The Company He Keeps

 

The Irish Tower in LA

Has all the Greats, like Keats and Yeats,

Who sing for all and sing for aye

And stack up rhymes like dinner plates.

And every one is good and true,

Except, as it happens, when they ain’t:

So what’s a simple man to do

When told the truth, but told it slant,

But trust in angels, saints, and Yeats

(And Keats)? For as his recompense,

He wants his high and mighty mates

Pungent and true as frankincense.

So he listens hard, and he takes good notes,

And if in company he is dumb,

Every hundred years—and he quotes—

Some things wonderful this way come.

Mr Jarrell's Fairy Tale

 

Mr Jarrell's fairy tale will begin

With German, where he found Gemütlichkeit
And Heimat, but which makes you think of Stürm
And Kindertotenlieder, not the Nacht
Where wolves leave calling cards, like furry salesmen.

And then come maidens—no, not little girls,
But maidens, singing Schubert, braids and busts:
Like bodyguards, they ripple, and their eyes
Are blue as glass. Their fingers smell of milk.

And next march files of small misshapen men,
Named many things; they all are phallus-shaped
With hoes and picks and axes. They are chanting
Bass songs of conquest over Mutter Earth.
They clear the ground and build transparent coffins.

And here at last comes Goethe. Rise for this
Interminable harbinger of Höch—
High everything, immer and eloquent,
So sound and sane our longhorn cattle flee
Their frontier spreads, the coyotes disavow
All knowledge of their German kin, whilst he—
Randall, not Johann—broiders in the dusk
A tale so full of Old World charm, you think
You'd die, just die, to have the chance to bleed
In märchen woods, watched over by black trees,
A coverlet of ash, made from good Völk
And rosy children, still before their time,
To warm you as you snuggle down to bones.

A Watering of Lawns

 

"What if the stream should rise and overflow?

The setbacks here, our little yard—we're goners,

all just like that."

                                "It's not a stream, you know.

It's just the wet a hose makes in the curb,

a watering of lawns, not quite the brown

rush of current an atlas might pick up.

I wouldn't worry too much about a flood."

"Our tree, you know, it thrusts--what? quite a hundred

feet up, that flood would snap it like a stick

and use it to beat time on Shady Lane.

It's all so vulnerable. We build a hedge

and put in burglar proofing for the night

some guy decides he needs our VCR

to round his little day. We buy a dog

and aerosol the ants out of the driveway.

All that it takes is one efficient storm,

a little wind, a couple clouds, and someone,

gray suits we never voted for, decides

we are disasters in the technical

and economic sense."

                                    "The sprinkler ran

a little long next door. They went away

this weekend and some valve stuck open. That's

not Noah, and the elephants are still

down at the Zoo. You see them on the way,

a pair of them, trying to climb aboard

our station wagon? One, one coffee cup

came floating westward down the curbside towards

the California culvert, and you're checking

the median to see if trees still show

their topmost twiglets mirrored on the sea."

"I worked so hard just training that clematis

to climb where put. I hate to see it wash

"downstream, a meal for some bright-stickled fish

who doesn't know the lubbers in the house

who made the dirt mature enough to bear.

A man moves landwards when he thinks an oar

would make a trellis."

                                    "Look, there comes the truck

of sprinkler repairmen. Look, dear, we are saved."

"You're making fun of me."

                                            "Disaster comes

to every day the sun comes up. Sufficient

unto that day are dishwasher and bath."

"Let's go out back and check the runner beans.

They don't need much to burn. It's all so quick."

My Grant Application

 Another poem from the pre-Cretaceous era.  This one appeared in Plains Poetry Journal.

They asked me for a line or two, to show

what I could do, poetry-wise.  I gave them:

"Though snow-bound now, I knew the spring before";

"the silver periphrasis of the moon";

"Amo, amat: the pilgrims cry, 'So what?'"

But they were not impressed.  The Guggenheims

looked elsewhere for their beneficiaries.

I'd filled out every square on every form;

I even knew my mother's maiden name

and what the book after my next would be

called, if they ever gave me time to write it.

"Sorry," they said.  "The volume of our mail

precludes an individual response."