Inside Of Moab, It's Too Dark To Read

 

Outside of Moab, they’re replacing Time

With sidewalks. Rolling either way, they pass

Monuments, which will never now occur,

First heart attack which ended with a kiss.

In Kingman they are stocking all the bars

With Mexican beer and tulgey wood, in Page

Nothing but churches and the refugees

From Old California missions and next spring,

The spring after that, and pools in desert towns.

Nothing sets like a sidewalk laid on Time,

Fossilized bugs and palm prints. Over in Brush,

The Mayor declared that Time was just a myth,

Some immigrant’s invention. He pronounced

Chicken-fried steak the plat du jour; he drank

A Nehi Orange, and Time just washed away,

Like fiddlers on a flood plain in the rain.

Two Traditional Exercises

 

1. The Same, Only Different

Roses bloom today, and then
Tomorrow roses bloom again.
Cut the grass, then rest: you find
New grass with roses intertwined.
Grass must be great, and roses strong,
To bloom and flourish, thriving long
After the gardener, planted, made
Under the grass, a thinning shade.
Yes, that rose is rose is rose;
Every blade of grass that grows
Is Grass. When you have tilled your plot,
Girls will be, though you are not,
Some with that shape, some with her name,
Some fit for love. Just not the same.

2. First & Last

Dead the first is pretty dead.
You'll be pretty, dead a while.
You watch the service with a smile,
It seems so quaint. The dead, you say,
Must have enjoyed their hymns today.
That ought to help them get ahead,
First through the gate, well on their way,
Or not so well. She's mighty dead,
You said this time. Some time, instead,
Of her, it will be me. Your style
Is going live. You mean to stay.
Dead the last is pretty dead.

Classical Gas

 

Diana does not care to know
What makes an apple blossom grow
As long as apples still are sweet
And she has more than one to eat.

Adonis does not mean to learn
What makes Diana blaze and burn.
She looks at him as though he were
An apple peeled, and just for her.

They are, they vow, as they were meant,
As satisfied as ignorant.
Their teeth are good, their fruit is firm.
Whence comes the rot, who made the worm,

And why Adonis looks when he
Sees peaches on Niobe's tree,
They mustn't ask, not till the day
Their frightened fences run away,

Until their blood runs dry, and sun
Does not shine down on everyone.
They haven't that much time to kill,
They say. But, oh, they will. They will.

Now What?

 

A little late for art,
a little weak for song,
I try my best to write,
and still it comes out wrong.

I looked within my heart,
I ate a peck of dirt.
I asked for extra light
and never shaved my shirt.

For every ancient blight
I found acoustic cure,
then shared it. Every part
of me was sound and sure;

but now it's late, and night
concludes a damaged age.
I guess I ought to start
to fill this empty page.

The Golden Corral

 

Mercurial Mercutio sits down,

His periodic table piled

With goods. The psalms and protocols

Have been concluded, vast

Salad bars looted, even the grill

Of his dreams expired, scrubbed and lapsed

Into the arms of sticky buns.

Ice cream, he says, and asks for more.

Nothing forthcoming. What if this

Is sold as is, a scruffy tail,

The end of plot and narrative—

Just some of this and a bit of that,

A chapel stew, a pot of mess,

And love a scant gratuity?

The World Lacks A Regular Scansion

 

Mr Keats, he dead. And Mr Marlowe.

I get the two mixed up. One had TB,

The other lost an eye, but did not write

To urns or psyches. Neither lasted long.

Marlowe, at least, he got to tell a tale

About a heart at dusk. Crepuscular.

Keats worked at CVS or some such place.

Apothecaries have their place, prescribe

And fade to black. I think they hail from Porlock.

Coitus interruptus. Some such thing.

Persona Non Grata, Torquemada

 

The world is your enchilada,

Torquemada,

And yet you are less than nada,

The Inquisition

No permanent position.

Partition,

Limb at a time, is not a solution.

Better to be a Rosicrucian,

Much improved by diminution,

Than textbook boss of being sure

That superstition is a pure,

Holy, and sanguinaceous cure.

