Family Matters

What do you say to Ishmael,

The spurned child, the second best—

Sorry, lad, but your mom was just

A handmaiden, a tweeny like,

And Sarah was godawful pissed?

Father a race, why don't you? That

Would show him, Father of his kind.

They made it to Vienna, but

It's couches there, not ottomans.

One each. Don't pus. And Isaac, he

Got to be a major moral bit:

The proof of how you love someone

Is where you'll put the knife when told.

That ram was someone's Ishmael,

A woolly spot of sacrifice.

How many times did Isaac ask

His dad to have a catch, you think?

When cards arrived for Ishmael—

Birthday, Christmas, 4th of July—

Mom tore them up and threw them out.

Ishmael gathered up the bits.

Under Groby Great-Tree

 

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.

This is the anodyne. It dogs
The hand that bit you. Reigning frogs
fall upwards, then, and abdicate.
This is the awkward watch, the late
piecemeal of time your father handed
off, before the day demanded
help, before the poison took.
Listen. Babbles. On Groby Brook
the paper boats all have departed:
sodden, sank, too heavy hearted
to arrive. The guests have begun
to wander off, and one by one
they seek release in solitude,
but not in love, nor meat, nor crude
imaginings of quick relief.
There is no pain beyond belief.
In Groby House, on unmade beds,
the servants set down weary heads,
and slowly the predicted dark
begins to cover Groby Park.

French 102

 

La plume de ma taunt,

In epigrams, is what I want.

Regime Change

 

Grandmothers throw themselves into the street,
Caterwauling, burning their ancient caches
Of diaries and grosgrain lingerie.
No more to hope for, now that loss has come,
Unpacked in the great room, fixed itself a snack,
And cut the landline. Tell the tailor no:
Alteration belongs to yesterday.

The authorized watchers do not want to watch.
Where younger pain explodes, this just hangs on,
Nor all that long. The actuarials
Identify themselves and confiscate
Running shoes of the stationary kind,
The keening widows and the flattened fraus
Not vigorous enough for knitted sleeves.
The grandmothers grow smaller, they retreat,
Much larger women on their wedding days.
Their children now have dewlaps. Here come vans
As big as percherons. The women grip
Their sorrow and will not be dragged away.
By morning they will be a little field
Of husk and hull, a compost now assoiled.

Hit or Myth

 

He flew it higher than you might have thought,

Beyond the reach of Sense or Cymbeline,

Headed for higher office, like the Earl

Of Eyrie or the Alderman of All.

Beyond reproach he flew it, though unmanned,

And woman, too, if only she would listen,

However first impressionable that.

I can't make headway here. A ducal debt

Is nomenclatural and nothing more,

And yet he flew it higher than you thought

He could, a prince among the aspirants.

Fate and fatuity are oh so close,

Wax wings and a ball of twine at either end.

On The road To Little Pacification

 

By stage, the journey, shorter than you think,
Consumes with interest the time. Those heads
You pass, for instance, stuck on rusted pikes,
The burning martyrs praising their foul judge,
Half-naked women selling anathemas--
Where is the like in leisure, safely sound,
Petting the family dog or boiling grits?
It takes a trip like this to fill the mind.

We stop at The Remorseless Inn for brunch,
One price fits all, relieve ourselves, then wash,
And head for the Humble Counties, home of black
Kine and those hunting dogs bred out of wolves.
Consulting our horoscopes, we do not pause;
Our journey has the urgency of faith
Beset by trimmers, little men, and gray
Ecclesiastics. Soon it starts to rain,
Thus mud prevails. We are above such things.

Thatch is espied, then woodcocks, and the tang
Of peasants burning wintergreen: they keep
Their spirits up, sure, broadcasting the fate
Of unbelievers in a weal of woe.
We have arrived, credentialed, to be kissed
And flattered, and we order each a grog,
A sandwich, and a leg of wench. Ah, home.
Someday it will be home. The savages.

When Birds Divorce

 

When wrens divorce, the children fly.

