The Ottoman Empire

I occupy this couch and think about
Decline this fall. For nearly 30 years
It ruled the room, and now its springs have passed
From mountains into gorges, great depressions.
Where are the wales of yesterday? I bought
A book, and all the change clattered away.
I changed a child, and look what that has done.
The subject people wanted to engage
Was war. Well, sometimes love. And never death.
Not on a couch, which framed all matters thus:
When we subside, how can we rise again?

Early Onset

Lordly dinners and waistcoast made of fust,
Gold, and the kind of glue schoolchildren use.
Gardens of flowers chosen for their names--
Verbena and wisteria and rue.
Cigars and women and women and cigars.
And ice cream, said the little boy. You do,
His father said. And so the women, too.

Yet I’ve forgotten everything that counts.
Without my mother’s maiden name I can’t
Access my bank account or climb the tree
From aunt to cousin, cousin to The Manse
Wherein the steamer trunk of crowns and pounds
Is kept for an emergency of love
Or kidnapping. It never will be missed.

Born Under Our Bed Sign

Under my sign are born the hard of hearing,

The hard of heart, the hard-up double-clutched
Investigative annalists. We act
Out conversations with ourselves, until
We’ve polished every line to silken splendor,
And who cares if they never happen? Lust
Is academic, omnipresent, pent,
But not exactly personal. A tale,
Worth more than actuality, is told
In Roman periods, by steel dip pen,
To pages not intended to be read.
That is my sign, not her sign. Where she walks,
Firelilies blossom and bombs explode
In anthills underneath the path. The toll
Is glorious among the hoplites. Drones
Behead themselves in homage; cynics rise
Buck-naked from their tubs and bow. She lies
Like rivers flow, by nature. She observes
The holidays of vegetable dyes,
The saint-days of the unredeemed, the last
Rites of Pompeii. The birds all wish they were
Self basting in her wake. They know the signs.

An Ad for Astra

To what are we fastened, luv,

As if you didn't know?
A woolly mastodon of pain
With braces on, for show.

A dancing clam, a rhyming slug,
A logarithmic cow.
Oh, set your sights on shiny stars
By night, by God. But how?

I think not, luv. The rain it rains
On aching necks and backs.
And what will come will come. For now
You'd better not relax.

The Norman Inquest

     This appeared in Plainsong.

King Harold had an arrow in his eye,

Which made his princeps difficult and gauche.

It bumped the mirror when he tried to shave

And hung up on his undershirt. His thralls

And churls inclined to sniggers as he passed—

Those bobbing feathers. Polity declined.

He bore sharp pain, like megrims, and he'd miss

The stirrups, if they'd been invented yet

(1066--he couldn't quite recall

If Saddler had made stirrups, though Clyde's Dale

Was large as life), and distance was too hard

To calibrate--he fell into a well

And had to be winched back up like a bucket,

A frog stuck in his jerkin. And the rot,

Decomposition in his nether parts:

How difficult to saunter like a king.

Then language withered like a hag-hexed crop.

Most third-declension verbs were hard to follow,

All Norman now, as if the iron head

Had tweaked all 3 bones in his inner ear

And no more freemen could decline a king

And field was just as hard as fealty.

  

But no tote bags

I am considering a pledge drive for RHEpoems.blogspot.com. The goal would be to raise readers, not money.  Perhaps I could raise some minor Cavalier poets, although they're probably afflicted with I'll Read One of Yours, If You'll Read One of Mine Syndrome, and theirs are all about ale and girdles.

Ideal for Ferns

Last time I went out on the town they didn’t

Just rent my room or box my books downstairs,
Pamper a pauper’s feet with my worn socks,
Or give my parka to a banker’s brat.
They sold my dog. They shot my desk. They dialed
My radio to Sister Carmen Todd,
The Bride of Pop. My mom declared me dead.
“He’s dead,” she said. “I do declare.” They made
My car a planter: somehow, they observed,
A hatchback is ideal for ferns. They mist
The ferns. They painted my pine bedstead white
And hung some Jesus where I used to sleep.
His eyes will track you if you try to rest
There now, but no one will. They mist their ferns.
The air must turn the color of balloons.

Not Far Behind

Spring on the horizon, the nightbird says.

I’m here, you know, not going anywhere.
It’s in the offing, spring is. Blackwing says,
We’re here for the duration. Longtemps is
Our middle name. Now bring the car around.
We’ll soon fill it with primroses and peepers.
We feed when you’re asleep, the jetblack says,
And never seem to get enough to eat.

When you just can't get enough

You know, if my posts here don't suffice to fill you up, you can find more of me on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/richard.epstein.3) and Twitter (https://twitter.com/rhepstein1), even, rather more infrequently, on Ello (https://ello.co/rhepstein).  But if you are pressed for time (or not all that interested), it's the poems which really matter.

Security at an Exhibition

We stand where we are stood, assigned to fill

A vacuum till the posh begetters come.
Trust us for that. The portraits say their names,
Whereas our labels are not blessed with art
Or opulence. From pockets we spill keys
And gummi bears and Zippos from the war,
Absent the ruffs and velvet hats. Our skies
Are free of putti, pennies in a jar
Betray no pudgy burgher here. We stare,
But are not scanned. We are the dragons now,
Extant beyond the borders of the frame;
And look at this one, gilt and dark and grime:
The demigods are falling from the trees
Like caterpillars, waiting for the change.

The Good Die Young

The good die young. Will you not try

To be good temporarily?

Epstein's Constant

This also appeared in Orbis.

I’ll call this Epstein’s Constant.  It implies

the angle of the vision from the man.

It imports paraendrocrinology

into aesthetics via sense of touch.

It makes all macroeconomics just.

