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.