Young tits from broken nests decry
The wounded tree, the severed song,
That feathered fate who hopped along
A bobbing branch, while in the park
A lone and separated lark
Complains to the under-birded blue
That there is nothing more to do
Than lean on a pelicanic thorn
And end with song this garish morn.
Or so the ornithologist
Explained. Perhaps a point was missed.
I caught the gossipy detail,
Who’d been distracted by her pale
Brow and her raven hair, a thing
Reminiscent of a wing.
So scientists construct a plot
That shows themselves where they would not.

Please Read The Prospectus Carefully

 

Congratulations, you've won Paradise.

Don't sweat the taxes, though with a prize like this

You'll get the salesmen and the beggar saints,

The clansmen and the classmates and the shame

That everyone else is licensed to contend

With sin, the petty and the deadly, all

The fallout of an autumn day at home.

But you, you will be here, in Paradise,

With 40,000 gourmet restaurants,

Emerald beaches, one-string harps who play

The Goldberg Variations. You have won

Eternities of room service and sea

Turtles to ferry drinks. (You have the time.)

The waste is heavenly, because there are

Malebolges of malcontents, their misery

Palpable as an egg, grit in their eyes,

Their tears a resin thicker than shaved ice,

And lupus. And the starving tots. Disease

Went AWL, but not so memory,

That vague disquietude, something like gas.

Read the fine print. Sign on the dotty line.

And tell your friends. Oh, tell them twice. We're waiting.

The Boston Swans

I vaguely recollect that there are swans

somewhere famous in Boston, somewhere Lowell

might think them his, a bird grant from the Crown.

He might discuss with Dr Holmes at night,

after the port passed by too many times,

how Zeus had managed Leda. This would pass

for smut among the philocrats, I swan.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree,” they’d laugh.

“Beg pardon?” said the emissary from

the Court of St James. “A longfellow joke,” Lowell said.

“Uh-huh,” said Robert, many years away,

trying to fit both skunk and sour cream

into his recollections of a swan

whose loins devolved a war it could not stop.

The Boston pops have brought their kids to hear

Napoleonic cannon foddering.

They hum as they tuck cobs back in their hampers,

decorously wrapped. Here Ted Williams hit

.400, which was nothing, if you count

percentages left lying in the snow

so Bonaparte could win the Triple Crown,

ambitions learned from Alexander, who

differed from Plato as to Homer’s hit.

Home and away, it all came down to swans.

—In memoriam Paula Tatarunis

This Augurs Well

 

Insensate sensei, say

Something in woodsy pulp,

Suited for cookie dough,

Something you hope will help

The plausible prophesy.

While we are young enough

To clean our plates, predict

Whatever will plot a graph

Good sense would interdict.

I'll study hard. I swear.

No fingers crossed? No fair.

What Do The Old Men Say?

 

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.

Weight Watchers

 

Let them eat cake.

Their teeth will break.

Let them eat bread.

They still will be dead.

They might not eat.

Their dust will be sweet.

Just ask the germs

Inside the worms.

Craftsmen

 

The general says, This is caviare,

Nor am I out of it. Inside the shed

The power tools warm to themselves. They drill

And flatten on the notion that the meek

Outnumber nails and must be driven home,

A smell of revolution in the air,

Like cuts that will not clot, like missing men

Who families have given up and watch

Ice-skating shows in April. It is June.

We have a chance, the general opines,

If taken at the tide, and he retreats.

The skater falls. She bounces up, her sequins

Prisms on a revolving stage of light.

A mitre saw is humming in the shed.

The Shores of Light

               This appeared in Angle.

When on the tepid shore

Of the great and greasy lake,
We greet each other, which
Weapon will you take?

Reproach is never failing,
Forgiveness always new.
I fear the most no light
Dawning between us two,

No pain of recognition,
Nor shock grown frail and old;
But bitter light extinguished,
Unspecified and cold.

When Dis Is Done

 

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.

The Woods Within

 

In woods within the city

The woods pretend to be

More than merely pretty

And decorously twee.

We have an owl and chipmunks

And squirrels and a fox

And almost massive tree trunks.

Mocha Man's two blocks

Away. Falafel King

And Conoco sustain

The needs of those who bring

Both brunch and hope, if rain

Muddies not the footpath

and wetteth not their feet.

The titmice, in mild wrath,

Fall silent, lest they meet

The programmers, the lawyers,

The botanists in clogs,

and eco-tested warriors

With large and tubby dogs.

