The Autumn of Troy

 

Imagine growing up in Troy,

N.Y., and Helen is your name.

You have no choice, obliged to find

A Menelaus right next door,

Or who'd be spurned? A Joe? A Ted?

I don't think so. In Paris, Mo.,

Abscond with some old mogul's wife,

Hide her behind your stuccoed walls,

Crouching for years and years and years,

Until she has grown hoarse with scorn,

All attitude? The men of Troy

Hector their bonne wives endlessly,

The voice of Nestor wafting in.

Native Americans Seize Parkway

 

Last night contemplative smokers and the lean

Jogger's rasp; this dawn, woodsmoke and boombox

Chants. I'll take Manhattan, the Bronx, Denver,

And some great plains, they sing. TV trucks. Ralph

The CU Buffalo has come to cheer.

We own these trees, this mani-pedi parkway

Ours. From light rain the grass, the grass is coming.

Perhaps these are the 12 Lost Tribes, their Moses,

A landbridge-walking chief, whom 40 years

Hardly sufficed, whose Canaan=Kansas.

The satellite feed sends this to Inuits

And Iroquois alike. We are inspired,

A spokes-dude says, by Prague and Zapatista,

By black & white together. We shall fight

No more forever, sure, but WrestleMania,

The cage match, the strap match, proscenium-

Free drama: they go on today, tomorrow. You

Pay per view, you take your choice. Oh, we,

We can do drama or we can sit still.

We watch at night, and our night watches back.

The neighbors seem confused. They try to do

The business of their neighborhood, which local

News zooms in on. These people vote here, pay

Beads for their land, send trinkets to their sons.

We all are out on porches now. We watch.

Erosion

 

        This, from Epigrams, appeared in Lyric.


Although they only gum the piers,

when they have gummed sufficient years,

the waves will melt the wood away.

The shore was once out in the bay.

Remember when you loved me more

than we had time or language for?

A Deep Breath

 

          This is an old, old poem

Just so you know, the car is packed.

The boxes for the poor and sick

I’ve set out front. Unbric-a-bracked,

The rooms feel foreign. Take your pick

Of where you’d like to squat. We’re left.

We’ve saved one leaf from every tree.

As we gain years, as they lose heft,

They’ll smell of dry mnemosyne.

We’ll hold that breath. The house, the yard,

Oh, they were ours, and now they’re not.

It’s hard at first, and it stays hard,

Not to forget those who forgot.

A Sentimental Christmas Poem

A mystery play is why

We say again this year,
And me a Jew and dry
As ash on toast, Good cheer
And peace on earth. And stuff.
And, no, it’s not enough.

I never met an elf.
I fed a reindeer corn—
He picked it up himself,
In truth. When you were born,
Redemption might have been
Avowed, pomaceous sin

Cancelled. But maybe not.
The land of snow and ice,
Marprelate and marplot,
Is far from paradise.
We murder to dissect,
Said Wordsworth once. I checked.

And nevertheless we are
Together on our grounds,
Pretending yonder star
In ancient flaming Zounds!
Promises you to me.
And here we are, we three,

Wholly a family,
An hour now or two.
This is the trinity
Available to a Jew:
For this an angel came
And vouched no greater claim.

Odysseus Transported

 

        for Dr swan

I am Ulysses.  I reject this form

they gave me at Admissions.  I have no

local address.  I do not care to show

Proof of Insurance.  Driven by a storm

to castellated strangers is the norm

for me, but no immortal set aglow

a light like this, half green.  Nothing could grow

on ground so square, so cold, innkeeper warm.

A smell of medicine, a sea of white.

I am Ulysses, ill but not deceived.

I am accustomed not to be believed.

I shall recite this on the bloody night

I send them here, their women sorely grieved

to lose their heroes in this sickly light.

Theory of Summer

 

Upon the tip, the cherry; on the branch;

the bird; under the tree, the dog. Still life

persists: the branches of the taller tree

wave in the superheated breeze, a frieze

only so tall, motion above stasis.

We notice me, still standing at the window,

observer of the unobserved, observed

by you in your detachment. Words, you say,

not things, as though I could not be a thing

because we know a word for me. The bird,

who is a flicker, as it happens, hops

closer, the cherry dips, the dog explodes—

I say she is a shepherd—and the still

structure collapses, except that you are reading

words, not noise. Your head, your head's a noun,

and I have made me up to tell to you,

whom I made up to hear. And the bird, too.

I think the dog is real. I'll look her up.

