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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
