Let Us Now Praise

Before they died they didn’t have a prayer,

And after no one heard. Inside the dark,

The ancestors inhabit empty space,

And they among. Bronze statues with a gene

In common look out at a distant sea

There in Nebraska, this the way they’re made,

Brittle and with that green pocked skin we give

Survivors, if they promise not to speak.

They keep their promises, which makes them special.

In life there was no little yellow barge

To ferry them to restitution, dull

Made serviceable. One, a tomahawk

Stuck in his stone cold belt, attempts a smile

And fails. He does not see a better day.

King of the Old Frontier

I have not written much about the Fathers,

Davy Crockett and The Cowboy G-Men,

Those on whom my constitution’s based,

University City and all the state

Houses of Colorado. They left trails

Which I have managed to convert to ruts,

The roots of routes, I almost said, which might

Demonstrate all you need to know. I can

Remember Alamo Park, an old and staid

Neighborhood with a centerpiece of fleurs.

It is still there, though I am not. This happens

A lot these days. There is somewhere a box,

Green and rectangular, if I had to had to guess,

Which holds the GOATS, who once were kids, which saves

Cobwebbed issues in colored ink, which waits

For No Man, who is never going to come.

The True Meaning of Christmas

 

On this night we observe the world of guilt,

Our consciences full of marzipan and myrrh,

And conifers where crabgrass clippings were,

Poinsettias, never to grow or wilt,

Unless tomorrow comes. And no one tells

The littlies, That is so. The manger moves

To U-Rent Storage Lockers, and the bells,

The bells, and clever evidence of hooves

Abscond, like fireflies or currant puds.

We are returning all our gifted goods.

We are remembering the little slights.

We’re cold and lonely on these winter nights.

Who knows what reindeer do in northern woods,

Where no one can unstring the brilliant lights?

The Disappointing Dead

 

Shall I tell you about the dead,

Who have no alibis,

Who do not care what’s said,

Bald truth or naked lies,

Who have no sense of loss,

Who do not groan in grief,

Nor grouse beneath their cross,

But won’t confess belief?

See for yourself? No fear

(But you won’t miss your eyes);

And though you disappear,

We shall feel no surprise.

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.

John Ransom's Garden

Kicking the leaves aside, I find a garden
Waiting, pale and helio-thwarted, seeds
Gone wild, which hasn’t henceforth proved a guerdon
Sufficient to combat saracen weeds.

Oh, till us, quoth they, fork and petty plow
A weaponry that fallen earth believes.
With pail and can they may be good enow.
When weeds are yanked and die, sir, no one grieves.

Unto a flower root and stem aspire,
Which then will seed to make a root a stem.
To probe so low, they needs must hie them higher.
I like the parts best, still unseen of them.

Thus is it often, paladins unknowing,
Consequence witnessed. What inaction forces
Lies, time in earth. O lovely flower showing
Benighted us, the dim tree light immerses.

Exercise: Patience & the Monument

 

A choice to be alone is good,

Although you haven't practiced much.
Don't walk. Don't hurt. Don't cook. Don't touch.
Pretend your legs are made of wood,

Pinocchian your heart and head.
Remembering is quite all right,
But try to reach beyond tonight.
Concentrate on your ancient dead--

I don't mean Agamemnon's brood
Or Marshall Ney's aunt's brother's wife.
Someone on whom you bet your life
And lost. Back when the world was lewd

And you in touch. All right. Enough.
Now you can make your mac and cheese
And sing what every little breeze
Whispers. And feel your legs. And stuff.

Tracking the Engineers

Engineers, and they make and drive the train,

Design the clacking parts and with them move

Through unlit fields of soy, past pinhead towns,

Into garages where they draw up specs,

To prove that motion is perpetual,

If expertly believed. They know that rods

Connect the wheels. They’ve seen how the harvest moon

In North Dakota polishes empty track,

Their iPods left at home, loaded with funk,

Earth, Wind & Fire, Little Anthony,

And Mantovani’s Permanent Regret.

