La plume de ma taunt,
In epigrams, is what I want.
Poems by Richard Epstein. Not much commentary, only one picture (sorry, Alice), and little disruption: just a place to find poems by Richard Epstein
Grandmothers
throw themselves into the street,
Caterwauling, burning their
ancient caches
Of diaries and grosgrain lingerie.
No more
to hope for, now that loss has come,
Unpacked in the great room,
fixed itself a snack,
And cut the landline. Tell the tailor
no:
Alteration belongs to yesterday.
The authorized
watchers do not want to watch.
Where younger pain explodes, this
just hangs on,
Nor all that long. The actuarials
Identify
themselves and confiscate
Running shoes of the stationary
kind,
The keening widows and the flattened fraus
Not
vigorous enough for knitted sleeves.
The grandmothers grow
smaller, they retreat,
Much larger women on their wedding
days.
Their children now have dewlaps. Here come vans
As
big as percherons. The women grip
Their sorrow and will not be
dragged away.
By morning they will be a little field
Of
husk and hull, a compost now assoiled.
He flew it higher than you might have thought,
Beyond the reach of Sense or Cymbeline,
Headed for higher office, like the Earl
Of Eyrie or the Alderman of All.
Beyond reproach he flew it, though unmanned,
And woman, too, if only she would listen,
However first impressionable that.
I can't make headway here. A ducal debt
Is nomenclatural and nothing more,
And yet he flew it higher than you thought
He could, a prince among the aspirants.
Fate and fatuity are oh so close,
Wax wings and a ball of twine at either end.
By stage, the journey, shorter than you think,
Consumes with interest the time. Those heads
You pass, for instance, stuck on rusted pikes,
The burning martyrs praising their foul judge,
Half-naked women selling anathemas--
Where is the like in leisure, safely sound,
Petting the family dog or boiling grits?
It takes a trip like this to fill the mind.
We stop at The Remorseless Inn for brunch,
One price fits all, relieve ourselves, then wash,
And head for the Humble Counties, home of black
Kine and those hunting dogs bred out of wolves.
Consulting our horoscopes, we do not pause;
Our journey has the urgency of faith
Beset by trimmers, little men, and gray
Ecclesiastics. Soon it starts to rain,
Thus mud prevails. We are above such things.
Thatch is espied, then woodcocks, and the tang
Of peasants burning wintergreen: they keep
Their spirits up, sure, broadcasting the fate
Of unbelievers in a weal of woe.
We have arrived, credentialed, to be kissed
And flattered, and we order each a grog,
A sandwich, and a leg of wench. Ah, home.
Someday it will be home. The savages.
Congratulations, you've won Paradise.
Don't sweat the taxes, though with a prize like this
You'll get the salesmen and the beggar saints,
The clansmen and the classmates and the shame
That everyone else is licensed to contend
With sin, the petty and the deadly, all
The fallout of an autumn day at home.
But you, you will be here, in Paradise,
With 40,000 gourmet restaurants,
Emerald beaches, one-string harps who play
The Goldberg Variations. You have won
Eternities of room service and sea
Turtles to ferry drinks. (You have the time.)
The waste is heavenly, because there are
Malebolges of malcontents, their misery
Palpable as an egg, grit in their eyes,
Their tears a resin thicker than shaved ice,
And lupus. And the starving tots. Disease
Went AWL, but not so memory,
That vague disquietude, something like gas.
Read the fine print. Sign on the dotty line.
And tell your friends. Oh, tell them twice. We're waiting.
I vaguely recollect that there are swans
somewhere famous in Boston, somewhere Lowell
might think them his, a bird grant from the Crown.
He might discuss with Dr Holmes at night,
after the port passed by too many times,
how Zeus had managed Leda. This would pass
for smut among the philocrats, I swan.
“Under a spreading chestnut tree,” they’d laugh.
“Beg pardon?” said the emissary from
the Court of St James. “A longfellow joke,” Lowell said.
“Uh-huh,” said Robert, many years away,
trying to fit both skunk and sour cream
into his recollections of a swan
whose loins devolved a war it could not stop.
