For Two Nights Only

Left me the day before the opera came

To town, a Fledermaus for bellowed love,
Its banjo on its knee, and would not stay,
However grievously implored. It went,

Trailing a cloud of bosoms, a mist, a wake,
Heaving the way Valkyries do. Left me,
And took up with a drummer from down South,
A treadmill salesman fit to be untied

And smooth as putting greens. Left me just as
A pitcher of tequila sunrises
Mysteriously emptied. Left behind
Headache and backache and cocks without a crow.

These are the days the market crashes, boys
And girls beneath the stripèd awnings; clay
And scalded dogs are everywhere, the heat
Like Tristan, broken kneecaps, broken heart,

And me without a woodwind to my name,
Ensemble on my own. The holidays
Are coming, leave me with a stocking, lumps
Of coal, and acappella, myrrh and myrrh.

Occupy Christmas

That was some night. The world went black.
We never got our feelings back
Below the waist. The frost descended.
All of the stars were apprehended,

But not by us. The cars refused
The roads. The birds of prey, confused,
Flew into clouds, and there they stayed.
The householders were sore afraid.

Since mangers would be closed this year,
A sensible wise man would appear
On other stages, baggy pantsed.
And all the stars in Heaven danced.

The Wells of Time

This will transport you to the elder times,

Fire like slabs of meat and smells so strong
They pound the air in dactyls. In a pinch
You can recite your “Please, Sir, send me home,”
There where the heart is, but no wolverines
Or kettles of boiling grease or water nymphs.
What would you give to have your teeth decay
Authentically, to wear a powdered wig,
To spread your plot with nightsoil, or to fetch
A fair price on the open market? Home
Is what you looked like when you were a boy;
But now you’re not. Now you could almost stay
Old as the hills when hills were young, and you
Were cold and muddy. Please, Sir, send me home.

Nothing of the Kine: An Idyll

Horrors, the lazy currents seem to spell

Saxon-ish imprecations on the pond.
Pathetic in their fallacies, the frogs
Croak in distaste; the serried midges form
An arrow pointing at the horrid words,
The word made wet, a stranger in their mist.
If words could kill, we all would die, the cow
Observes beyond her fence. She has been told
All cows eat grass. I don't know if that's true,
She tells her stablemate, but why take chances?
I wager it is so, and so I eat.
Grass is its own reward. The shrieking pond
Is turtle-proud, but in a world of woe,
We keep to beaten ways, as best we can,
And distance ourself from the shellfish sort,
The gravitas-less insects, and the fowl;
But, oh, how the amphibious betray
Lack of commitment. Low, she says. We're born,
And no one knows a single thing thereafter.

The Well-Read Man

    This appeared in Poetry Bus.

Teach me no more.  I know enough.
Of Dis and that and other stuff
Found on these pages no one's read
But dead descendants of the dead,
I've made myself a treasure hoard,
Dust like an asthma of the word.
Ceres does not search for me.
She does not call and cannot see
I bear seeds, too, and I should plant
Green fields in volume; but I can't.
The shelves are brown; the air is sere,
No months there and twelve months here.

Major Bear

Although I'm cracking wise and quoting Yeats,

explaining all the voices Kant can't do,
the damn bear won't look back. He has a den
accessible to meat- and berry-men,
but not to those whose popcorn-covered cates
feed just themselves. He may live in a zoo,

which is his loss to bear: but one must buy
goodwill from prisoners. He can smell my heart,
so fat, so crowded, from this far away.
When I go home to betty, he will stay,
a bear among men, a bear who will not try
to rise above his nature. Take your art

to some museum, where a red Matisse,
resigned to gilt, rectangularly framed,
hangs. Never shuffles. Never craps or roars.
Blinks not. As squares dance in the in-of-doors,
my bear is moated by such white police.
Die, will you? Do. The bear will not be blamed.

