Monday, April 29, 2024

My Unravished Bride

 

Medusa’s head above the door

Has stoned the crows and salesmen, too;

But no one ever rocked me more

Than igneous, impassive you,



Though permanent now as headstones cut

With mottoes, there beside my walk,

So poets can imagine what

Art would sound like if it could talk.



Medusa once was fair herself

And drove the bright boys wild with lust.

Like you now, from her warden shelf

She flakes in petrifying dust.


Wednesday, April 24, 2024

Ferry Tale Ending

 

Tell me some more

About the shore

Where Charon waits

To greet the greats

And poor and 'twixt,

Randomly mixed,

A penny apiece,

Without surcease.

Is it hard and bare?

Do spirits share

Obligingly

Or try to flee,

Each dark shape

Bent on escape?

Do come ahead,

He tells the dead,

No woo, no warning.

No more morning.


Saturday, April 20, 2024

Lullaby In Slumberland City

 

While birdies slept and earthworms snored
And owlets stooped to swoopy flights,
You the Teen Queen Max restored,
With endless make-up, endless nights.

Our tygers pad the jasmined path
And cherries fall from green green trees
And all our dead lay down their wrath
As I awake through slow degrees

In shadowed rooms to unfilled beds.
The clock, the clock. Across the lawn,
In fact, the sparrows shield their heads
Till, chime by chime, they rouse to dawn.


Monday, April 15, 2024

Verses Suitable For Any Occasion

 


Help has been delayed.

The rescuers are lost.

Accountants have defrayed

Their compass at your cost.


The bears are up and running.

The bull has whet his wings.

Lifeguards outside sunning,

The happy hunchback sings.


Into the broken woods,

Then out again, chop, chop.

Illicit, knockoff goods,

Sold by your momma’s shop,


Are smuggled home by doctors

Discovering arbitrage.

Your robed and pear-shaped proctors

Wait in the garage.


Wednesday, April 10, 2024

It Wasn't A Nightingale

 

Least of our problems is the nightingale,

Which will not live in Denver. It must be

The altitude, the air Professor Dust,

Or all the folks from Texas moving here.

Sure, I should like to hear him sing to sleep

Weary baristas, shaking on the grounds

They cannot keep a songbird of their own.

Yes, it might cheer my grandma, if I had one,

Make her recall that once her skin was snug;

But if its old plaint was only loss and love,

You amid roses, sweetpeas on your pants,

I'd just as soon converse with crows and grackles.

Friday, April 05, 2024

Tone Deaf and Dumbfounded

 

My love is like a partridge or a squab.

I tried to make that work, but she resisted.

This was a compliment, so I insisted;

But she, it seemed, was something of a snob.


She wanted peacocks. Lord, she wanted tits

With scarlet crests and wings of diamante

To fly ahead and trill of shantih, shantih.

Still I preferred to sing my greatest hits,


Honor roll of the commonplace, the same,

Sparkly in dun. Dressed down. The sure. The daily.

Nothing about me said, I love you gaily.

She flew in neon on a darkling plane.


And so I write to you from this far place,

Who misses most a hypothetic face.

Monday, April 01, 2024

U Before I

 

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.