This House No Longer

  This appeared in Poetry Proper.

This is a house without chalcedony

Or Andamooka opals, and it deems

Its seizure insecure. Hawks veer away

To overfly somebody else's house.

This house is what it is, is what it is.

You want to meet us? We share a single bath,

Not privacy. Our calendar misquotes

In scarlet letters Make your life sublime

Use Rapid Sands. We never leave the room

For grave emergencies. Our motto is

A tramp stamp on the lady of the house,

Her fine embroidered sacroiliac,

Hunker Down, which seems not to overstate,

And understatement is a way of life.

Why, there is a bone here after all; a mole

Has left his skull, a warrior's helmet toy,

For Spike to crunch and play with. This is a house

Without a porphyry tub or sisal strings

To anchor it, and someday it will leave.

A Babble of Green Fields

 

County after county,

green field after rain,

land of good and plenty,

filling in the rain—

who knows what the people,
blessed by county airs,
do to keep them simple?
Up the wooden stairs,

they are what they should be,
common-like and poor.
Of the woodlands woody,
moorish of the moor.

We of course admire
simple little lives.
Bless us, if we spare
a glance for graves and wives,

prior to our mansion
flats and massage showers.
Older than our fashion,
these the little hours

and ceremonies lost,
like counties in the rain.
Green fields like a ghost,
passed and passed again.

Garden Gods

 

Leis festoon my Queen Elizabeth

this morning, so she is both pink and coral,
one unexpectedly. Who would do

such a thing? The contractor next door,
him with the hemi? The SEC lawyer,
retired from niggling? A stranger,

hell bent on whimsy. Saints preserve us
from the drunken fey, the determined oddball
hoping to go Wilde and run to fat.

I think it was Zeus himself, eagled
as he has been bulled and pissed, leaving a gay
reminder that gods are not solemn,

except when they want something special—
grilled bones, sobbing virgins, grim obedience—
and prefer a boner to doctrine.

Bees back off from the paper hanger,
annoyed by mimesis and crude deception.
They own a queen way too fat to care.

Prematurely Wise

 "Sex is explosive, Woman.  Understand—"

And while he talked, it went off in his hand.

Seasonal Adjustments

 

In foot on foot of snow

The plant sang winter songs,

How spring plots to revenge

Deep-rooted wrongs.

Then leaves await the day

That sun makes brown things right;

But leaves that come and go

Burn sun at night,

And roots divide with branches

The plant.  Roots sing bass,

Grounded below ground

In a dark place.

The Hesperides, Such As They Are

 

The Raintown Review for this one.

Here there are no rough winds, and here no snow
Disturbs construction: twig by twig they nest,
The birds of summer. Here we have a plan
For wasting time, not spending it; the gold
And lilac spring dissolves in pools so brief,
The grass absorbs them like a sponge. We sing
Like blackbirds; but without the gift of song,
Soon forgetting what we were singing of.
Our trees are wrapping pits in juice and flesh,
Dressing them up for going underground,
Absent of light, flowering memory,
Ready to take one for the common good.
Within the hedge our fledglings ask, How long?
And even birds don’t dare to say, Forever.

Fade As A Leaf

 This poem is probably older than you are.  Whoever you are.

This time of year my life is leaves,
Trees their own compost. So are we.
They can do this indefinitely.
Like us, I guess, though no oak grieves

At loss of oak. They just make more.
Like us, I guess. If seedlings know
The august stock from which they grow,
They do not say. They have in store

Leaves of their own--great oaks, the sound
Thin and bird-high in autumn wind.
Like us, they fall, and, whether sinned
Or sapling, find the common ground.

Leaves are my life, this time of year,
Knowing there will be more, then more.
It doesn't matter. What they're for
Is why I make them disappear.