Rex Anglorum, P.I.

 

1.

First the canary died, and then the light.

There was no heat, but it was June, okay?

He didn't need hot water any day,

But Mrs Hornet fetched the severed head

UPS had delivered overnight:

Then Rex believe coincidence was dead;

And he thought deeply and went back to bed.

When he was roused, he put that scum away,

In theory. Still, he knew just who had done it.

He took some DNA and made them run it.

The lights resumed. The boiler flamed. (The bird,

Too bad.) He thought that he might buy a hound

To save the villeins who had gone to ground,

Who’d share his common cause without a word.

2.

The type was set in Baskerville, the hair

A blonde’s – Cinnamon Smoke. He knew his stuff.

The ash a Turkish pre-war brand of snuff,

Now unobtainable, from God knows where.

His trenchcoat buckled, Rex went out to share

Info with the outwitted perp. Enough.

Dim Sum, the sign. So many are undone,

So few for whom a sleuth will do the trick.

Some muscle, maybe, or some patter, slick

As Wildroot Cream Oil. Never, though, the one,

The permanent moll, the sempiternal pick.

Rex pats his pocket; there the trusty gun

Mollifies the most strident of the senses--

A picayune per diem. Plus expenses.

Desk-Waller

 

When I awoke, you weren’t so great,

Not hell on toast, not fixed as fate,
Less than high sentence, more than fair,
Too cute to cry, too young to care.
You weren’t all that. I saw that some,
Of little fame, were twice as dumb,
Stuck out as far, and rode as fast,
And had no skills, and had no past,
And were both free and kind. They came
Before I called; they knew my name
And were available right now.
I didn’t want them anyhow.
The heart is hard, concealed and stark,
And whores in alleys after dark.

A Ballad for Willie

 

My name is William Butler Yeats.

When young, I spoke to faeries
and sang of ponds and leprechauns
and lips red-ripe as cherries.

Now my glass is cold and cracked,
my verse a fine steel wire.
The faeries all have been served with writs
and flung out in the mire,

shot down at the Post Office door,
blown up by the IRA:
a city man in a country house,
I'll make myself a play;

taut for my Maud and statesmanlike,
I perne me in a gyre.
I'll bear it all for drama's sake
and set this house on fire.

Brasso & Marble Cleaner

 I write this with a steel dip pen,

terribly old fashioned,

They wrote like this—remember when?—

painful and impassioned.

I don't.  They wrote on close stool walls

and phone kiosks and cardboard.

On creaking slats of cattle stalls.

At Metro State.  At Harvard.

They wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote

of lost wills and abortions.

At epic length.  By train.  By rote.

In whopping festal portions.

The pigs ate most.  The silverfish

six-stepped across the rest.

Frau Bluebird, fluttery and swish,

and very red of breast,

has carried off a stave or two

in rapid, darting trips

and mumbled them into a glue

and long dependent strips.

As Every Schoolboy Knows

 

        Everyone knows that Plato

        in the tenth book of his

        Republic, proposed to banish

        poets from his ideal State

            —Sven Birkerts

It goes to show

what everyone knows.

Well below

The practical city

of laundered prose,

the tired and tatty

poets conspire

in solitude.

They set afire

pipe and cable,

They send up lewd

reworkings of fable

through manhole covers.

They mail out letters

petitioning lovers

to abandon their betters.

Everyone knows

they had to move on.

We heard in prose

the poets are gone.

His Secret Notes

 

In Book VII of The Secret Notes

of Constantine Colossus

he summarizes what he's learned

from his 4 o'clocks with kings and queens,

from his morganatic wife

who sold their son to sausage men,

from his large collection of poniards

jewelled and venomed, and long use

of gnostic texts and lemon inks.

Life is short and wonky-ish, he says,

our felicity at all times

frail. Roses fade, but grass persists.

Love is ephemeral, plutocrats,

like the beggarman, must sleep.

Still, gold ain't all that shabby.

My edition of The Secret Notes

is dented, as though I weren't

the first who threw it at the wall.

My Republic

 

This one was in Plainsongs, a long time ago.

To my republic immigrants arrive
with no fanfare of paperwork; they come,
and right away they ask to be left alone.
They want to go where yeoman farmers live
and beekeepers and Latinists. Old maids
give them each maps and send them on their ways,
unstamped, unnumbered, all unphotographed.

In my republic each one makes a stop
at gift shops which sell baseball gloves and bats
with which they make their own ways to the dark
sinuous backroads of the heartland states,
thence to disperse to dry or forest places.
No one keeps count. No one’s allowed to do so.
You’ll hear them playing catch in summer’s dusk,

trying to learn to act like you and me,
even the ones who exit tropic climes
in oddball togs woven from unknown bolls.
If not at first, then soon. They must be just,
like us, and just a trickle, which is why
they all play ball, a sort of crowd control,
the only one allowed in my republic,
short on theologians, long on shortstops.