A can of Sterno for a souvenir,

A pen so fine you cannot see the point--

No layman can—those they carry around

To dim sum hangouts on the frozen plains.

And when they fade, and when they are defrocked,

They live in rathskellers and rumpus rooms,

Where late at night, baffled by bells and horns,

They learn the trick that makes their whole wash white. 

Nostalgie Pour La Boue

 

Naive to think the upturned earth

Disgorged the spoils of the Spanish mains.

We’re landlocked here. For what they’re worth,

Wormcasts abound. Rewarded by rains,

Robins rejoice in booty, loot

They’re engineered both to digest

And to expect. With wormy fruit,

The unimaginative do best.

Tough to play pirate with these clumps.

Compress them into diamonds, sure--

I did that every day and proved

Mountains by increments were moved.

Nothing comes easy but the pure

Projected source of perfect dumps.

The Boston Swans

 I vaguely recollect that there are swans

somewhere famous in Boston, somewhere Lowell

might think them his, a bird grant from the Crown.

He might discuss with Dr Holmes at night,

after the port passed by too many times,

how Zeus had managed Leda. This would pass

for smut among the philocrats, I swan.

“Under a spreading chestnut tree,” they’d laugh.

“Beg pardon?” said the emissary from

the Court of St James. “A longfellow joke,” Lowell said.

“Uh-huh,” said Robert, many years away,

trying to fit both skunk and sour cream

into his recollections of a swan

whose loins devolved a war it could not stop.

The Boston pops have brought their kids to hear

Napoleonic cannon foddering.

They hum as they tuck cobs back in their hampers,

decorously wrapped. Here Ted Williams hit

.400, which was nothing, if you count

percentages left lying in the snow

so Bonaparte could win the Triple Crown,

ambitions learned from Alexander, who

differed from Plato as to Homer’s hit.

Home and away, it all came down to swans.

---In memoriam Paula Tatarunis

Not Always to the Swift

 

Consider the bees.  They toil lots,

And, boy, they spin from fleur to fleur,

Pollinations as they were,

Floribunding the hot spots,

While I watch here, unverbed, unnouned,

Except for remembering what I hear,

A taste of honey growing near

And sweat.  It is an elder sound,

The sound of since, not without sting.

The bees head home.  Say, come again,

And be what you have always been,

Sweetness of bloom a living thing.

On the Road to Little Pacification

 

By stage, the journey, shorter than you think,
Consumes with interest the time. Those heads
You pass, for instance, stuck on rusted pikes,
The burning martyrs praising their foul judge,
Half-naked women selling anathemas--
Where is the like in leisure, safely sound,
Petting the family dog or boiling grits?
It takes a trip like this to fill the mind.

We stop at The Remorseless Inn for brunch,
One price fits all, relieve ourselves, then wash,
And head for the Humble Counties, home of black
Kine and those hunting dogs bred out of wolves.
Consulting our horoscopes, we do not pause;
Our journey has the urgency of faith
Beset by trimmers, little men, and gray
Ecclesiastics. Soon it starts to rain,
Thus mud prevails. We are above such things.

Thatch is espied, then woodcocks, and the tang
Of peasants burning wintergreen: they keep
Their spirits up, sure, broadcasting the fate
Of unbelievers in a weal of woe.
We have arrived, credentialed, to be kissed
And flattered, and we order each a grog,
A sandwich, and a leg of wench. Ah, home.
Someday it will be home. The savages.

Edible Arrangements

 

Our friends are celery and thyme.

They’re acorn squash and coriander.
They used to pass the oddbox rhyme;
They used to copulate, philander,
Sweat out of every pore, and curse.
Now they grow grass, and we grow worse.

Our friends are honey locust; mud
Becomes them. No more shop and dance
With anyone who warms their blood
And shtups the lot in true romance.
Eggplant, maybe, and Queen Anne’s lace.
No one grows with a greater grace.

Yam and bo, they were once a pair,
Love in an atmospheric venue.
R ♥ J on a bark is their
Gnarled and edible hostel, menu,
And home at last, the beetles say,
Leaves in the fall and flags in May.