By Epstein’s Constant all girls understand

all boys, and boys occasionally know

something about one girl, if they apply

themselves.  And Epstein’s Constant.  When you view

the stars through Epstein’s Constant on clear nights,

Magellan’s Cloud will match both Decalogue

And the Decameron in tone and luster,

measured against whatever scale you like.

It never changes. (I said it was constant.)

It knows no history and yet applies

To what your mother told your father you

told your teacher.  Although it will not bend,

applied to love it usually finds

the path most sinuous between two points.

Dead Grandpa, He Dead

from The Complete Dead Grandpa

Goose, gander, ducat, duchess, dead dead dead,
and nothing you can say will bring me back,
nor cumulo-nimbus fleece floating atone
for birthday candles blown or naked gifts
on disco-lit parquet. Dead. Dead is croaked,
frogs on a spit, Achilles in the pit,
and ordinary Me blue in the face,
a little while at least. The high-toned art,
allusive and annoying, leaves me cold.
I'd rather be a butcher in Portales
than talked about in Paradise, where odes
are picayune accomplices of dirt.

And Beets and Pickled Okra

The pantry is a cool and cedar-lined

Room in the basement where we keep the jars
We do not need right now, but someday might.
(It hasn’t happened yet, but who can tell.)
Preserves, we call them, as if that would keep
Them biohazard-free. I think they wait
For evolution. In the night I hope
To be preserved, but I know better now,
Awake. To be a boy of 17,
A damson plum with paraffin on top
To save me from my nature—-string beans grow
Pale in their darkened room: they will not turn
To tap dancers or unicyclists if
They do not break their seals. Though tubers chant
The virtues of sequestered, reddened roots,
They do not grow, and if they did, they’d drown.

Raising Expectations

Given some rope, they've torn the statues down

To piss on legendary heads, the groins
Bedecked in amaryllis and ablaze.
(Who would have guessed that amaryllis burns,
And colorfully?) The shoppers fill their carts
With freebies. (Who'd have guessed they wanted phones
Far more than sandwiches?) The songs they sing
Are short on lyric wordplay, long on scat.
We made no plans to emigrate, but have
Our havens in the hinterlands, where treats
Are plastic shoes on Sundays, where delight
Is puddings made of pigs and doughty men
Pray to the forest just because it's there.
(Who knew that gods had green cards or that wolves
Wanted our wives for bon-bons in the smoke?)

Travelling Exhibition

appeared in The Shit Creek Review

Room by room they packed up the museum.
They filled the armored suits with porcelain,
The urns with lesser urns. They wrapped the busts
In bubble paper, squeezing now and then
Mini-explosions, just for fun, like Queen
Victoria's little wars. The paintings posed
A problem. Smaller ones in plastic sacks,
That would just do; but 19th-century
Gigantists--lacking room enough and twine,
Necessity made them inverts, hauled them out,
Hoping for fair and fine. It took a while.
The Judgement of Solomon, a red and gold
Simeon Smythe, took 12 old men to tote,
Curators with post-docs and 3 rosettes
Amongst them. When they propped the painting back
Against the mini-van to rest, it glowed.
A minion in the right foreground held out
A scimitar, prepared to bisect babes
On the command. One of the old men said,
Where is a minion where you really need one?
They left a head of Nero on the roof.
It sneered and skittered as they took the turn.

On the Border

The river flowed with blood and sparkling water,
side by side and travelling fast, unmixed.
On the far bank, lilies and pink petunias;

on mine, roses the size and hue of mothballs.
Hot here, cool showed off there.  Grasses waist high
bobbed and rebounded under a light breeze.

There, a sign the Unforgiven could read:
IF YOU'D BEEN GOOD, YOU'D ALREADY BE HERE.
I read; like my compatriots, I laughed.

The dust administered a shock.  I bled
and laughed no more.  Heaven constructs its own
retaliatory tools.  Nobody asked

me to repent, too late, too late.  I tried
to break my fast, but could not prise apart
the breadfruit package issued me.  When Might

combines with Milk, the bad, the weak, the blamed
had better fast.  Unhoped.  All Hell is still.
Nowhere, we are not going Anywhere.

A Greek Tragedy

Chorus announces: See how all is made

Proper and tidy-like. The gods abhor
Disorder. It's at tit-for-tat they stand
Up, and the stars are symbols on a vest
Of justice. Be amazed and be content.

The Elderly Man protests: It isn't so.
The baby rabbits die before they blink,
And fatty deposits in the blood of queens,
Glamorous, doomed, gone to the mattresses,
Knock them as dead as crones. Don't talk to me.

Chorus replies: All righty, then. We won't.

Why me? Why here?

Every day at least a couple readers arrive here via something called claritywritingexperts.com, the exceptionally dull website of a UK-based service, which, for a fee, will teach you how to be a ghostwriter, copywriter, etc.  (Picture mock frisson of horror.)  Although I can find on it no hint as to how people are referred from there to here, I guess I ought to say thanks.

Thanks.

In Time of Plague

This appeared in Lyric.

This morning there were microbes on my walk,
Said Alex, and I swept, then scrubbed. I smell
Invasion, which is not repelled by talk.
He power-washed his porch. I wished him well.

Affliction has no limits. In the trees
Bats plot the overthrow of priest and peasant.
The grass is crowded with bug-born disease:
Ants march, and they will not make conquest pleasant.

I wash my hands of this. And that. The soap
Is dirty now, though Alex claims a cure:
One quart ammonia, sublimated hope,
A heart that’s tainted, latex gloves too pure

For dirt’s adhesion. Listen to the song
Of angry grackles: armies in the sky
Will drop their worms upon us before long,
Then move into the rumpus room and die.