Bobs and Jimmies

         This appeared in Lyric.

The streets our fathers played in they describe

Over and over, looking out at air

Peopled with places we've been told were theirs,

Home to some far-fetched prehistoric tribe

Of Normans, Bobs, and Jimmies. These are now

Grandsires to a clan who do not hear.

No streetcars run down Skinker. I see how

Amid my life my life could disappear.

Dead Grandpa Shops at Walmart at 4 a.m.

 

Nail clippers, maybe, no more aftershave.

No shiny trainers, sextet of latte cups.

A groundcloth sounds quite nice, and wind-up toys

To fill the void with clackety-clacks and beeps;

But who to wind them up? The waitress said--

Next plot but one--Here, let me freshen that.

Disarming, but without real consequence.

Clean underwear, in case of accident,

Would please The Inner Mom, but accidents

Happen to others now, and he has leaked

And spilled his substance on Aisle 17.

His sepsis seeps away, and all his toys.

The Wells of Time

 

This will transport you to the elder times,

Fire like slabs of meat and smells so strong
They pound the air in dactyls. In a pinch
You can recite your “Please, Sir, send me home,”
There where the heart is, but no wolverines
Or kettles of boiling grease or water nymphs.
What would you give to have your teeth decay
Authentically, to wear a powdered wig,
To spread your plot with nightsoil, or to fetch
A fair price on the open market? Home
Is what you looked like when you were a boy;
But now you’re not. Now you could almost stay
Old as the hills when hills were young, and you
Were cold and muddy. Please, Sir, send me home.

That’s Rory For You

The bugs have their names, too. This one is Rory.

His life was hard and brief. No winged glory Surmounts its end; a splintered carapace Hangs in no hall. He found it no disgrace To die of snow and never tell his story, Nor knew he had a point. And that was Rory.

Nothing of the Kine: An Idyll

 

Horrors, the lazy currents seem to spell

Saxon-ish imprecations on the pond.
Pathetic in their fallacies, the frogs
Croak in distaste; the serried midges form
An arrow pointing at the horrid words,
The word made wet, a stranger in their mist.
If words could kill, we all would die, the cow
Observes beyond her fence. She has been told
All cows eat grass. I don't know if that's true,
She tells her stablemate, but why take chances?
I wager it is so, and so I eat.
Grass is its own reward. The shrieking pond
Is turtle-proud, but in a world of woe,
We keep to beaten ways, as best we can,
And distance ourselves from the shellfish sort,
The gravitas-less insects, and the fowl;
But, oh, how the amphibious betray
Lack of commitment. Low, she says. We're born,
And no one knows a single thing thereafter.

The Tempest

 

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 House the Hoarder Had

It’s 90 in the shade. The hawthorn shares

Its leaves, its thorns, botanical debris,

And squirrels and does it all ungrudgingly,

All without affect. If it thinks, it thinks

Of roots and where they’re headed, of the nice

Vitreous clay pipe a little to the south,

Not of the hoarder and the house she had

Across the street. Tornadoes would have loved it.

The ambience was right, the floor a blitz

Of concrete, mud, and glass. It showed no shame

And more shade, even, than the hawthorn tree;

And shades await, if all the tales are true,

Across the tracks from piles of beauty books,

Tampon boxes, milk of magnesia sweet

As locust shells, and bags of dried-up pens.

The hawthorn leaves are planning for October. 

Do Not Touch: Display Only

The lintel of my door declares

Timor mortis conturbat me,

But only for display. Inside,

The folks are busy brewing tea

And snacking on what Christmas left

Behind—dry turkey sandwiches

And lebkuchen. Eggnog is not

A morning-after sort of thing.

Today's the day we roll our eyes

And smirk, superior, then betray,

And throw the calendar away.

Remembering Eden

         this appeared in Staple

It isn't that the oranges tasted better

or that the dust that fell across the shafts

of morning sun were something more than dirt.

We're made of motes here too, and here the sky

changes for eve, changes for morning. Though

the grass was growing when the sword was sheathed,

we are not missing all of Paradise.

I've told the story now so many times

I don't think I remember how it happened,

when I woke up with that stitch in my side

and she alongside. It still makes a good story.

