Tell me some more
About the shore
Where Charon waits
To greet the greats
And poor and 'twixt,
Randomly mixed,
A penny apiece,
Without surcease.
Is it hard and bare?
Do spirits share
Obligingly
Or try to flee,
Each dark shape
Bent on escape?
Do come ahead,
He tells the dead,
No woo, no warning.
No more morning.
While birdies slept and
earthworms snored
And owlets stooped to swoopy flights,
You
the Teen Queen Max restored,
With endless make-up, endless
nights.
Our tygers pad the jasmined path
And cherries
fall from green green trees
And all our dead lay down their
wrath
As I awake through slow degrees
In shadowed
rooms to unfilled beds.
The clock, the clock. Across the
lawn,
In fact, the sparrows shield their heads
Till, chime
by chime, they rouse to dawn.
Help has been delayed.
The rescuers are lost.
Accountants have defrayed
Their compass at your cost.
The bears are up and running.
The bull has whet his wings.
Lifeguards outside sunning,
The happy hunchback sings.
Into the broken woods,
Then out again, chop, chop.
Illicit, knockoff goods,
Sold by your momma’s shop,
Are smuggled home by doctors
Discovering arbitrage.
Your robed and pear-shaped proctors
Wait in the garage.
Least of our problems is the nightingale,
Which will not live in Denver. It must be
The altitude, the air Professor Dust,
Or all the folks from Texas moving here.
Sure, I should like to hear him sing to sleep
Weary baristas, shaking on the grounds
They cannot keep a songbird of their own.
Yes, it might cheer my grandma, if I had one,
Make her recall that once her skin was snug;
But if its old plaint was only loss and love,
You amid roses, sweetpeas on your pants,
I'd just as soon converse with crows and grackles.
My love is like a partridge or a squab.
I tried to make that work, but she resisted.
This was a compliment, so I insisted;
But she, it seemed, was something of a snob.
She wanted peacocks. Lord, she wanted tits
With scarlet crests and wings of diamante
To fly ahead and trill of shantih, shantih.
Still I preferred to sing my greatest hits,
Honor roll of the commonplace, the same,
Sparkly in dun. Dressed down. The sure. The daily.
Nothing about me said, I love you gaily.
She flew in neon on a darkling plane.
And so I write to you from this far place,
Who misses most a hypothetic face.
To you a letter. How about q,
Always followed by u, as I
Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?
Too oblique, I know. I know it
Follows, not p to o, but where
We all align, in tidied rows,
Where there are diphthongs we can share,
On monuments a line or less.
O, I say, O. But no one gapes.
They keep, instead, their final shapes.
12 lines. Or several hundred more.
And never again what came before.
That light from underneath the wendy house?
Aliens praying for our human souls,
Which they use to recover old upholstery,
To plug the cracks in alien patios,
Through which they plunge for hundreds of alien miles,
And end up salting mines. They keep a light
On day and night, hoping they will be saved
From shopworn fates by spiritual human stuff.
I don’t know if that ever happens, though.
Our lawn is littered with the crinkled husks
Of something other, something not like us
In flannel shirts and wool sweat socks, and hats
Stamped Alma Mater, Stabat Mater. Pray,
You aliens. I wish you all the best.
