The Pisan Pantos

  

The rain distorts my make-up, blue
The color of my hair and eyes.
(My nose is red, my heart is green.)
A scenist has prepared the skies
Ingeniously. I’ve come into
My own here--Look! A human bean,

A roly-poly in a cage,
The Widow Twankey on her walk,
Wishing the weeds would grow so high,
I could ascend my private stalk
And put all heathen in a rage.
This dragonfly my private eye:

He boos and hisses, laughs and cheers
As I perform the buck-and-wing,
Magic to find the state a spine,
Alchemy in chansons I sing.
I hope the ingenue appears
To change my homemade ink to wine,

To animate imagined books,
A smell of candy from the crowd.
This fence is higher than my art.
The roly-poly laughs so loud,
Guards come a-runnng, Demos looks,
And here is where my poems start.

The Daisies Mown

  

from These Denver Odes

The daisies mown will blow again.
The moon pines not, nor is dismayed,
rejuvenating without pain;
once man into his grave is laid,

he is no more a man. His dust
may someday form some form instead.
It won't be he. The new moon must
return; but man, when dead, is dead.

So you, figured like Helen, bright
of eye, Celinda, will not see
how good you look, made up for night,
to be illumed like Semele.

The Expatriate

 

For extra credit he remembered much

That wasn’t worth remembering, forgot
The kinship he had promised to except
From discharge, and demurred at growing up.
It made him charming, like a short-term loan,
Lots of interest there, so he changed his name
To Amaryllis-in-the-Shade and wept,
Or said he did, at auld acquaintances.
The Times that try men’s souls, he did not read,
Other than archived, knew that butterflies
Were thinner on the ground than yesteryear,
But worms more frequent. Mr Lowly Worm,
There was a name for next week, if he made
Next week as Amaryllis-in-the-Shade.

Populist Politics

  

This is the country where a commandant

Discovered persiflage and flavored it,

Enlisted Cherokees for crowd control,

Good local color, founded an orphanage,

And called it Huxley on the Hill of Beans.

A modernizer, they say now, who stored

The name of every voter in a barn

Shaped like the Trianon, then burned it down

To prove he was sincere. From the insurance

He bought a trotter and a Brahma bull

With erysipelas and crooked horns.

They wouldn't get it on. He claimed a spread

Deeper in Texas than he ever went,

Who spent his twilight out on old Cape Cod,

A victim of the Zeitgeist and detente,

An advocate for antinomians.

I Love It When She Talked Like That

  

I threw the golden apples all at once.

I might have hit her once or twice, but mostly

They landed where I meant them to. She stopped

And picked one up, glistening like the sun

On cutlery.  The apple looked good, too.

You think I’m Eve, she said, and passionfruit

A golden bauble wrapped around a core

Of propagation and distraction? Run,

You fleet-foot son of Adam. I got far

Enough to watch her curve around the curve

The highway made, the fruit of all my labor,

Some knowledge maybe—Good, Better, and Gone.

A Little Delivered

  

Nothing more gorgeous than her gardening,

Which needs no barge or poop, just steer manure

And leafmeal crumble. Mulch is promised us,

Not always promptly. What we grow takes time,

Then flowers in the night. Conservators

Have failed their catalogues; Linneans weep,

Knowing somehow they've given it no name.

Ignis fatuus, some pink scholar said,

But he cared more about the Amazon,

One-breasted warbler, clear cut first, then mute.

She works the soil, not knowing if the fruits

Will see her, call her by her name, or care.

Wolves & Avalanches

 After the wolves and avalanche subsided,

After some man was found encased in ice,

A quill clasped in his hand, a bowler hat,

Crown up, between his legs, there wasn’t much

To do but lay new shingles on the roof.

The goats were glad the wolves were gone, the dogs

Looked sheepish, and the bowler hat was blessed

By Father Tom, the light of rectitude.

We thought, though, that the corpse might be a poet,

One speechless as a Popsicle, and stiff

As Abelard’s one poem would have been,

An Orpheus of footless harmonies.

He wasn’t, it seems. The only one we had,

One Paul Verlaine, was eaten by a bear.

Not even the local Rambo made it good

By blood vengeance, monosyllabic death,

Or dada verse aboard a drunken sleigh.

As for the wolves, perhaps they have moved on—

No verse, no point, so late their country seat.