Pluvial Morphology

Someone has painted letters on the walk.
The rain invents a ouija board. It points
LQK ATT, precatory and sibylline.
And soon effaced in promiscuity.
The walk now stands for everything at once,
Like dreams and abstract artifice. The rain,
It raineth only some days here, a treat
Of dissolution. Carry me away,
Its strain, its burden. We must quite forget
We all go somewhere: somewhere in the sea
O REASON NOT THE NEED is spelled in kelp.
The silt holds every sound that can be said.

From the Homefront

No, not a mansion, an estate,

Nor a chateau.  It’s just a house.
The taxes here are second rate.
No pheasantry.  The famous grouse
In the odd cupboards never call.
We have a lot.  Who has it all,

He works downtown.  His hands are clean,
He’s made of iron, cap-a-pie.
He is a gent we all have seen.
The women claim he ran away,
Just at proposal.  We are sure
His kind is weak and won’t endure

A liberal incumbency,
Yet there he is.  And here we are.
We mow our own.  And you can see
The oil which needs a newer car.
We have a vision: Saturday
We’re going to scrub those stains away,

Uncreak the door and love our wives
And make our children sweet and smart.
Life after life, lives after lives,
We barely finish where we start,
Exceptional in no detail,
Tepid and permanently frail.

The heat increases.  As we sink
Beneath our debts, the clocks explode.
No one has asked us what we think.
Our recent bills have come in code.
It’s later than it used to be,
We translate one.  But there are three.

A civil servant with a broom
Is dancing.  There’s a gravid fox
Has moved into the rumpus room
Where cellotape obstructs the locks.
Lawyers assumed to boardrooms rain
Upon the gold and fruited plain.

An organ grinder plies his trade
At 6 o’clock: This is the news.
We waltz in the diminished shade
Between our house and Duncan’s Mews.
The children write, We have been lent
By LSE to Parliament.

Thus we, content, replant the mint,
Repaint the windowbox, and wait.
My wife takes off her clothes.  Her hint
Is good enough.  We shall be late,
We shall be last.  We shall be saved,
Our names erased, our dates engraved.

The Book of Simple

The Book of Simple instructs you how to make

Your gut behave. It tells a tale of long
And distant. How, without it, can you steep
Teabags of Life? Would you like her to be bleached
And buxom, do you need to make her love
The man you were, unlikely as that seems?
You've got to go there. Really. You go there.

Of course it isn't cheap, not having been
Online auditioned or a paperback
At Harold's Half-Price Inwits. There's a crone
In Crawford with a stack in her Tuff Shed,
Guarded by gargoyles and a papillon;
And drop-ins she doesn't like are mostly dead
And numerous. When Lifetime tried to shoot
A movie version there, the black was white.
I bought one at her jumble sale last May.
It changed me round. Now I can call to mind
The minor dramatists I never read,
And then some. And the foxes stop to stare.
They catch some scent, a brief response to pain.

It can't be memorized. It must be read
Each time as though from scratch. The crone once made
A golem in a golden-thread sombrero
Who danced at her command. The April rains
Reduced him to a plaster statuette.
Made in Crawford, it says there on the sole.

The Midnight Train

A lantern on a lanyard on the last

Train out of town to Anywhere at All,

Which happens to be east of Little Jugs,

Gives more illumination than you’d think.

A carrot and a stick and several shoes

Piled on the platform where the caboose becomes

Thin air; and you, you weren’t expecting that.

The elegance of emptiness does not

Include a carrot or a pair of heels,

But Anywhere at All will be amused.

A milliner’s, a pool hall, and a new

Patisserie, in case the gentry come.

A Church of Holy Holiness, a cow

Walking the streets, and then, of course, a bank.

Life can be fruitful, Anywhere at All

Instructs its children, who are dreaming of

A better world, offered in Somewhere Else,

To those catching the midnight train, which leaves

Tomorrow afternoon at 6:15.