The timbers rotted and the close rooms stank.
Pomanders did no good. Out in the stables
The horses held their noses in the dank
And straw. Laid out on the damasked tables,
The joints turned green, the bread grew hard and died;
No lady could spend such a spring inside.
The cuckoo on the move sang in hysterics;
The hawthorn sucked in air and stained it pink;
The garden walks were seasoned well with clerics;
The poets hid in hedges with their ink
And rhyming paper. In the elmtree shade,
Vertically, a man knocked up a maid.
Heads would depart before there came a June,
And no man knew the faith that in the fall
Would be allowed. Red-ripe and out of tune,
Wind in their blood made lyres of them all.
Men died, who let their mustaches relax
Or thought of a conundrum worth an ax.
The buried life of immigrants, obscured
from sight by Grandma Hortense's Pall Malls,
came to a stop in her, when she declined
to tell the stories her mother told her
to Dad, or when he didn't care to hear
his own voice bearing tales to me. Somewhere
in Germany—we were too proud to be
from Eastern Europe, or, may God forbid,
that Tsarist place—the Epsteins went to shul,
if given leave, and Grampy made a minyan.
It must be so. They all grew old and gnarled
and must have built portable roots, but we,
the Friends of Crockett, Boone, and Hopalong,
we weren't to know what they had heard and so
in our turn, shtum. The Indians lived once
where we had Sunday school; the Gentiles bore
no adverse rights in our town. Grandma knew
unlike that Mrs Feingold, she belonged.
This appeared in South Ash several hundred years ago
Let us enumerate some things which move you
(one,
two, three, five—let’s only count the primes,
the ones that
really count).
Your
daughter’s hands
stained to the wrist in peas and carrots,
saying,
“Mommy, can you do this?”
Your
husband stopping
and getting back out of the car and coming
back
to the house to say he won’t be home for dinner.
The
thought of the lover you have never met
thinking of you and
wondering what sound
you’d make if he turned you this way
first, then that.
Your husband calling, saying, since they
serve
fresh fish tonight on Burma Airlines, he
might miss
dinner tomorrow, too, and if
Air Kampuchea takes his
Mastercard,
he’ll send a postcard back from Angkor Wat.
The
sight of your fingers telling you they are
your lover’s in
extremity.
The
voice
you haven’t heard paying you that one praise
you
always wanted not to have to seek.
The airline calling, asking
if you are
the beneficiary whom he called
aloud to,
somewhere over Bora Bora.
A footstep at the doorstep, at the
door.
Your daughter asking if someone could please
change
her, isn’t anyone going to change?
Potpourri printed this one.
Here
is God’s plenty
--Dryden
I
watch the garden mythologically,
predator swans beneath the
victim trees
whose limbs still twist, the Zoo a generation
of
sweat transforming semen. It may be
the tail of the tapir holds
statistical
significance, as flexible as a god.
Look
at the fountain, all carved heads and mouths
smiling in
blindness, O-O’d in stone terror,
or blank, as though anomie
were their defense.
The flowers soil themselves with seed: they
once
cried to be changed, and now they are, they are.
The
coral snake remembers better days
when he swam
double-breasted in a rain
of terror. There are peacocks in my
path.
Two antelopes who can’t elope because
Jove pinned
them in begetting to the sand
until they begged in heat for
hooves, they made
story. A bullfinch twitters. From my
first
fable up to the present, who has been
transformed
by hormones, given plumes, and sent
to brood odd young in armor?
Who’s been paid
for charm in stars? Who started school but
came
back home a tale of fantasy in feet
some free verse
mortal thought too cute to count?
Let's hear it for the frenzied fritillaries.
They flit, yes, I am sure they do, but look—
Their wings make boys in Paraguay run backwards
And girls at St Lestrade grow maidenheads.
Have you no hope of following? Well, no,
Not with that punim, marked with freckled dust
Of sweet and sweaty apocalypse; but I
Shall soon arrive, accomplishment no go
And expectation up for sale, reduced
To realistic, pure disapparation.
So grab my hand, descend to Pluto's cave,
Where slopes are slick and trees have been conjoined
And mica and basalt are felonies.
There we shall break our fast. We'll beg to stay
Trunked and taut and parallel forever.
This appeared in Staple.
A place where each room glows by lamp at night
as buildings grumble back into the ground,
groomed, but no longer supple, as they gray,
where docents sprinkle sets of books with dust,
and privilege is lectured on by experts
in bespoke suits and coats of arms, where rubes
like me can listen from the vestibule,
absorbing facts and accents, but not charm,
contempt both for themselves and others, not
a hope of Heaven, but twelve names for grace:
this is a college comfy with itself.
Punts in the current, gals who've been to dances
with one's new roommate's brother, not with one,
they go together like the sound of cash
and knowledge of vocatives. I can be turned,
bought and subverted, for a vowel sound.
Treachery leads me to the place where we
must pay to be shown over the great hall,
the gallery, the messes. Up above,
in bedrooms, something else is taking place.
