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.

Virgil & the Bees

appeared in Angelic Dynamo

we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax;
thus furnishing mankind with two of the noblest things, which
are sweetness and light.
--Swift

A flat gray stone absolved of dung and schmutz,
Warmed by the sun and near, not in, a grove,
Proximate to a meadow, not to sheep,
Unthinking sweaters on the hoof, at hand
Running water for sound effect: then sit,
And you will find the bees. Theirs is a mind
Unfit for your accommodating self.
Like physicists, they are absorbed by thoughts
Too pure and rarefied for you. They work,
The autumn ever coming, honey from
The dandelion and excrete a light
So fine it makes divine commedias
A piece of cake, a holiday of dusk.
He listens: you can see him move his lips,
No buzz, no hum. Hexameters like glass,
The shape of cells, coincidentally—
They were invented to store wisdom, wax,
And pollen effluents. Thus you have flowers,
He thinks, stung by the notion Dido walks
Amidst gray flowers she can never touch.

What Do The Old Men Say?

What do they mean, who say
The world has gone awry?
The trees leave every day.
I saw them in July,

As green as the heart of man.
I see men stiffly clad,
Colored in gray and tan,
Calling our summer bad

For insufficient shade,
Damning our leaves as small,
Making their wrath a blade,
Hurrying us to fall.

If only our lives were sad,
If we saw that we had
Outlasted our summer stay,
They'd happily love us all
And tidy us away.

Goin' Up The Country

Pish and Tosh rode into Broomfield, scents

Of Liberty and saddle sores, denied

Their basic rights of rye and brewskis, all

Because the goldleaf fell at others’ feet.

Not yet, they said, a floozy by each wrist

Of every taste in radical descent

Down from the mountain streams with rills so bare,

None ferried fruit. I say, no seams for me,

Said each, blaming the other, and the girls

Sang country blues before they had been born.

The Dowager Biddy

The dowager biddy of our neighborhood

Uncovers evil everywhere: she mews

To voices lost in the wainscoting; she teems

With fled and ancient cats; she says the pith

Of the neighbors next door is spoiled, like fallen serfs

Exhausted by disaster. Debutantes

Are not what once they were: it’s in their eyes

And their tiaras. She sleeps in her car,

Parked out in front, to trick the foes and fiends

Who offer their casseroles in covered bowls

Shaped like the skulls of mayors she has known,

Domos and seneschals, now making light

Of all their troubles, there at Fairlawn, done with

The scene at Holy Family. She was there.