A Poem for the Girls Writing All Those Poems

 

So you picture yourself

in a cream satin t-shirt

writing a poem about

you writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

how when he breaks in

on you writing a poem about

writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

he’ll be so excited

about you so excited

about writing a poem

about him so excited,

he’ll shred the damn t-shirt,

sweep you and your poem

right off your futon

and someone will publish

your poem because it is

true as a t-shirt,

besides which, the paper

is cream, like the t-shirt.

And, smooth as it is,

the poem you’re writing

about writing a poem,

who needs the boy?

Or if he shows up,

while you’re still in your t-shirt,

all cream and all satin,

who needs the poem?

To Robert, At The Vernal Equinox

 

There are a number.  This is one.  It's not

The one about the holy fool who saved

Others, if they had golden hair and spoke

Like cello music in a sitting-room.

Nor is it How the Great King Came to Grief

By Trusting to His Strength, though I have heard

That is a tale for little men to tell.

This is the one about true love, made hard

By hands of flint and counselors of pain,

By those who preached renunciation, those

Who'd nothing to renounce, the tallymen.

He loved from here.  She heard from there.  They sent

Their messages by email or by dove

Or friendly friar: messages mistook,

And blood ensued, and loneliness, and smug

Denunciations from fat senators.

This is that tale.  We all know it by heart,

Which tells you why we tell it every day.

News of the World

 This appeared in Candelabrum.

Mr Paul Riley of Decatur writes

to say strange doings have invested his

quiet suburban neighborhood, Sea Views.

Middle to upper-middle class, he says

Sea Views is, mostly ranch-style homes, two-car

garages, lots of grass, and too few trees.

Mostly professionals, says Mr Riley,

chiropodists and CPAs, their kids

and lives no different than yours, he says—

which doesn't make them good, only familiar.

Well, we say that; to tell the truth, he didn't.

Fourteen police calls in the last two months,

all for the same offense, if that it is:

a misshaped man running across the rooftops

in tarry night, clomping over the shingles,

those blue asbestos ones, heavy of foot,

but featly nonetheless, and leaping far

to span the voids between the houses, too

broad of a space for any man to jump.

Det. Abercrombie says he has

no clues, no evidence, no damage done—

not even a crime exactly, just an upset:

a man, if man he be, where none belongs.

Det. Abercrombie doesn't like them,

anomalies in Sea Views, when the whole

point of a Sea View is to get away

from aberrations, which are doing well

and thriving, thank you, in the bigger city,

if that is what Decatur is, and, no,

Det. Abercrombie didn't say that.

So, if you have some information bearing

on running rooftop gargoyles in the States,

(we'll rain in gold on you for photographs),

call us no charge, 1-800-BIG NEWS.

And, Mr Riley, please, sir, keep in touch.

3. The Lines Are Drawn

 The third of "3 for the Trees"

The line is as if drawn there on the ground,

the trees above, the grass and house below,

as though by nature planned to be a sound

demarcator of how far we should go:

here you may live, here visit, though it's true

our living room expands some every year.

A little firewood, a yule or two,

a few more of the sentries disappear.

The deer, of course, were gone last century,

and now the stove has claimed the elder oak.

Perhaps the odd, covert raccoon can see

the vestige of it going up in smoke.

It isn't that we hate what isn't ours,

and no one here needs to bring in a crop.

It's just the way we tell off ancient powers

who dared advise us where we ought to stop.

2. Finally Today

 The second of "Three for the Trees."

Finally today the trees

shook off their leaves to go it bare.

They'd had enough remembering.

There will be cold, and they prepare,

attentive to the nth degrees,

by shucking off the last of spring.

In brazen shapes of disregard

they rustle and they flinch, but stay.

Their gift is doing what is hard

as well as they do anything.

1. Apple & Oak

 The first of three poems, collectively "Three for the Trees."

The apple trees stay close together, far

as possible from the oak trees which look down

upon those wind-spun blossoms. Though they are

communicants in pollen, though renown

would greet oak/apples, if they only could,

they won't. Unheeding acorns, apples grow

a little sour, while the oaks make wood

from dirt, then slowly leave the dirt below.

They draw no moral, neither leave. They sieve

the same brown air and replicate their kind,

but do not share, they do not change. They give

no sense they have each other much in mind.

What apple does for oak tree is not clear.

From rooms across the way, though, people frame

them in one scene, glad that they stand so near,

one sight, one kind, called by a common name.

The Dead On Arrival

 

The number of the dead in Pasadena

Exceeds the grasp of man. Who would believe

You couldn't fit another body in

Another hole, the green so green, a sponge

Extended to its fullest? And the dead

Continued to arrive. From Ypsilanti,

Louisa, Chillicothe, and Gig Harbor,

The dead, the poor, the affluent, the dead

Came rolling in like breakers, but the shore

Declined their cold attentions. Thank you, no,

The living said, and didn't say much more,

The declinations, courteous, ignored.

So many, light, and losing heft, their last

Ride a return. Where was that ticket home?