At The VFW Hall

 

Odysseus can't make it. He sent me

As his replacement. Less wily though I am

And unaccustomed to pacific life,

I'll try to say a few words. As you know,

The VFW has done much good

To men in greaves. In many other states

We are the only counselors can bear

Those who in their privies can hear their bowels

Hectored with fear and stress. To those who drink

Their bowls uncut with water, we dispense

Advice and unguents. The Friends of Nestor,

One of our byblows, offer anecdotes

To aid insomniacs. And men who wear

Envenomed shirts and arrows through their pecs,

Who look like fretted porpentines, and weep

When they attempt a sacrifice, attend

Domestic Violence: Making Hearth a Home

And are the calmer for it. I myself,

Mistaking sheep for Trojans, thrice have tried

To join my comrades in their dreamless sleep.

I may be somewhat medicated now;

But in your faces I perceive contempt,

Who never once felt Ares twist your guts,

Or raped a captive, playing she was Helen.

Superior to poontang, I expect,

You nancy stay-at-homes, you gormless helots—

Where are your scars? Show me your hands. Which one

Of you lay bleeding on a bloody field

And cursed your mom for opening her legs?

The roar of Scamander, rising from his bed,

Wiping the plain away with us, the shape

Of what he swept away, I hear in rain.

Let the son of Laertes make his own speech

Next time. We brought some color slides. My friend

Diomedes will show them to you now.

All Sorts of Things

 

    This appeared in Candelabrum, a long, long time ago.

Jane had decided late on Anglo-Saxon.
She drove away to Rochester, to live
with her new friend, and did, until she drove
into a bridge abutment. So I saw
her not again. I never saw the friend.

There must be at least a story there, what happened,
that sounds like a story; but it's missing something.
It wasn't organized; it just occurred.
Where was she going? Does her mother think
she meant to do it? What was this new girlfriend,

and why is it she wasn't in the car?
These are the sorts of things nobody knows,
except for the ones who get to make it up.
So to Jane's mother maybe it makes sense.
And maybe to the friend. And maybe not.

Men of Letters

 

The Post Office is gated, guarded, barred.

Each citizen may bring a single page

To be reviewed, then stamped, if shapely in

Calligraphy and spelling. Homonyms

Are disapproved, ambiguous, like frocks

On sailors or hard rain on sunny days.

Postcards were okay last week. This week, though,

Implying other places, they are less

Bland, so the young and paleolithic old,

Who don’t know what they're doing or are done,

Attempt them, but with bogus names and towns.

Postage expensive, paper products rare,

Ink, it turns out, is nothing more than mud

Thinned to the point of near transparency.

Return addresses? SASEs? No.

Corporal punishment, defunct, this spring

Envelopes crime: the grave, the good, the gone

Cannot petition. Sign language alone

Conveys too little of their superscript.

Rumors of nibs cannot be verified,

And cartridges descend on public squares.

Transformations

 

        This appeared in The Flea.

This is the bark which used to be

A functioning face. You see the stream?

A nymphet breathing.  Things who seem

Alive are, mostly, differently.

What if your hand were once a rock,

Your friends narcissi, your heart a clock?

No, wait. that doesn't count, the beat

Mechanical, no fur, no bone,

No pollen making the chime repeat.

What if you were left all alone,

Never a maple, never a creek,

The lone indigenous antique?

Love your armchair. Sleep with your bed.

Praise the sky for distance. Or wait.

You may be someone else instead,

Son of the streetlight, child of the late

God who transformed your mom to coal

And burned her breast to warm his soul.

Unruly Breaks The Day

 

Peep-peep, chook-chook,

The briddes rebuke

And take short wing.

They scold and sing.

It’s what they’ve donne

For sheep and sonne;

It’s what they do

For gods and ewe,

Fodder and pun.

The briddes review,

Chook-chook, peep-peep,

Who wins, who won.

1 Samuel

 

In panel 1 the little boy

Reloads his sling; a lion waits,

The upper right. (What pastures grew

Was Saul’s domain.) By panel 2

The boy is wearing lion skin.

His flock is grazing, happy ewe

And lamb. It seems they know a king

Is just as handy with a sling

As with a concubine. In 3

Goliath says he’s sure to win

The olive grove and local bar.

His sword is twinkling like a star.

Now panel 4, all gravitas,

He lies there like a toppled tree.

The little boy accepts applause

And God’s unique, contingent laws,

Effective when appropriate,

Though given young, remembered late,

And best when proven by a stone,

A hundred psalms, and a golden throne.

Inside Of Moab, It's Too Dark To Read

 

Outside of Moab, they’re replacing Time

With sidewalks. Rolling either way, they pass

Monuments, which will never now occur,

First heart attack which ended with a kiss.

