear

Sweat is the moisture agriculture named,

But summer lies, and winter lasts: within

The master bedroom wall a cache of snow

Waits and concedes no melting, never melts.

Anecdote

 

So Auden married Erika, der Mann's
Daughter, because that's what a bugger does,
Which doesn't seem to have disturbed the plans
Of anyone, except the beast that was.

Nice story. Famous names. The gentile touch
Of charity, and no Mann shared his beds.
Just don't believe that we believe too much
Of what such great men portage in their heads

From Alpha to Omega. There were those
Abandoned, which was not the fault of verse;
A little more, perhaps, a debt that prose
Has not repaid; but when the starving curse,

They do not mention villanelles or myth
Or those who aimed intentions, one by one,
At celebrated, artificial kith
And never felt contrition from a son.

Happy Trails

 

Edgier, maybe.  Nevertheless, I am

King of the Cowboys, Lord of the Saving Grace,

The Prince of Pizza, OMG Duke of Earl.

And late to my own funeral, if what

I see is what there is, reality

A cognomen for disappointment, cheese

Spritzed from a spray can, Gandalf with a sawn

Lady in half, too grey to sing the blues.

Birthdays!  I tell me.  Birthdays!   Let them bring

Adoration and single malt and straw

Spun from gold on an old potholder frame.

Maybe I'll let them stay to pay the bills

For Gro-Lights that can't remember when to stop.

King of the Cowboys, closing down the range.

Land Lubbers

 

The worms are tapping out. The grass

Has taken all it can, but rain

Perseveres. Down the asphalt main

The cars sail onwards. No one has

Observed the like before, they say.

They have. But that was yesterday,

And rain evaporates. Our dreams

Will not hold water. When we dove,

We suffocated, and we throve

Beached. We are landlocked, and, it seems,

We get along quite swimmingly

Once, quite deserted, all at sea.