Only Labor Day

Look at the falling leaves.
It's only Labor Day,
When crabgrass half believes
We've scarcely finished May.

The chickadee is demanding
Every surviving seed.
The hollyhock still is standing,
Old habit now, not need

To make the bees attend
And propagate.  We say,
Look at the leaves descend,
And then we look away.

A Ballad For Willlie

My name is William Butler Yeats.

When young, I spoke to faeries
and sang of ponds and leprechauns
and lips red-ripe as cherries.

Now my glass is cold and cracked,
my verse a fine steel wire.
The faeries all have been served with writs
and flung out in the mire,

shot down at the Post Office door,
blown up by the IRA:
a city man in a country house,
I'll make myself a play;

taut for my Maud and statesmanlike,
I perne me in a gyre.
I'll bear it all for drama's sake
and set this house on fire.

Decomposition

Scraping away their sod, you find--

The time-intoxicated dirt,
Rich in polysyllabic orts
And nutrients, like red roe deer
And tallow chandlers--roots and bones.
We have those here. Around a shrew's
Skull you can see the withy threads
Of something growing somewhere else.
Our soil is fed by little songs
Of composition: Here lies one
Whose name was never writ at all,
Genius and species, gone to seed.

Burritos Before Bed

Damned by the first and undressed by the next,

Preferred by neither, settled for by both,

This may not be true love. But then who is?

Juliet is dead and hadn’t yet begun

To grasp Home Ec nor rallied over pep:

It’s Die or Dulcinea for the rest;

And blanketed by down at two a.m.,

I don't know which is worse, I who have watched

The best and brightest looking somewhere else.

We are what we have overlooked, neglected,

Misprisions of vanity. At two

They all seem just the same, no rapprochement,

Walking reproaches, fuzzy and opaque.

I doubt that I am falling back asleep.

When Birds Divorce

When wrens divorce, the children fly.

Young tits from broken nests decry
The wounded tree, the severed song,
That feathered fate who hopped along
A bobbing branch, while in the park
A lone and separated lark
Complains to the under-birded blue
That there is nothing more to do
Than lean on a pelicanic thorn
And end with song this garish morn.
Or so the ornithologist
Explained. Perhaps a point was missed.
I caught the gossipy detail,
Who’d been distracted by her pale
Brow and her raven hair, a thing
Reminiscent of a wing.
So scientists construct a plot
That shows themselves where they would not.

When Nighthood Was In Flotsam

The staff has snapped; the flag has been misplaced.

The Coconino County Bar & Grill

Breaks both its windows, locks the doors, and posts,

Send me a kiss by wire.  Bourbon flows

Through the arroyos.  Canteens burst with beer.

The news does not report.  Tequila leaks

Upstream.  The fish are dying for a drink.

No, sir, my realism is not an art,

Says Jenny Wren, the brickbat in my pie,

The neon in her undies, my patootie.

She shines from both sides now.  The Bar & Grill

Has set cane chairs out on the promenade

And pointed them with seashell, which it sells

By the seashore, if only it were there.

Outgrabe Days

A fire on the staircase,
The body in the pantry,
A woman in the confessional
Reading Elmer Gantry.

Cutworms on the salad.
Bats below the eaves.
On the doorstep pamphlets
Claiming Jesus grieves.

Children in the parkway,
Placards held on high,
THINGS WILL ALL BE BETTER
When the piggies fly.

When the door is opened
And the stairs ascend.
When the teller flaunts his
Tales at either end.

The Tempest

The air is full of music, but the isle

Gets bad reception. Under every rock
Scamper the grubs that were somebody else--
Will be again. The Ghost of Christmas Past
Or The Nobel Prizewinner for the Blues.
Thrones go unoccupied, but fires set
At twilight smell of camphor, and great moths
Sing little liebestods while sailing in.
The stars are green. True love never runs smooth,
But walks at a brisk pace. The wind blows warm
Across the bay, where seals on plaster rocks
Snore gently, dreaming dreams of fish. The eyes
Of magi close as well. The roads are waxed:
Young lovers slip away, concealed by mist
Imported just for them. It rains and rains.
It rains and rains, and ships capsize, the crews
Borne to the shore on water wings. They find
The aborigines, diaphanous
In raindrops, dancing pas de deux, de trois,
Wrapped round themselves and singing, Liberty.