In Adam's Fall

 

Yes, it is autumn. You see the pale tinge

The leaves imply. They know what will come next,

But won't admit it. What's a leaf to do,

Feeling its death, but with no voice to kvetch,

No hand to raise in protest? It's a fair

Fall from here and will be crunchy then,

A lot of company, no one to say

There, there, we were quite green back then, you know?

The Missouri Shores

 This appeared in Hidden Oaks.

Looking out over the land of retired bison,
where Indians haven’t been seen a hundred years,
the farmers shift their chaw and think of changes.
Maybe the tractor threw another rod.
Maybe the banker’s wife had a bad night.

Someday, they say, the sea will reach Missouri.
But they don’t know. They’re tired of alfalfa
and soybeans and corn. They think they’ll sit
up in their lofts on rockers, watching the tides.
It’s all in plate tectonics, is what they say.

Me, I think that grasses and sycamores
are safer to be predicted here than tuna.
Somehow I can’t imagine Mom and Dad
parking their dory in the new garage
or rowing bagels to Grandma every Sunday.

I’d like to see the moon reflected in spume
over the vanished town of Moberly.
I hear them wish that everything that stales
washes away and grows a coral shell.
I like to dream, but hopefulness has its limits.

Lateral Transfers

 

The elder blossom sees the worm,

Seizes a day and smells the breeze

And moves along. It can't go far.

The Younger Brothers see the cache

And hope it proves they chose the path

That Momma wanted: Nouveau Chic.

The middle sex is villages

And towns along a scruffy march.

They live with Hope. She cheats on them.

These demarcations, falsehoods, if

You get my drift, blur at the end

Of eras, pending scholarship

And bibliographies. Athwart

the elder, berries mark their place

With footnotes, colorful, but dry.

The Dickens, You Say

 

In smog at dawn, such as it was, a man,

A little young to be so stooped, retrieved

With pious care the aitches which were left

From yesterday's conversations. Horses dropped

As well, but letters glitter, even mucked.

He put them in his gunny.

                                                       Another man,

Maybe a boy, polished the anecdotes

Piled on each corner. His blue camisole

And tawny trousers, stained with riverweeds,

Implied how long the stories had been passed;

And still they mirrored, rubbed with spit and hock.

The fog smelled of cabbage. Atop St Paul's the cross

Bobbed to the time daws kept. A little girl

Invited passers-by to take her home

To tell their missus what she ought to do

With all them stays and crinolines. She wore

Chapter and verse, and not too much of either.

A constable suggested she might make

The lilies of the field her chaperone.

She didn't seem inclined to heed the call.

In the damp thoroughfare a printing press,

Strewing its papers, signalled for a turn.

Genre Friction

 

Latex, the private dick opined, but whether
he’d noticed wall paint or the lissome pants
which clung to her like wall paint, I don’t know.
When he said Dames, I guess he didn’t mean
a thespianette once sanctioned with a gong;
but, really, only every second line
he uttered, like a water-damaged page,
registered. He was grousing about hollow
points. Perhaps Quintilian had reentered
his recollection. Sometimes from a dark
outcrop of fiction odd things clamber up,
with strappy shoes, peroxide hair, and net
shielding the violet eyes. Probably not
Quintilian, though. Psyche with a quirk,
trysting the night away, seems far more likely.
He offered rye. Who now drinks rye? The flask
restored him for an exit, nothing more,
and soon the transom, last light left, went black.

The Village

 

In that kingdom, it is written,

birds do not sing: they hum, show tunes
mostly, though records and radios
are unknown. Overseas travel
is a bird’s hobby. They have seen
mermen; they’ve been to the far side.

In that kingdom, whose king does not
touch the ground, birth to death, for soil
that knew him would have to be burnt
(and who, of that thin stratum, spares
any centimeter gladly?),

the yaks dance in their fields at night,
shaking their horns, and the stars faint.
The marmots whistle in the aisles
between rows of quaking blue pines.
In the skin dormitories sleep comes

when light fails. Mountain Edison
won’t string lines here. The yaks strike sparks
when hooves tap stone, on cloudy nights
looking like mountain glow worms.
Dreamless, love is an act of sleep.

What If The Evil Twin

 

What if the evil twin prevails?

What if the Count of Darkness jails

The better half? And pulls his testes?