Word Problems

 

Let's say you had 2 monkeys and a fox,

7 bananas, and an ATV,
Or maybe a rowboat, and a ski chalet.
How many trips before you fall asleep,
Dreaming of Mr Dinkum’s science test
And the atomic weight of Super String?
Give up? One monkey’s grey, the other locked
In Booneville, where he learned the iron rule.
The fox clears out the tikihut and leaves
Scat on the rec room floor in thorns and thetas.
Then you remembered Mr D was dead,
Shot by his wife in 1983
For messing around in Chem Club Lab. The fox
Is wily, and you never stood a chance.

Tales From Sycorax's Wood

 Once split, twice shy, the tree

Will not disclose the plight

Of those condemned to be

Embedded out of sight.

They never speak of her.

Whatever once occurred

To make a prisoner,

No one will say a word.

Only the bark is warm,

In places bark is not,

And when lush Carpo’s storm

Shakes the wood, the lot

Of trees exempts such places,

No motion and no sound,

No sense of human faces,

Except the wetted ground.

Endoscopy

It seems to be a form of divination,

All of the chickens gone, but not at peace,

The parts all fried. We read the gizzards, though.

They seemed to say that all is what it was;

No matter what we do, the end comes last.

The scholars have their doubts. They cast the bones

Upon the waters, looking to get a rise,

Some answers bubbling up, a withered arm,

Trove in a gnarly hand. The argument

Which they propose is, Everything foretold

In great detail and ending in the dark,

The sea worms and the earthworms in the dark,

And no one ever learns what happens next.

Quiet Flows The Don

They hid the old professors in the sub-
Scriptorium, in carrels made of wood
And chickenwire, gave them wi-fi, let
Them roam the stacks, as long as they were late.
They were, they always were. Was found: puns bent
To fit into the pretty bursar's door.
The bursar's gown was torn and gluey, stained;
Her person was a vacancy in time
And apprehension. Dr Rathbone wrote,
The Oxford comma marks the gentleman.
We cannot find a one about her person.
Condemned, he was, for pronomial pride,
Then built a stand behind Collected Works,
Blue and maroon, with peeling paper labels,
Accessible to none and dead to all.

Yeah, Lights

       appeared in Poetry Ink.

This woman who is 93, she swears

That she was young once.  Silly as she seems,

She now claims she has been your age and danced

Under a fairy moon, whatever that is,

Some same-sex astronomical effect

Of medication, Alzheimer’s, and pain,

Perhaps.  She says she has the photographs

To back it up, but boxed away; she’s left

Them all to you because you’ll understand--

She told me just this morning.  Being young,

You know what colored lights can do and dresses

That crinkle when they’re touched by the right hands.

That’s what she said.  Talk about touched.  She said

She wishes fairy lights for you.  Yeah, right.

The Marvells of Fruita

On recommendation I have come

To Fruita, hoping there to find

A vegetable life and sweet.

If pears run bareback in the street,

If clad in lucency of rind,

The watermelons strike me dumb,

I can eschew the vice of meat.

I can do seeds.  I’ll leave behind

A life of leg for love of plum.

Instead of one, I’ll love by tree.

Orchards of lovers, each the same

(Allowing for the minor spot

And bruise), will fail; who loves me not,

Need never even bear a name.

A blossom and a bud will be

Two names for each: I’ll love the lot,

Keep them from freezing by my flame,

Pick an extended family,

And build an altar on the hill

That lifts above the Fruita plain.

I’ll bury pits, one to a hole,

And watch the botanizing soul

Of each I loved burst forth again,

Multiplied.  I shall taste my fill,

Haremed upon my grassy knoll,

Summoned by humankind in vain,

Of apples of untainted will.

People, Get Ready

This morning I can taste the air.

It tastes like fall and resin. Spring
Is gooier. No need to share
This news with birds, who already sing
Insistently. The seed is swell,
They say. Bring more. And make it fast.
They sample the air. A guy can tell.
Black Bird is coming home at last.