Goodbye to Poetry Month, And About Time, Too

They asked for something simple.

They asked for something plain--

Something about a flower girl,

Something about the rain.

I really don't do simple.

I really don't do clear.

That's not what these eyes look at.

That's not what I can hear.

Obfuscatory nonsense,

Effete and out of touch,

They told me, and I thanked them.

I thanked them very much

And offered them a sonnet,

Recondite and blue.

They said they didn't like it,

Not that it was untrue.

Exterminator 20:2

The rodents in the wainscoting
Are singing: Praise to God on high,
By which they mean--I've no idea.
The cat, perhaps, the Man of Pie

And Edam. Or a giant mouse
Who takes no shit and never begs,
His tail contorted by a trap
And dying from his broken legs.

A little song, a little dance,
A little seltzer in the pants:
Not for the pious mice who keep
An eye on life and death. The chance

To be a better mouse is not
High on To-Do. They settle for
An Oysterette, some sour rye.
Their god and appetite are more

Than any mouse can bear. They go
Gently, and they do not return.
Some life, some death, some little guys
For owls to eat. They never learn.

Foundation Myth

Leastwise, they said, they had a proper book,

With “thou” and “withal.” Under a fruity tree
They read and didn’t understand a thing.
She had her hair--her tresses, she was told;
He had the muscles God might give a goose,
Were He so minded. They thought they looked swell.
It rained, but not so they knew wet from warm.

One day the sun went elsewhere, and the leaves
Showed them no comfort. One day she was sick,
Of nothing, really, and then she was gone.
He blamed the varmints, critters in the dark
Who laughed at her and told repulsive jokes.
He said he would remember who she was
And what they did, but what they did was made

A part of where he left, and who she was
He told so many times that he forgot.

The Worms & I

They do not come to see me in this hole,

My buds and bloods. Perhaps they share the shame
And largesse of disaster. Who would bruit
His kin's confinement in an earthy cone,
Tapered for retribution? All the worms
Are laughing, mind you: they don't see the sense
Of wider welkins; blue just makes them blush.
My Uncle Thad threw rubbish on my head,
The Daily Mirror wrapped around a bun.
Perhaps he meant to plump me. Kindness comes
In kits, to be assembled as you like it.
Aunt Alice led him off, her voice the twin
Of heavy rain on mud. There is no bed,
No sleep, no sanitation, whereat worms
Stand up and cheer for everyone but birds.
I pray for commutation, they for dirt.

Casual Labor

Later they claimed they hadn't known the truth.
It might have been a train, a didgeridoo,
A kid bleating across a bottleneck,
And not a woman trying to break free.
Gods are capricious. When he let her go,
He hollered Boo! and farmers in their fields
Puckered up tight and drew their flocks in close.
The woman cried herself into a daze,
Humming and shaking, giving prescient birth
In 24 hours to a superstar
Who grew to his full self in a couple weeks,
Released the hounds, throttled a blatant beast,
Then took to the road, a casual laborer,
Beating up bachelors, just for fun, at night.

Talking Pictures

His spurs would jingle when he brushed his teeth

Or dusted. When he bent down to remove
Clean silver from the dishwasher, his hat
Would hit the floor, 10 gallons all at once.

He drilled the Jack of Spades clean through the eye
At 20 paces. Right handed. He left
A slew of weepy dance-hall girls behind,
Their garters disarranged, their fishnets full.

The rustlers swung from greasy cottonwoods
Or, planted upside down in alkali,
Displayed their soleless boots to noon. Though cured,
They went unclaimed, black villains, black and blue.