What if the loyal troupe, his besties,

Good and fidele as earth and salt,

Are swatted away? Then, oy gewalt,

There is the end of fairy tales.

The kingdom falls. The black barge sails.

Maybe a thousand years of briers,

Of root decay and stagnant fires,

A new-fledged bird will take the air

And chirp because there's no one there.

Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard

 

    This appeared in the British magazine Candelabrum.


I started a list of what you never saw,
dead before Epsteins lived, dying while yours
wore roundheads, dead a long time, dead so well
your stones look more like sponge. I gave it up.
Who wants a list of cars and compact discs?
Who could explain epinephrine to the dead

and chronically short of breath? Still in their spheres,
the stars were not impeded by your lights;
but lacking National Geographic, you
never pinned up the Horsecrab Nebula.
It says here you’re not lost, but G N B RE.
Someone has trimmed this turf 300 years,

and still it wants to grow. The River Wye
asks no eponymous questions, flows while green
returns to grass, which is the epitaph
other grass grew. That they’d be picturesque
in increments of centuries would make
the dead rise, if they could. I wait. They can’t.

Boxing Day

 

I wrote this down in perfect confidence

And cannot read a word of it. It was

Etruscan, maybe, or the speech of mimes

Running against the wind, their lips sewn shut.

It was the scent of peaches when the trees

Have been uprooted, pulped, and turned to tales

Describing a girl converted to a peach.

Apollo took her home. Artemis ate her.

I made this up in perfect confidence,

While walking the dog. I don’t recall a word.

Something about a peach, miming the fate

Of man in late September, while the rain

Didn’t feel like the fall of man, but might

Come to that, with some mulching in between.

A Little Learning

 

Only a woman’s hair, he kept repeating,

Proving that erudition didn’t work.

Precedent wasn’t a cure; it wasn’t then,

And repetition didn’t make it so.

And anyway, the dresses weren’t. The shoes,

The winter coats. Or little socks. A hair,

Now that was synecdoche, which, it was known,

Couldn’t be traded on the heart’s exchange

For love or money, blood or Latin verse.

The Dainty Dishes

 

The End Is Near said every sign

Every Saturday. They came,

Forecasting death and sometimes rain.

Their name was Legion, just the same

As ever. If you had a home,

You wouldn’t come, predicting rain,

I thought, but that was foolishness.

One wore a bed sheet, one a kilt,

And you a tablecloth or lace.

You warned of blood which would be spilt

And drank your chocolate milk, a fault

Indigenously out of place,

But loveable. The girls displayed

The follies of their fashioning,

And gawkers liked the sight they made

And joined in on the final sing.

Death advertised its local sting,

Picturesque and a little lewd.

The sting was in your parlor, stuffed

With bread and money, left a card

There on the mantel, never left

The doorway where it knocked too hard,

As if no one had ever heard

Or ever wept or ever laughed.

Othello: Crib Sheet

 

When they say Moor, they mean a lad 

Of color.  Black like pitch or coal,
though multi-colored in his soul.
Polka dots.  Paisley.  Tartan plaid.

His wife is white.  As pale as whey.
She has a hanky bleached with salt.
The dark chap has a Tragic Fault.
(He likes to fight.)  (She likes to play

at wifery.)  His sword is keen.
His adjutant is keener still.
At peace, there's beaucoup time to kill,
and we all know what that can mean:

the blackamoor is dead as dirt.
The pale-faced squaw is stiff as stone.
The villain rules the room alone
and will not speak and will be hurt,

which he minds not.  Oh, what a waste.
The colors of our rainbow run
red everywhere, black as the sun
behind the moon, perversely placed.

The Power of the Pen

 

I sharpened my pen, attacked the bad

Bad men. They were still standing when
I finished. I would make them sad,
I thought. They would be sorry then.

They weren’t. I gave them bitter names;
I called their mamas out. They kept
On being what they were. In flames
I sent my pages. Jesus wept,

But they declined. They were afraid
Of neither noun nor nib. My room
Was lit by indignation, shade
Of Johnson’s inspissated gloom

Hooting from where the restless go
When weight has fled. They did such deeds
As penmen perish not to know
And burned the barns and ate the seeds.