The lintel of my door declares
Timor mortis conturbat me,
But only for display. Inside,
The folks are busy brewing tea
And snacking on what Christmas left
Behind—dry turkey sandwiches
And lebkuchen. Eggnog is not
A morning-after sort of thing.
Today's the day we roll our eyes
And smirk, superior, then betray,
And throw the calendar away.
this appeared in Staple
It isn't that the oranges tasted better
or that the dust that fell across the shafts
of morning sun were something more than dirt.
We're made of motes here too, and here the sky
changes for eve, changes for morning. Though
the grass was growing when the sword was sheathed,
we are not missing all of Paradise.
I've told the story now so many times
I don't think I remember how it happened,
when I woke up with that stitch in my side
and she alongside. It still makes a good story.
What I do remember is how we made
the lamb eat avocados. Who would think
a sheep could pull a face? So here I am,
Father of Man, and dignified by years,
a tale in my possession no one else
could match but she, who is herself the tale,
and all I have to tell are anecdotes.
What stays when the emotion drains away
is this moment and that, the lamb, a bath,
Abel's first laugh, when he saw his first chicken.
I lived here once. I know
which streets went where. I ran
where this lane starts to go
to the left, where it began
to carry another name.
So I am not impressed
by maps. It's not the same,
your sketch. I think you messed
up my reality.
Where's Archer? Appleton?
The dogleg at du Pres?
I know now what you've done,
you've gone to see what's there.
You stood on my home ground
as is. That wasn't fair;
taking a look around
alters the memory.
It warps the past. It preys
on what we say we see,
It relocates what stays
to houses, then to maps,
till we avert our eyes,
as though all routes collapse
below misfigured skies.
To you a letter. How about q,
Always followed by u, as I
Follow the mark for hay and Hensa?
Too oblique, I know. I know it
Follows, not p to o, but where
We all align, in tidied rows,
Where there are diphthongs we can share,
On monuments a line or less.
O, I say, O. But no one gapes.
They keep, instead, their final shapes.
12 lines. Or several hundred more.
And never again what came before.
Around the corner, where I cannot see,
I see you waiting, haute couture in verse,
Lines I cannot remember on your face,
Deep, but not embellished, and a bright
Hyperbole of allusion in your eyes.
Around the corner. Where I cannot see.
One of the elderberries of the tribe,
Domitable, but tart. What I expected—
No, never mind. Not more or less and less,
Less saucy than a pilgrim berry. Drop
The bogs. They are not coming back. The old
Berries are what we call a souvenir,
The madeleine of fruit trees, for the loss,
The least instructive, dispersal of the juice,
The streetwise remnant abandoning the street,
Forswearing home and all that garden truck,
The radish and the relish on the vine,
The creepers and the hoe, the rake and rose.
What of that? I'm not alone,
Tasting rose and bubble gum.
Years and boys, there must be some.
Some I hate, some unknown,
Time has made them dry and dumb.
Under clocks and amber trees,
What they think of in their years,
Ever Jenny, never nears.
All who did their best to please,
Kissed and captured, cold and tears,
Distant smiling, fresh and close,
These are flushed as any flower.
Real and given to the hour,
Jenny kissed me. No one knows
Jenny distant. All that power.
13
At the hoity-toity entrance to the GeorgeWhat if the stars are singing like the bats,
Too high a song to hear, but full of clues,
Like whodunit and why I dream of girls
Too good for me, I never even met?
Maybe it’s all the same, and what they say
Who say such things, one nation, full of bonds
And stock responses, they who never saw,
Though bangled to the max, a stellar mouse
Absconding with your name and your address,
Home to a star part gas and all white flame.
A butterfly just robbed a bank. At once
The effects are felt in Cleveland, and the jars
Of homemade pickles aging in my fridge
Advertise the consequences. Good luck
That I was weeding frontally at the time.
Deforestation? Maybe, but the choice
Is stash the butterflies in solitude.
Frappe´ their nectar. Give them leafy bunks.
But do not risk Tibet on keeping straight
Your sofa cushions or the coffee mugs.
This first appeared in The Chimaera.
Wednesday
Among these sparrows, frogs, and chickadees,
Finally warmed by sun instead of steam,
Too early for the shift to certainties,
Pentameter to prose, maybe I dream
Of sex and violets. Perhaps I know
What scientists on salary forecast:
This Thursday, patchy fog and early snow.
Their spring comes early, but it does not last
Forever. So I’m told. No season does
Which lies beneath the dirt today. Tomorrow
The violets will be the spring that was.
They lend me verse. Whatever else I borrow,
I offer back, as though I had a choice.
First day of spring, this is my winter voice.
Whensday
Dr Dee and his chicks, that brood who read
Fire and numbers, every comet signed,
What good are they? Their sun is not a head
Of state. Mere shape lives only in the mind,
In digs where violence dwells, sex of a kind,
Like ringing changes on these lilybells.
He knew his time, he told his time. And then?
I heard the answer. Like the heart, it tells
The count. It told the weather, but not when.
I take my time. It will be small and soon.
He only heard the pitch of notes that men
Are built to hear. I think I heard that tune
Performing here. The feeder and the grass
Bear the refrain: “A lass, my love, a lass.”
Wedsday
Nobody claims that flowers are untrue
Because they claim their pollen from the wind.
Imagine being proffered this excuse--
“It was the zephyr did it. I’m unskinned,
I’m virgin as a stone.” Of course you are.
The hyacinths immaculately flower.
They took their color from a passing star
While you were sleeping: some ungodly hour
When spring believed that nobody was watching.
Tulips push through. The grass begins to sweat.
Troo-loo the song the songbirds have been hatching:
Tra-la the song they urge us to forget.