The Chirikawa called him Brother Love,
Notorious as they were for irony
And tropes of understatement and reserve.
He hailed them from a distance, clad in white

With crimson trim. The dry-goods store in Fort
Pauperis did his dry cleaning for free.
(He'd saved them from the Crippled Kings last fall
At 2:30 on Main St., dentist time.)

Sunday a.m.s he offered himself brunch--
Chicken satay and crepes and papadoms.
He rubbed his boots with neats'-foot oil and planned
Retirement along the Jemez Springs,

Where no one asked for favors, no one died,
Except in winter, firewater brought
Dreams of the schoolmarm larnin' little boys
How Cicero betrayed himself for fear

And sent out letters wetted by a slave.
(Additional Effects, he called them.) Spring
Fell late on Jemez, cutthroats coming home,
Packed to the gills with stories of the snow.

Please Take a Moment to Locate the Exits

King of the Night, he is.  He doesn’t like you.

He doesn’t like your backstory.  Your charm,

Like Bottom’s bottom, isn’t something special.

The mists of midnight blow away.  You stand

In the Aisle of Target, looking for your shoes

On shelves of mouthwash, rodent spray, and cans

Of 3-in-1.  King of the Night, he says,

“Wet cleanup on Aisle 7, where the lute

And zither sale  has just concluded.   Please

Exit the store, and, listen, don’t come back.”

Non Plussed Ultra

Something’s not right--the dog has too many legs,

The poet is rhyming punch with anaconda,

You in an iron mask, a gun in hand,

Thought balloons overhead. Alarming stuff

For those not yet acquainted with the dog,

Whose genial nature only wants to please.

A centipede for love. A friend in need.

But why not a sword, which better suits the mask,

If not the miniskirt, balloons so full,

They’re raining everywhere, the proper nouns

And action words. The poet is nonplussed.

Nevertheless, each sun must have its day

To shine on its constituents and tell

Its tale, or maybe that’s the comet, come

And gone, not to return, until next time.

And, no, conclusion has not come. Not yet.

Not while an aunt is upstairs rhyming fish

And threatening to wed the chest of drawers.

Something will come of this, something sublime,

Like peonies or chifforobes in flames.

Light Concludes in Lightning Bugs

When the sky was a vault, the stars were stuck

To the underside. We wished for luck
On falling decals. First the sun
And then the moon blinked off for fun,
Relit for entertainment. God
Was merciful, but very odd.

Grounded, alfalfa didn't care;
And cherries ripened in an air
Closer to home, where pigs agree
That slop is their theology.
The decals slipped and fell at night,
Yet there was no decrease of light.
Piercing terrestrial disguise,
We brought them home as fireflies.

When Dis is Done

Nobody thinks about Persephone

That much, though here she is, a normal girl,
Stolen away and raped in Hell by Hades,
Betrayed by fruit, although her mother is
The goddess of breakfast cereal and toast,
Dazed, dim, and bleeding in a sooty place
Even the iron heroes couldn't stomach.
6 months off for good behavior, and 6
Back, was the best deal even Zeus could cut,
And you tell me you have no time to think
Of Proserpine (you see, even the name
Is changing), and the innocent's allowed
A line and a half of Milton, which is more,
My dear, than you and I are due for Hell,
And we were not that innocent, besides.

Under Groby Great-Tree

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.

This is the anodyne. It dogs
The hand that bit you. Reigning frogs
fall upwards, then, and abdicate.
This is the awkward watch, the late
piecemeal of time your father handed
off, before the day demanded
help, before the poison took.
Listen. Babbles. On Groby Brook
the paper boats all have departed:
sodden, sank, too heavy hearted
to arrive. The guests have begun
to wander off, and one by one
they seek release in solitude,
but not in love, nor meat, nor crude
imaginings of quick relief.
There is no pain beyond belief.
In Groby House, on unmade beds,
the servants set down weary heads,
and slowly the predicted dark
begins to cover Groby Park.