In Kingman they are stocking all the bars

With Mexican beer and tulgey wood, in Page

Nothing but churches and the refugees

From Old California missions and next spring,

The spring after that, and pools in desert towns.

Nothing sets like a sidewalk laid on Time,

Fossilized bugs and palm prints. Over in Brush,

The Mayor declared that Time was just a myth,

Some immigrant’s invention. He pronounced

Chicken-fried steak the plat du jour; he drank

A Nehi Orange, and Time just washed away,

Like fiddlers on a flood plain in the rain.

Two Traditional Exercises

 

1. The Same, Only Different

Roses bloom today, and then
Tomorrow roses bloom again.
Cut the grass, then rest: you find
New grass with roses intertwined.
Grass must be great, and roses strong,
To bloom and flourish, thriving long
After the gardener, planted, made
Under the grass, a thinning shade.
Yes, that rose is rose is rose;
Every blade of grass that grows
Is Grass. When you have tilled your plot,
Girls will be, though you are not,
Some with that shape, some with her name,
Some fit for love. Just not the same.

2. First & Last

Dead the first is pretty dead.
You'll be pretty, dead a while.
You watch the service with a smile,
It seems so quaint. The dead, you say,
Must have enjoyed their hymns today.
That ought to help them get ahead,
First through the gate, well on their way,
Or not so well. She's mighty dead,
You said this time. Some time, instead,
Of her, it will be me. Your style
Is going live. You mean to stay.
Dead the last is pretty dead.

Classical Gas

 

Diana does not care to know
What makes an apple blossom grow
As long as apples still are sweet
And she has more than one to eat.

Adonis does not mean to learn
What makes Diana blaze and burn.
She looks at him as though he were
An apple peeled, and just for her.

They are, they vow, as they were meant,
As satisfied as ignorant.
Their teeth are good, their fruit is firm.
Whence comes the rot, who made the worm,

And why Adonis looks when he
Sees peaches on Niobe's tree,
They mustn't ask, not till the day
Their frightened fences run away,

Until their blood runs dry, and sun
Does not shine down on everyone.
They haven't that much time to kill,
They say. But, oh, they will. They will.

Now What?

 

A little late for art,
a little weak for song,
I try my best to write,
and still it comes out wrong.

I looked within my heart,
I ate a peck of dirt.
I asked for extra light
and never shaved my shirt.

For every ancient blight
I found acoustic cure,
then shared it. Every part
of me was sound and sure;

but now it's late, and night
concludes a damaged age.
I guess I ought to start
to fill this empty page.

The Golden Corral

 

Mercurial Mercutio sits down,

His periodic table piled

With goods. The psalms and protocols

Have been concluded, vast

Salad bars looted, even the grill

Of his dreams expired, scrubbed and lapsed

Into the arms of sticky buns.

Ice cream, he says, and asks for more.

Nothing forthcoming. What if this

Is sold as is, a scruffy tail,

The end of plot and narrative—

Just some of this and a bit of that,

A chapel stew, a pot of mess,

And love a scant gratuity?

The World Lacks A Regular Scansion

 

Mr Keats, he dead. And Mr Marlowe.

I get the two mixed up. One had TB,

The other lost an eye, but did not write

To urns or psyches. Neither lasted long.

Marlowe, at least, he got to tell a tale

About a heart at dusk. Crepuscular.

Keats worked at CVS or some such place.

Apothecaries have their place, prescribe

And fade to black. I think they hail from Porlock.

Coitus interruptus. Some such thing.

Persona Non Grata, Torquemada

 

The world is your enchilada,

Torquemada,

And yet you are less than nada,

The Inquisition

No permanent position.

Partition,

Limb at a time, is not a solution.

Better to be a Rosicrucian,

Much improved by diminution,

Than textbook boss of being sure

That superstition is a pure,

Holy, and sanguinaceous cure.

In Adam's Fall

 

Yes, it is autumn. You see the pale tinge

The leaves imply. They know what will come next,

But won't admit it. What's a leaf to do,

Feeling its death, but with no voice to kvetch,

No hand to raise in protest? It's a fair

Fall from here and will be crunchy then,

A lot of company, no one to say

There, there, we were quite green back then, you know?

The Missouri Shores

 This appeared in Hidden Oaks.

Looking out over the land of retired bison,
where Indians haven’t been seen a hundred years,
the farmers shift their chaw and think of changes.
Maybe the tractor threw another rod.
Maybe the banker’s wife had a bad night.

Someday, they say, the sea will reach Missouri.
But they don’t know. They’re tired of alfalfa
and soybeans and corn. They think they’ll sit
up in their lofts on rockers, watching the tides.
It’s all in plate tectonics, is what they say.

