We Thought We Saw

Puddytat tiptoes through the rising mint,
Secretive as a sapper, stalking bees
She does not want. How fey of her. Such twee
Impulses we impute. Perhaps she likes
The same sack Puck smelled. Maybe she is roused
By stingers in her stomach. Nothing sweet
Is likely to be true, the clerisy
Informs itself from Deuteronomy
To Darwin. She is twisting in the sun,
Trying to warm both sides at once and failing
Elegantly, fur laid across the lawn,
A preyer’s shawl, a boa on the grass.
There’s honey in the earth. And someday more.

     

Answering the mail

Answering the second most often asked question: Yes, many of them, but mostly in small, obscure places, here and in the UK. Denver Quarterly, Colorado Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Wallace Stevens Journal, Descant, Dekalb, Staple, Orbis, all the way down to places so de minimis that they seem to have been printed to entertain the editor's dogs and cats. Don't worry, though, if you're an editor. Just ask: I have more.

Poets' blogs

tell me more than I want to know. When you first read The Jungle Books, were you dying to know what Kipling ate for breakfast* and what color his socks were? Did your discovery of "The Eve of St Agnes" make you think, "Did Keats take Flintstones Chewables?"?

I don't want to know about blogging poets' medications or their troubles on moving day or how the cat produced her hairball. I don't care if the latest boyfriend, so cool that even his dick is dyed black, finished off the Pantene Pro-Vita. Your mom doesn't understand you. Your daughter doesn't understand you. Your editor, your best friend's girl, your supervisor at the Zoo: none of them understands you. I understand you, and I find the experience disappointing. Write a poem instead.

I don't really get blogs, do I?

*Mr Kipling's Cakes, I expect

The Botanic Gardens

Here's another really old one. It was printed in Plainsongs.

King Louie Bonga-Bonga. The flowers have
names so bizarre you'd never think to smell them,
only to wonder what they're doing here
and who knew how they'd come out of their bulbs
in this planned mix of stripe and sepal, thinking
Rainbow Delight on Thursday from the first.

And none of us knows what he's doing here,
except that the Zoo is crowded and too big
in heat like this. How about the Arboretum,
with fewer bugs and orchids on the air?
That's an idea whose time will never come.
No one can stay inside, where there's a bo
tree, but not a soul in contemplation,
unblasted figs and aloes, but no point.
A garden is outside. In hip-high boots
and a funny hat, a man moves very slowly,
making his own waves, walking through the pond,
pruning beneath the water, plant by plant,
naming the names of lilies as he goes.

Odysseus on the Weekend

I think this is the oldest poem I’ve posted here, though I’ve refurbished it a bit.  I wrote it so long ago—or so it feels—that parts of it make me laugh through unfamiliarity, something that’d never happen if I had really been engaged with it recently.  Anyway, it’s an odd feeling, confronting one’s older work.  It’s been suggested that no poet should revise his earlier work, because a different poet wrote it.  I don’t know if I agree with that, but I understand it.


Odysseus observes a crocus.  When
spring has arrived for real, the phone proclaims
non-stop—minor tars, boat-insurance chums,
the odd surviving monster, half a god
(always the father’s half).  “When can we go?”
“Will you be packing?”  “How’d you like a brawl?”
A card from Nausicaa, who can’t forget.
A card from Sy, who doesn’t want to see
no man this season.   But the goats’ fresh grass
must be refreshed with bone, then power raked.
No one is going looting till that’s done.
A circular from Agamemnon’s girl,
one of them, raising prostate money.  Two
appeals for orphanages from the Wee
Survivors, a non-profit building fund.
He calls his dog Achilles for a walk.
Replacement he, willing, but much too young
to know that spring had other names than this.
Paris is dead this time of year; the kids
bleat across a green and unbloodied field.
     

Who, You?

Death? Death Who? I don't know any Death.
I lied, of course. I saw him just last week
At dinner. He had come with Wendy's dad,
Who shivered over parsnips. He looked bad
And rattled like a toolbox with each breath.
Death drank a pinot grigiot, showed his sleek

Company manners. Yesterday I saw
Him outside Tiffany, blue box in hand.
An hourglass, he said, with diamond sand,
A bijou for a buddy in the law.

The phone rang. Death Who? I said. No death here.
I hung up, made the lords of order loud.
They shot at random, laying down the crowd.
No death. No suavity. A flitch of fear.

Epitaph

This appeared in Pegasus.


Beneath the mist, beneath the dirt,
Under it all, she does not hurt.
She lies in unacknowledged state.
This is supposed to compensate
For all the pain. She never cries,
We say. At last she will not rise.
Thank God we know enough to be
Deprived of possibility.

Osteoporosis

This one appeared in Staple, issued at the time from Matlock Bath.  Salve, Meashams.

                                        
From these bones you could build a bird.
From one blunt end a whispered word
emerges as music.  On their last
legs, these brittle sticks, they’re past
a long walk.  Down a short peer narrow
end-wise, which houseled a marrow
could bear a weight, you’d see the moon.
A cakewalk, a fox-trot: a tune
keeps time where we all come.  Belief
did not hollow this, nor did grief
warp out of whack the graceful line:
not sin, though tried, and it felt fine.
It was not fault, nor fear; not real
presence, the stars, nor that schlemiel
who broke her trellis, thorned by the climb.
It was a leg; it’s not.  It’s time.
     

My favorite poetry board remarks

--Who are you to say what's good?

--There's no such thing as good or bad; it's all just opinions.

--If you know so much, how come I never heard of you?

--I showed this to my girlfriend, and she liked it.

--What are you, like the poetry god?

--I've been published, you know.

--When I read this to a bunch of drunks the other night, all of whom were waiting a turn to read their poems, they all liked it.

--I really really liked your poem. Now read mine, and tell me what you think.

--You're mean. There's other things in life besides poetry.

--I've been writing poetry since I was 8, and I don't have to listen to you.

--Yeah, we read that Tennyson crap in school, but this isn't the Middle Ages anymore.

--I read this to Anne Sexton before she committed suicide, and she said it reminded her of Adrienne Rich.

--You're not the boss of me.

RHE

Blogs & Boards

This certainly is a different kind of format for someone used to the hubbub of message boards. It's still and solitary--which seems appropriate for a poet; but it is a change. The 3 message boards I've frequented over the years were loud, busy, contentious places, and that made them both interesting and annoying. The chief problem with them, for me anyway, is that an awful lot of people like to post on poetry message boards who have no interest in (let alone skill at) poetry. They just want to be noticed, and they don't care what they say, if only it garners them a little attention. At least that's not a problem here, and if it turns out to be, I see I've been equipped with a Delete button. How convenient.

Although I was going to remark that I don't know what it is about poetry boards that attracts so many trolls, so many half-baked half-wits, clamoring to be noticed and stroked--is it that poetry still has lingering trappings of prestige, vestigial survivals from archaic times?--the truth is that I'm not familiar with other sorts of message boards. For all I know, they have exactly the same problems. Maybe there are Quilting Trolls and Scrapbooking Trolls and Duckpin Bowling Trolls who haunt, menace, and disrupt their respective venues. I don't know.

But it is nice and quiet here.

RHE