In for a Penny

In for a pound, the centaur died.

His rusted cage began to curl
Away from its anchors. Ants fried
On the concrete floor. That's a pearl

That was his eye, whose setting failed.
The better men and calmer bards
Have winkled out, have not been jailed,
Kings of their graven calling cards.

The mistress primps her painted bones.
The Greek is wrong and the Chinese
Opaque as Pocatello. Loans
Sustain the fingers as they freeze.

Off the wet page the hand-set words
Scarper. The night men clank and shift,
Marley in chains. From ill-kept birds
Onto the Thames the adverbs sift.

Civis Romanus Sum

This appeared in Plainsongs.

The immigration man will let you through
Because you’re white and smell okay, but not
So Customs, who keeps profiles on a lot
Of funny types, including some like you.
You will feel funny, if he wants you to.
You’ll act as though your Henry James were hot.
That biro is suspicious. You forgot
All that old stuff, which looks like something new

When undeclared. So make a speech: I deal
In artifacts of the mind. I’m odd. I write
At painful and eccentric times of night.
I smuggle into books a way to feel.
I bear impediments of no appeal.
I am a citizen. I transport light.

Desk-Waller

When I awoke, you weren’t so great,

Not hell on toast, not fixed as fate,
Less than high sentence, more than fair,
Too cute to cry, too young to care.
You weren’t all that. I saw that some,
Of little fame, were twice as dumb,
Stuck out as far, and rode as fast,
And had no skills, and had no past,
And were both free and kind. They came
Before I called; they knew my name
And were available right now.
I didn’t want them anyhow.
The heart is hard, concealed and stark,
And whores in alleys after dark.

Jenny Kissed Me

What of that? I'm not alone,
Tasting rose and bubble gum.
Years and boys, there must be some.
Some I hate, some unknown,
Time has made them dry and dumb.

Under clocks and amber trees,
What they think of in their years,
Ever Jenny, never nears.
All who did their best to please,
Kissed and captured, cold and tears,

Distant smiling, fresh and close,
These are flushed as any flower.
Real and given to the hour,
Jenny kissed me. No one knows
Jenny distant. All that power.

Motley Carew

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.


As far as I know, no one knows,
When August leaves, and leaves the rose,
When leaves turn pale and fall, and fall
Replaces flesh with down, and all
Your fallen friends are raked away,
Who's going to go and who to stay.

Ask me to find where fall bestows,
Week after week, la vie en rose:
Where sun is weak and hope is faint
And even dawn would chill a saint,
It's sacked and set aside and waits,
Before cold comes, till cold abates.

Generations are each the same.
They sport; they sun; they look to blame,
On frosted fence, the smitten vine.
It will be their tale. Now a mine
Is set of seeds: without a sound,
It plots resistance underground.

Summer Blockbuster

Summer didn’t differ all that much from spring,

Not the first day. The sprinklers and the dogs,

The blossoms where the bees crawled, and the night

Which wasn’t quite the day because I saw

Less of myself, which didn’t bother me.

Then it grew hot. And windy just the same.

The tree of knowledge only bore dried fruit;

The columbine flourished, and the chiles made

Mad bombers of the wasps. A chickadee

Drank all the water in the collie’s bowl

And fluttered like a wiffleball. I mailed

My manuscript To Whom It May Concern,

No one yet having been; but this had heat,

A love triangle, scalene, sweat and skin.

In That Great Gettin'-Up Morning

They came in caravans, like mushy peas

Lined up on a table, stuff you wouldn't eat,
No, not for anything, not even if
You had to sit there till your plate was clean--
It was, but moving peas onto the wood
Surface, which doubled back globular green,
Didn't much count--and you couldn't go out,
So there you sat, and they came on in files
And filled the fields in rows, one after one,
As if for concert parking; but the songs,
Sweetest when never heard, made dead birds fly
And unseen eagles fall out of the clouds
Onto the roofs of Minis. As they sang,
The caravans, of John Brown's Body Wash
And Vengeance is A-Coming Like a Go-Go,
The smell of sacrifice, the trampled dust,
The blue smoke of electrics ill installed,
Rose over hills where harts skipped and the roe
Carried their heads like trophy wives and posed,
The ungulate mission. Psalms of praise abound.

