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.