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.