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.

Wednesday: Theme and Variations

      This first appeared in The Chimaera.

Wednesday

Among these sparrows, frogs, and chickadees,

Finally warmed by sun instead of steam,

Too early for the shift to certainties,

Pentameter to prose, maybe I dream

Of sex and violets. Perhaps I know

What scientists on salary forecast:

This Thursday, patchy fog and early snow.

Their spring comes early, but it does not last

Forever. So I’m told. No season does

Which lies beneath the dirt today. Tomorrow

The violets will be the spring that was.

They lend me verse. Whatever else I borrow,

I offer back, as though I had a choice.

First day of spring, this is my winter voice.

Whensday

Dr Dee and his chicks, that brood who read

Fire and numbers, every comet signed,

What good are they? Their sun is not a head

Of state. Mere shape lives only in the mind,

In digs where violence dwells, sex of a kind,

Like ringing changes on these lilybells.

He knew his time, he told his time. And then?

I heard the answer. Like the heart, it tells

The count. It told the weather, but not when.

I take my time. It will be small and soon.

He only heard the pitch of notes that men

Are built to hear. I think I heard that tune

Performing here. The feeder and the grass

Bear the refrain: “A lass, my love, a lass.”

Wedsday

Nobody claims that flowers are untrue

Because they claim their pollen from the wind.

Imagine being proffered this excuse--

“It was the zephyr did it. I’m unskinned,

I’m virgin as a stone.” Of course you are.

The hyacinths immaculately flower.

They took their color from a passing star

While you were sleeping: some ungodly hour

When spring believed that nobody was watching.

Tulips push through. The grass begins to sweat.

Troo-loo the song the songbirds have been hatching:

Tra-la the song they urge us to forget.

Trust is a cycle. If we do the same,

We get it back. And no one knows its name.

Wendsday

A pilgrimage, spring having sprung, we go

The places we go every day, to see

What sun has done to change the world we know:

It starts from scratch, except for me and thee.

We are now what we have been, more and less,

Parts shed, augmented, by and large forgotten.

We can still flower—there is that, God bless--

So fertile we, so much to work with, rotten

Right to the corps. They call these zephyrs. Feel

Commotion in the ground? No? I don’t either.

From this point forward, nothing much is real—

No pilgrims, Aprille, smalle foweles neither.

Spring forward. Fall back. Either way we stand

Right where we are, not sky, not wholly land.

A Tide In Their Affairs

 

I checked the tub for tides. The ducky rode
Bravely as ever, jake a duck as Drake.
Clearly the surface, clear of Spaniards, sent
A message to all pirates, blackguards: Make
Your bones in other bathrooms, the abode
Of breeds without the law. They pitch a tent
On bathmats, oilcloth, on a naked floor.
I scuppered them. Here you will find no more

Than Ivory, almost completely pure.
The tub was calm. And yet the drain was waiting
To suck and spiral all that came away.
Calm is a fury, still anticipating
The quack of terror. What poor ducks endure
To save the surface, even for a day.