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 bat
Absconding with your name and your address,
Home to a star part gas and all white flame.
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.
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.
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.
Under the bridges, then, where can be found
There at the Federal Courthouse they love Shakespeare.
They quote him often, and they quote him wrong.
“The quality of mercy is not stained,”
A PD said. “This kingdom is no horse,”
A prosecutor pled. “In every hamlet
They know the great clichés.” I have an itch
To stand and rectify, but I do not,
Suspecting that the local lockup holds
Good friends to friends of bards. The judge looks down,
His lifetime tenure harbored in his gut,
And quotes, “Victims have died. Why, even worms
May have their day and turn. But not for love.”
It’s hard to argue with a thought like that.
I don’t know any worms who disagree.