What I do remember is how we made

the lamb eat avocados. Who would think

a sheep could pull a face? So here I am,

Father of Man, and dignified by years,

a tale in my possession no one else

could match but she, who is herself the tale,

and all I have to tell are anecdotes.

What stays when the emotion drains away

is this moment and that, the lamb, a bath,

Abel's first laugh, when he saw his first chicken.

The New Roadmap

 

I lived here once.  I know

which streets went where. I ran

where this lane starts to go

to the left, where it began

to carry another name.

So I am not impressed

by maps. It's not the same,

your sketch. I think you messed

up my reality.

Where's Archer? Appleton?

The dogleg at du Pres?

I know now what you've done,

you've gone to see what's there.

You stood on my home ground

as is. That wasn't fair;

taking a look around

alters the memory.

It warps the past. It preys

on what we say we see,

It relocates what stays

to houses, then to maps,

till we avert our eyes,

as though all routes collapse

below misfigured skies.

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.

Graved For Me

Around the corner, where I cannot see,
I see you waiting, haute couture in verse,
Lines I cannot remember on your face,
Deep, but not embellished, and a bright
Hyperbole of allusion in your eyes.
Around the corner.   Where I cannot see.

What Was In My Pockets Last Night When I Undressed

 

My keys, a pocketknife, the Pietà,

A handkerchief, a poopkit, and a friend

Of Héloïse, who said that Abelard

Was boring, but intense—no mix for men.

And 32¢.  Too little to apprise

A grateful nation of my whereabouts,

A paltriness made for a piggybank;

But I was out of pigs, apparently,

And when I dropped my pants, nobody cared

Enough to hang them up, preserve the crease

For sales meetings, in case there was a need

For Pietàs or handkerchiefs or knives.

Song

When thin recruits come pushing up   

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

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

Not Conversion

 

One of the elderberries of the tribe,

Domitable, but tart. What I expected—

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

Less saucy than a pilgrim berry. Drop

The bogs. They are not coming back. The old

Berries are what we call a souvenir,

The madeleine of fruit trees, for the loss,

The least instructive, dispersal of the juice,

The streetwise remnant abandoning the street,

Forswearing home and all that garden truck,

The radish and the relish on the vine,

The creepers and the hoe, the rake and rose.

The First Hotel

The first hotel

Where the angels did stay

Was a Holiday Inn

On South Broadway.

They brought their own myrrh.

They brought their own gold.

The frankincense was

The stories they told.

They phoned out for shepherds,

They prayed for an ox.

It’s a Wonderful Life,

They watched on the box,

But the straw in the manger

Projected a blaze

They could see from their room.

And it burned days and days.

They never got close.

They sang from afar.

And they spent all their myrrh

On drinks at the bar,

Till their halos dispersed

Like the peal of a bell,

And the stories flowed out

From the First of Noel.

Jenny Kissed Me

 

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

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

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

from Days of Our Lives

 13

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

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

Burritos Before Bed

Damned by the first and undressed by the next,

Preferred by neither, settled for by both,

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

Juliet is dead and hadn’t yet begun

To grasp Home Ec nor rallied over pep:

It’s Die or Dulcinea for the rest;

And blanketed by down at two a.m.,

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

The best and brightest looking somewhere else.

We are what we have overlooked, neglected,

Misprisions of vanity. At two

They all seem just the same, no rapprochement,

Walking reproaches, fuzzy and opaque.

I doubt that I am falling back asleep.

Astronomy: An Introduction

What if the stars are singing like the bats,

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

Like whodunit and why I dream of girls

Too good for me, I never even met?

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

Who say such things, one nation, full of bonds

And stock responses, they who never saw,

Though bangled to the max, a stellar mouse

Absconding with your name and your address,

Home to a star part gas and all white flame.

The Butterfly Project

 

A butterfly just robbed a bank.  At once

The effects are felt in Cleveland, and the jars

Of homemade pickles aging in my fridge

Advertise the consequences.  Good luck

That I was weeding frontally at the time.

Deforestation?  Maybe, but the choice

Is stash the butterflies in solitude.

Frappe´ their nectar.  Give them leafy bunks.

But do not risk Tibet on keeping straight

Your sofa cushions or the coffee mugs.