Losing the Thread Count

The world is not asleep, though you may dream

It dreams of you.  It’s busy with the bus,

Running late, and a list of shepherd’s pie’s

Constituents.  It doesn’t even snore;

It doesn’t toss.  It turns a blinded eye

Half of the time. You’re looking for a mitzvah,

Kissed from the dark side, full of hugs and zzzs.

You get an email, Jewish Singles Hot

& Holy Hurry Hurry.  Now’s the time

To turn your hot cheek to the cool percale

And hope the dead don’t know what’s going on.

Tomorrow in a While

Tomorrow, or tomorrow in a while,

After you lay down secateurs and pause
To watch the housebirds swoop, and when you smile,
Thinking of what a wilderness it was,
This little eden, when the warmth of order
Makes of fatigue a friend, when you install
A sense of fence along the gravel border,
Carving out here and here and here from all,

Remember that it was not always so.
Change uproots comfort, stains, then shatters, glass,
Packs up a house in boxes, hands to weeds
Their lasting triumph. All disaster needs
For flowers to be overcome by grass
Is one small crack through which the wild can grow.

Surprise, Surprise

From a long time ago. This appeared in Poetry Ink.

They say that at the house right down the street,
the one looks much like ours, they ran a brothel.
Actually, a whorehouse is what they say,
a word that people like, when they can manage
to poke it somehow into the conversation.

I haven't pictured anyone who lived there,
although I've tried, no woman who might be
the siren of our cul-de-sac. The cops
led two kids and a chocolate lab away.
I hadn't seen a one of them before.

At my house we were busy with the closets--
you take this, no I want that--mementos
of incidents we couldn't quite remember,
except of you, young in your wedding dress.

This Red Rose

from These Denver Odes

This red rose is perfect today,
Celinda. You, too. Its dewy
petals spread symmetrically
like--anyway, the rose unfolds;
and, at this moment, nothing could be
more like a rose than this rose. You, too.

Twilight soon. The chilly garden
will house a lesser rose, hunching
now, color leaching at its day's end.
You, Celinda, too. Forget-me-nots
last longer, stay neat. Prissy bores.

The Bear and the Goat will gather
over our houses after we
vacate them; and the rose knows no
second summer. You, too. Nor I.

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.

Desert Island Discs

With nothing to eat but Kettle Crisps and Spam,

Salt on a salted sea, open always,

I floated along on the wreckage of a Spar,

Partly hydrogenated, like the waves.

What is this shore on which I’m beached? What are

These alte cocker spaniels doing here,

Beyond both bath and bed? I know the sound.

It’s 50s rock n roll up in the trees.

Chestnut is what I think, but I’m not sure.

I hope it lasts. And me. The saints preserve

Berry and Little Richard. Little I

Know of nesting among the spanielled crowd.

Never too late, doo-wop doo-wop, I pray.

Mr. Bones & Attendant Flights

I was thinking Bones, probably thinking
Like Henry. Happens sometimes. And I'm sure
A stewardess is falling, falling, now
A flight attendant, now a slight depression.
They talk back in patois. They have their ways.
They're violent and clinically unsound
And deader than a deaf door jamb. They're closed.
I think of them, though, waiting in the dark,
Collectedly insentient. Such bones
We use for soup, grow strong & tall 12 ways.

When I became a man, I took such bones,
Plucked free of noodles, cast them in the street,
And read my riddles, almost knew the truth,
Although a blue Imperial, false spare
& painted whitewalls, ran them down like dirt.