This house when it was new
was mine. Now we have aged
past midpoint. When I grew
that elm, I kept it caged
a year or so. It soars
and crowds the house beside,
as if the out of doors
were one great neighbor wide.
I guess we haven’t altered
because I went away,
nor would these roots have faltered
if I had chanced to stay;
and yet it seems it bided
until I turned my face,
like someone then decided
to let it have the place.
Scheherazade called last night, with a tale
Of buffalo and bitcoin. I hung up.
Her name is Scam; her voice is far away
From Rocky Mountain vowels, her face as pure
As real-life happenstance, as blank as pie.
Next time she calls I’ll ask her, Have you more?
More rocs, more executions, warranties,
Or current offers? I am Old King Cole
And full of expectations unfulfilled;
But I can see the chambers where you toil,
A studio walled in silk, and those are pearls,
And these are bread and swine, Scheherazade.
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?
I was paying bills when Professor H.,
dressed in his salt-and-pepper tweeds, appeared
and clucked, too long a victim of catarrh
and clerical miscues. The wrong iota,
sense goes awry, the statement gets misfiled.
He raised a saturnine brow. “O loveliest
of trees,” he said and decrescendoed. No
spot of ink stained where he’d stood, no scent
of laurel filled the august empty air.
I turned myself to text and death, his two
permanent acquisitions. In the heat
the cherry blossoms fluttered, though no breeze
rattled my papers. Unhappiness, he said,
is best unspoken. Sweet are the uses of
pomposity. Pains and chains and silence.
The fat squirrels have surrendered.
Nuts, I say: they had no other course.
The chickadees complain until they’re hoarse.
I feel for them as though they had been rendered,
Or would if I were nature’s friend;
But I’ve made other, safer plans for fall.
I shall not be at home when ill winds call.
Spring is the goal here; winter is the end.
The trees are sure they will awake.
The frozen grass has done it all before.
Clematis clings to hopes there will be more.
But they're all botany. There's no mistake.
No cyclic show for me; but, oh,
I think of warmth and someone whom I knew,
Someone who spoke in cadences, as you
Burst with excitement at the sight of snow.
Phoebus in his coat and tie
Caught the barista’s wandering eye,
And all was won, and love was done,
And love produced an errant son.
And all the world was hot and dry.
A shepherd in a foundered field
Found him a maid and made her yield.
A golden age, by golden rule,
Began its rain, and it was cool,
Its prior mystery concealed.
They called it fable, called it lore,
The days of rain, the age of ore.
And all of those who came behind
Said it been by love designed,
And they were what had been in store.
Wry Mr James commits enomities
Of style with style. This late in life he knows
Embonpoint is a structural device,
The close that makes the man--his buttons need
Jumbo's dexterity to finish off.
He calls his flowers flowers: that's enough
For floribundant similarity;
But caution comes in shades, like purple light
Climbing a red-brick garden wall at dusk;
And he sees every tint, Adamic man
Mounting a stair which knows no period,
Only a pause, a lamp lit at each landing.
