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.
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.
I wrote this down in perfect confidence
And cannot read a word of it. It was
Etruscan, maybe, or the speech of mimes
Running against the wind, their lips sewn shut.
It was the scent of peaches when the trees
Have been uprooted, pulped, and turned to tales
Describing a girl converted to a peach.
Apollo took her home. Artemis ate her.
I made this up in perfect confidence,
While walking the dog. I don’t recall a word.
Something about a peach, miming the fate
Of man in late September, while the rain
Didn’t feel like the fall of man, but might
Come to that, with some mulching in between.
Only a woman’s hair, he kept repeating,
Proving that erudition didn’t work.
Precedent wasn’t a cure; it wasn’t then,
And repetition didn’t make it so.
And anyway, the dresses weren’t. The shoes,
The winter coats. Or little socks. A hair,
Now that was synecdoche, which, it was known,
Couldn’t be traded on the heart’s exchange
For love or money, blood or Latin verse.
The End Is Near said every sign
Every Saturday. They came,
Forecasting death and sometimes rain.
Their name was Legion, just the same
As ever. If you had a home,
You wouldn’t come, predicting rain,
I thought, but that was foolishness.
One wore a bed sheet, one a kilt,
And you a tablecloth or lace.
You warned of blood which would be spilt
And drank your chocolate milk, a fault
Indigenously out of place,
But loveable. The girls displayed
The follies of their fashioning,
And gawkers liked the sight they made
And joined in on the final sing.
Death advertised its local sting,
Picturesque and a little lewd.
The sting was in your parlor, stuffed
With bread and money, left a card
There on the mantel, never left
The doorway where it knocked too hard,
As if no one had ever heard
Or ever wept or ever laughed.
This was the edict: When the snow first fell,
He headed for the High Country, to stay
Until the bears took out their winter trash
And mockingbirds regained their higher range.
Meanwhile, he’d cover one royal family
In hexametric verse—Plantagenets
One January, Hapsburgs, though he fell
Asleep, spilling his ink, in staunching them.
The lynx, extinct, as all good families knew,
Admired declamation, and he fed
The shrews his extra feet. I say, he said,
Attempting the Romanovs, when comets fell,
Or airplanes, on his field of vision, there
Between his clothesline and the Finland Train.