Trust is a cycle. If we do the same,
We get it back. And no one knows its name.
Wendsday
A pilgrimage, spring having sprung, we go
The places we go every day, to see
What sun has done to change the world we know:
It starts from scratch, except for me and thee.
We are now what we have been, more and less,
Parts shed, augmented, by and large forgotten.
We can still flower—there is that, God bless--
So fertile we, so much to work with, rotten
Right to the corps. They call these zephyrs. Feel
Commotion in the ground? No? I don’t either.
From this point forward, nothing much is real—
No pilgrims, Aprille, smalle foweles neither.
Spring forward. Fall back. Either way we stand
Right where we are, not sky, not wholly land.
I checked the tub for tides. The ducky rode
Bravely as ever, jake a duck as Drake.
Clearly the surface, clear of Spaniards, sent
A message to all pirates, blackguards: Make
Your bones in other bathrooms, the abode
Of breeds without the law. They pitch a tent
On bathmats, oilcloth, on a naked floor.
I scuppered them. Here you will find no more
Than Ivory, almost completely pure.
The tub was calm. And yet the drain was waiting
To suck and spiral all that came away.
Calm is a fury, still anticipating
The quack of terror. What poor ducks endure
To save the surface, even for a day.
Under the bridges, then, where can be found
There at the Federal Courthouse they love Shakespeare.
They quote him often, and they quote him wrong.
“The quality of mercy is not stained,”
A PD said. “This kingdom is no horse,”
A prosecutor pled. “In every hamlet
They know the great clichés.” I have an itch
To stand and rectify, but I do not,
Suspecting that the local lockup holds
Good friends to friends of bards. The judge looks down,
His lifetime tenure harbored in his gut,
And quotes, “Victims have died. Why, even worms
May have their day and turn. But not for love.”
It’s hard to argue with a thought like that.
I don’t know any worms who disagree.
from These Denver Odes
Dawn over trees, over roofs
over jogging dogs, toting their own leashes.
Dawn over coeds in too few clothes
for the chill.
Dawn departs quickly, Affairs
called to conclusion, sunlight's gold coercion,
coffee perked, forecast scanned, all the scores
doublechecked.
I have immotile longings,
the dying semen announces to the sheets.
I have it in me to be no one,
to make new
none. Percale covers it all.
Dawn is gone. Late runners occupy highways,
their bunched lovers'-knots trained to forget.
Dreams of flesh.
for Stuart James
This appeared in Angle.
In fall the flowers fail. The faeries fly
To Boca Raton and the Winter Wings Buffet,
The Bottomless Shrimp Bowl, Boundless Salad Bar,
The Seminal Seminole Margarita +,
And flash floods in your dreams. The flowers pray
To be dismembered in your orisons,
A Home of Unsaved Sepals in the Hills,
A past of pollen all their future now.
No cherry pie. No Anna Baptist Bread,
Dunked in The Living Chocolate Wonderfall.
No Date Night Date Nut Pudding in the spring.
The faeries book their seats for further south.
for HC
Such hieroglyphs are easy.
This one says,
CATES IN THE MORNING and that swirly one,
NO
PAIN, NO PAIN, today the practical
Feast-day of St Bartokomous,
who wrote
God is most perfect, this His indigence,
And
gaped in satisfaction, doubtlessly.
Over the air conditioner man
hath sprayed,
HARM TO A WISE MAN IN HIS BROTHER’S
FIELD.
Prefects prefer straight-shooters, schooled in
plain
Annunciation, all lean and clean in tone.
The pink
one pricked above the mansard reads,
DRAGONS FORGET THEIR EGGS.
Who claims they don’t?
They disbelieve in swords, even in
dark
And ribald festivals of patriots.
St Evelyn said, This
ghetto is my stage
And squashed his inner pupa. He was mad,
This
wight who wrote beside the padlocked door,
THE WORLD IS COMING
TO THIS STAGE. STAY TUNED.
You know the one about the whore,
The Land of Lu, or Mu, was washed away
Embarrassed by an iron-hungry surf.
In gaudy triremes rowed by engineers
The government attempted to re-boot;
But Greenland intervened and Newfoundland
And all the loansharks rising from the sea,
Shaking their cowrie shells, their scuba gear,
Promising retribution had occurred.
Debacle and disaster. Turned away
From Silverado and Leander's Gate,
The governors, their Chicken o' the Sea
Exhausted, floated, while the trade winds spent
Our heritage and blew the whole thing up.
They do not come to see me in this hole,
My buds and bloods. Perhaps they share the shame
And largesse of disaster. Who would bruit
His kin's confinement in an earthly cone,
Tapered for retribution? All the worms
Are laughing, mind you: they don't see the sense
Of wider welkins; blue just makes them blush.
My Uncle Thad threw rubbish on my head,
The Daily Mirror wrapped around a bun.
Perhaps he meant to plump me. Kindness comes
In kits, to be assembled as you like it.
Aunt Alice led him off, her voice the twin
Of heavy rain on mud. There is no bed,
No sleep, no sanitation, whereat worms
Stand up and cheer for everyone but birds.
I pray for commutation, they for dirt.
Imagine that it’s been
A century since Yeats.
Imagine, and conclude
How meaningless are dates.
All of time gone by,
And not a second passed
For you who saw him first
And you who read him last.
He stepped outside to say
A line or two. It was
Out of time and place,
But no one cared because
No one had built a wall,
Nobody tore one down.
Beautiful women merged
There in Lissome Town.
When you are given away
Another century hence,
Your comely wisdom combined
Worth a couple pence,
The women still will walk,
And rebels stop and stare,
Nothing much to say.
Helen will not care.