The Boston pops have brought their kids to hear
Napoleonic cannon foddering.
They hum as they tuck cobs back in their hampers,
decorously wrapped. Here Ted Williams hit
.400, which was nothing, if you count
percentages left lying in the snow
so Bonaparte could win the Triple Crown,
ambitions learned from Alexander, who
differed from Plato as to Homer’s hit.
Home and away, it all came down to swans.
—In memoriam Paula Tatarunis
Insensate sensei, say
Something in woodsy pulp,
Suited for cookie dough,
Something you hope will help
The plausible prophesy.
While we are young enough
To clean our plates, predict
Whatever will plot a graph
Good sense would interdict.
I'll study hard. I swear.
No fingers crossed? No fair.
What
do they mean, who say
The
world has gone awry?
The
trees leave every day.
I
saw them in July,
As
green as the heart of man.
I
see men stiffly clad,
Colored
in gray and tan,
Calling
our summer bad
For
insufficient shade,
Damning
our leaves as small,
Making
their wrath a blade,
Hurrying
us to fall.
If
only our lives were sad,
If
we saw that we had
Outlasted
our summer stay,
They'd
happily love us all
And
tidy us away.
Let them eat cake.
Their teeth will break.
Let them eat bread.
They still will be dead.
They might not eat.
Their dust will be sweet.
Just ask the germs
Inside the worms.
The general says, This is caviare,
Nor am I out of it. Inside the shed
The power tools warm to themselves. They drill
And flatten on the notion that the meek
Outnumber nails and must be driven home,
A smell of revolution in the air,
Like cuts that will not clot, like missing men
Who families have given up and watch
Ice-skating shows in April. It is June.
We have a chance, the general opines,
If taken at the tide, and he retreats.
The skater falls. She bounces up, her sequins
Prisms on a revolving stage of light.
A mitre saw is humming in the shed.
This appeared in Angle.
When on the tepid shore
In woods within the city
The woods pretend to be
More than merely pretty
And decorously twee.
We have an owl and chipmunks
And squirrels and a fox
And almost massive tree trunks.
Mocha Man's two blocks
Away. Falafel King
And Conoco sustain
The needs of those who bring
Both brunch and hope, if rain
Muddies not the footpath
and wetteth not their feet.
The titmice, in mild wrath,
Fall silent, lest they meet
The programmers, the lawyers,
The botanists in clogs,
and eco-tested warriors
With large and tubby dogs.
This appeared in Lyric.
The streets our fathers played in they describe
Over and over, looking out at air
Peopled with places we've been told were theirs,
Home to some far-fetched prehistoric tribe
Of Normans, Bobs, and Jimmies. These are now
Grandsires to a clan who do not hear.
No streetcars run down Skinker. I see how
Amid my life my life could disappear.
Nail clippers, maybe, no more aftershave.
No shiny trainers, sextet of latte cups.
A groundcloth sounds quite nice, and wind-up toys
To fill the void with clackety-clacks and beeps;
But who to wind them up? The waitress said--
Next plot but one--Here, let me freshen that.
Disarming, but without real consequence.
Clean underwear, in case of accident,
Would please The Inner Mom, but accidents
Happen to others now, and he has leaked
And spilled his substance on Aisle 17.
His sepsis seeps away, and all his toys.
It’s 90 in the shade. The hawthorn shares
Its leaves, its thorns, botanical debris,
And squirrels and does it all ungrudgingly,
All without affect. If it thinks, it thinks
Of roots and where they’re headed, of the nice
Vitreous clay pipe a little to the south,
Not of the hoarder and the house she had
Across the street. Tornadoes would have loved it.
The ambience was right, the floor a blitz
Of concrete, mud, and glass. It showed no shame
And more shade, even, than the hawthorn tree;
And shades await, if all the tales are true,
Across the tracks from piles of beauty books,
Tampon boxes, milk of magnesia sweet
As locust shells, and bags of dried-up pens.
The hawthorn leaves are planning for October.