A Centaur In His Dragon World

This appeared in The Flea, as I was reminded this week.

The sorcerers played in their own front yard,

Cardboard and crayon cutlery, no faith

Because no doubt. The little kings who lived

Regnant beneath the evergreens, concealed

By prickly leaves and bagworms, weren’t impressed.

The eldritch practices of kids on trikes,

Gray in good time, and teens do not recall

White magic. They require faith. They pray

To gods and spirits, wholly insincere.

Elder than all, and smaller than their sight,

The little kings bowed once and turned their hands

To caterpillars, lightning bugs, and soup

Brewed from a clover damp with morning dew,

Seasoned with berries poisonous to men,

And set the spiders watching, all those eyes.

In The Year Of Our Lord

In 1436 the gods of war

Changed their approach and stained their skins, their clothes,
Their reputations, and left the Roman world
For residence in gray geographies.
They bought clean papers, forged fresh fingerprints
From fish scales, and denied the love of men
A role in their affairs. They wanted blood,
Never a tough commodity, but chose
Abstention and the madness of no voice.
They broke their bows, inventing new disease
As more efficient and anonymous.
They drew bad dreams on hitmen fast asleep
And offered explanations via signs
Of nature—clouds and a chemical response.
It was a time of gravity and loss.
They raised the dead, then sent them back for good.
They ate their young and easily made more.
The story would end here, except that birds,
Disguised by night, concealed in brush by day,
Sang their way clear and called it parable.
Later the wise men said it was history.

A Short Course in Theology

An old, old poem. It appeared in The Ball State University Forum.

Nobody ever said that God was nice,
only that God was God. Picture Apollo,
that's Phoebus Apollo, flaying Marsyas
for the considerable crime of piping
as well, he'd said, as any god. How heinous.
What hubris. Whistling all the while, Apollo
peeled epidermal curlicues off of
the living sinner in his dextrous hands.
Now wonder what your friends' child did, that he
died slowly of a brain tumor at six,
first going blind, then losing all his hair.

Measured Nautically

Nautical miles away, does that make me

closer or farther? I should look it up.
The dictionaries loom across the room,
as you lie over endless waters, measured
by any span, piratical or not.

If I could picture schools of kippers pushing
a v-shaped wedge of water on their way
to be your lunch, or hear the blue whale sing
Songs of the Psychedelic 60s, we
still would be stumped by distance. I am quite

as close as thought-waves. I could rig a gizmo
out of a curling-iron, colander,
extension cord, some rock salt, and my belt.
Where would you plug it in? Someone forbade
compatible power in our different lands.

I'll tie a message to a tuna, let him
slipstream currents, resting at fish stops. If
he pulls up lame, we're hopeless; watch for him
to greet your shore as tired as a dove,
bearing a stalk of salt-soaked celery.

And Then They Died

Ordered to make a narrative,
First you must say “First” and then
“And then.” It is by “then” and “when”
And “at the last” that stories live.

No princess unless “once there was,”
No prince unless “There came a day,”
No end until “They rode away,”
Whatever the red dragon does

Or sorcerer yellowed by spite.
Time takes them in and calls their dance.
Chronology bestirs romance,
Prompts it, promotes it, calls it a night.

Lovers insist the stream stands still,
Leaves never fall, the lion smiles.
Their collars droop, their Golden Isles
Occlude. They lie unchanged until

They can’t. And then. There is no next.
Overleaf, nothing, no pretend.
First there was then. And then, The End,
And then the tale is trapped in text.

The Weekend Gardener

You mock the flowers I can raise:
A grown man should find better ways
To sow his seed and harvest praise.

Mutual funds look good, and hiking,
Plumbing repairs, and mountain biking--
Hobbies manly and much more striking.

Adam gardened. Cain, who killed.
Onan bore seed, although it spilled.
John Ball revolted. First he tilled.

Let me manure. I fork. I spread.
Like harlotry, in white and red,
I raise commotion from a bed

For private pleasure, amply paid.
In shadow, color: sun and shade
Where Cain worked hard and Abel played.