Me, I think that grasses and sycamores
are safer to be predicted here than tuna.
Somehow I can’t imagine Mom and Dad
parking their dory in the new garage
or rowing bagels to Grandma every Sunday.

I’d like to see the moon reflected in spume
over the vanished town of Moberly.
I hear them wish that everything that stales
washes away and grows a coral shell.
I like to dream, but hopefulness has its limits.

Lateral Transfers

 

The elder blossom sees the worm,

Seizes a day and smells the breeze

And moves along. It can't go far.

The Younger Brothers see the cache

And hope it proves they chose the path

That Momma wanted: Nouveau Chic.

The middle sex is villages

And towns along a scruffy march.

They live with Hope. She cheats on them.

These demarcations, falsehoods, if

You get my drift, blur at the end

Of eras, pending scholarship

And bibliographies. Athwart

the elder, berries mark their place

With footnotes, colorful, but dry.

The Dickens, You Say

 

In smog at dawn, such as it was, a man,

A little young to be so stooped, retrieved

With pious care the aitches which were left

From yesterday's conversations. Horses dropped

As well, but letters glitter, even mucked.

He put them in his gunny.

                                                       Another man,

Maybe a boy, polished the anecdotes

Piled on each corner. His blue camisole

And tawny trousers, stained with riverweeds,

Implied how long the stories had been passed;

And still they mirrored, rubbed with spit and hock.

The fog smelled of cabbage. Atop St Paul's the cross

Bobbed to the time daws kept. A little girl

Invited passers-by to take her home

To tell their missus what she ought to do

With all them stays and crinolines. She wore

Chapter and verse, and not too much of either.

A constable suggested she might make

The lilies of the field her chaperone.

She didn't seem inclined to heed the call.

In the damp thoroughfare a printing press,

Strewing its papers, signalled for a turn.

Genre Friction

 

Latex, the private dick opined, but whether
he’d noticed wall paint or the lissome pants
which clung to her like wall paint, I don’t know.
When he said Dames, I guess he didn’t mean
a thespianette once sanctioned with a gong;
but, really, only every second line
he uttered, like a water-damaged page,
registered. He was grousing about hollow
points. Perhaps Quintilian had reentered
his recollection. Sometimes from a dark
outcrop of fiction odd things clamber up,
with strappy shoes, peroxide hair, and net
shielding the violet eyes. Probably not
Quintilian, though. Psyche with a quirk,
trysting the night away, seems far more likely.
He offered rye. Who now drinks rye? The flask
restored him for an exit, nothing more,
and soon the transom, last light left, went black.

The Village

 

In that kingdom, it is written,

birds do not sing: they hum, show tunes
mostly, though records and radios
are unknown. Overseas travel
is a bird’s hobby. They have seen
mermen; they’ve been to the far side.

In that kingdom, whose king does not
touch the ground, birth to death, for soil
that knew him would have to be burnt
(and who, of that thin stratum, spares
any centimeter gladly?),

the yaks dance in their fields at night,
shaking their horns, and the stars faint.
The marmots whistle in the aisles
between rows of quaking blue pines.
In the skin dormitories sleep comes

when light fails. Mountain Edison
won’t string lines here. The yaks strike sparks
when hooves tap stone, on cloudy nights
looking like mountain glow worms.
Dreamless, love is an act of sleep.

What If The Evil Twin

 

What if the evil twin prevails?

What if the Count of Darkness jails

The better half? And pulls his testes?

What if the loyal troupe, his besties,

Good and fidele as earth and salt,

Are swatted away? Then, oy gewalt,

There is the end of fairy tales.

The kingdom falls. The black barge sails.

Maybe a thousand years of briers,

Of root decay and stagnant fires,

A new-fledged bird will take the air

And chirp because there's no one there.

Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard

 

    This appeared in the British magazine Candelabrum.


I started a list of what you never saw,
dead before Epsteins lived, dying while yours
wore roundheads, dead a long time, dead so well
your stones look more like sponge. I gave it up.
Who wants a list of cars and compact discs?
Who could explain epinephrine to the dead

and chronically short of breath? Still in their spheres,
the stars were not impeded by your lights;
but lacking National Geographic, you
never pinned up the Horsecrab Nebula.
It says here you’re not lost, but G N B RE.
Someone has trimmed this turf 300 years,

and still it wants to grow. The River Wye
asks no eponymous questions, flows while green
returns to grass, which is the epitaph
other grass grew. That they’d be picturesque
in increments of centuries would make
the dead rise, if they could. I wait. They can’t.