Manon

 Dear Abbé:

    We are pent up in our loft,
Too stippled to sing, too poor to buy new clothes,
Ladies and gentlemen, too sick to beg.
We tell each other stories. I'll be quiet,
She'll be at peace, and when the fairy says,
A plugged sou for your thoughts, then mum's the word.
Orchids could never change our little love.
Once she is dead, I'll be a notary
And practice barratry; when I am dead,
She'll move to customer service for the mob.
Someday, God willing, there will be crème brûlée,
Amoxicillin, and some warmer clothes.
Till then they hum, who do not know the words.

Their Widened Apertures

 

Girls in dresses on bicycles with baskets,

Streamers from the handlebars. A wet April
In a dry year, and they pedal warily
To market, to market, to buy like a lamb
Their new décor, more than observers deserve.

Higgledy, they head home here and there, thither,
If that may be permitted, stilled by the eyes,
The boys’ widened apertures, the precursors
And post-. Into the sun with them, pink streamers
Streaming, spring girls the headstones of the winter,
The corpus of the fall, where they wend, ridden.

Treasure Islands

The frontons bet on sonnets, good

To the last foot, unlike Lord B
Or LJS, whose syncope
Turned flesh and blood to strap and wood.

Each foot expands the club, the start
Of each sestet a lucky act.
The shape is bowing, hunched with tact,
By present pulse and present art

Betrayed in novel ways. At last
She is a rose and he a stag
Or he the hunk who freed the hag
Into her dewy, virgin past.

The Hellespont swum, Ben Gunn goes bang.
I sing the song my masters sang.

With These Beans

The conqueror of conquerors, the suave

Rapier, the diligent seabee, fat
Alcades, and persnickety CFOs.
I lack downtrodden populace, but those
Are everywhere, a litter at the curb,
Ripe for the patting. Grow No Paving Stones
Will be the motto of my beans. If tanks
Are what I offer, they can chant, You're Welcome
Between siestas and the native pulque,
A cardinal in each town to lead the cheers.

My fighter planes write Phantom on the sky,
While street urchins must reason out the weeds.
Salt beans, they'll grow with tears. A few will do.
A palace and a harp, a grand vizier,
A minstrel and a harem of the few,
The proud, the pink, the hopelessly obliged.
Let them grow pancakes out there in the sticks,
Aged fathers trying to tell the tales
Which make young people strong. They won't regret:
There never was a time to call Before.

The Well-Read Man

         This appeared in Poetry Bus.

Teach me no more. I know enough.
Of Dis and that and other stuff
Found on these pages no one's read
But dead descendants of the dead,
I've made myself a treasure hoard,
Dust like an asthma of the word.
Ceres does not search for me.
She does not call and cannot see
I bear seeds, too, and I should plant
Green fields in volume; but I can't.
The shelves are brown; the air is sere,
No months there and twelve months here.

Goodbye to Poetry Month, And About Time, Too

They asked for something simple.

They asked for something plain--

Something about a flower girl,

Something about the rain.

I really don't do simple.

I really don't do clear.

That's not what these eyes look at.

That's not what I can hear.

Obfuscatory nonsense,

Effete and out of touch,

They told me, and I thanked them.

I thanked them very much

And offered them a sonnet,

Recondite and blue.

They said they didn't like it,

Not that it was untrue.