Measured Nautically

 

Nautical miles away, does that make me

closer or farther? I should look it up.
The dictionaries loom across the room,
as you lie over endless waters, measured
by any span, piratical or not.

If I could picture schools of kippers pushing
a v-shaped wedge of water on their way
to be your lunch, or hear the blue whale sing
Songs of the Psychedelic 60s, we
still would be stumped by distance. I am quite

as close as thought-waves. I could rig a gizmo
out of a curling-iron, colander,
extension cord, some rock salt, and my belt.
Where would you plug it in? Someone forbade
compatible power in our different lands.

I'll tie a message to a tuna, let him
slipstream currents, resting at fish stops. If
he pulls up lame, we're hopeless; watch for him
to greet your shore as tired as a dove,
bearing a stalk of salt-soaked celery.

The Maltese Sonnet

   This appeared in Lyric.

Having the frail, the dingus, and the gat,
My standfast scruples and a flask of rye,
I set her up, then I sat down and grat
Like any bairn. I spit in my partner's eye
And took a beating for him. I could draw
Honor from any gunsel gave the lie
Direct. A fat man and a slippery dame
Are markers on the pawnshop of the law.
A man should be remembered for his name;
And yet I drank to think of her forbye.

A character I am. I take no fall.
In black and white down these green streets I pass,
Errant and nicely suited. If you call,
Angel, I'll say you made a bonnie lass.

A Stock Response

You start with stocks or pillories, I forget,

Celery, carrots, adultery, and shame.

Noodles, of course, and breasts or bits of thigh,

Steeped and simmered, exposed and ridiculed

And made to represent healthy choice and sin

And dreams of crepuscular orange and azure strolls.

Have another, you look so thin, you have

Tomato on your forehead—someone’s aim

Was pretty good after all. Have you been thinking

About what your father said? You have to speak

After it’s done, you know: what separates

Us from the lower beasts is chat. And veg,

Plucked from their beds at pleasurable peaks,

Simmered and skimmed and pricey past all pearls.

The Age of Gold

           This appeared in Angle.

And then, when the obliging sheep

In colors grow their ready wool,

And knickers fall like ripened fruit

Upon the shaven grass, and crêpes

Suzettes extend until we're full

From bramble bushes, and the flute

Sonatas of the shepherds toot

The flocks in file, the wolves will cull

The weakest for unconstructed suits

And long-johns knitted with extra legs.

Welcome the Age of Martial Bands

And Paperclips and Glitzy Digs

And Varnish on Arthritic Hands.

Mores and mores. Rustic now

Invites the wolf to buy his plow

For peanuts, and the Opus Coots

Disperse small crowds from roadside stands.

Plots and Sods

Older than all of us, they say,

The little blades of grass. They'll wait.
Concrete may spall and roots expand
And fire hydrants blow away.
Smaller wins out. And ain't it great,
They say, that they are quite unmanned

By frost and promises? They brown.
Or they're lopped off, sometimes refaced
By maisonettes, by diamond shops,
And yet they farm. They go to town.
They have seen cenotaphs replaced
By plots and sods. Time never stops.

The Marvells of Fruita

 

On recommendation I have come

To Fruita, hoping there to find

A vegetable life and sweet.

If pears run bareback in the street,

If clad in lucency of rind,

The watermelons strike me dumb,

I can eschew the vice of meat.

I can do seeds.  I’ll leave behind

A life of leg for love of plum.

Instead of one, I’ll love by tree.

Orchards of lovers, each the same

(Allowing for the minor spot

And bruise), will fail; who loves me not,

Need never even bear a name.

A blossom and a bud will be

Two names for each: I’ll love the lot,

Keep them from freezing by my flame,

Pick an extended family,

And build an altar on the hill

That lifts above the Fruita plain.

I’ll bury pits, one to a hole,

And watch the botanizing soul

Of each I loved burst forth again,

Multiplied.  I shall taste my fill,

Haremed upon my grassy knoll,

Summoned by humankind in vain,

Of apples of untainted will.

Tarnish Town

The potentates are marching from St. Paul,

Wearing the hats they stole from desert kings, 

More of them stuffed inside a tiny car 

Than Billy has Spaghetti-Os. The nurse 

Flaunts her prosthetic sword, says Opioids, 

And all fall down. In wheezing lungs, shaved heads, 

And intubated families they fail 

Of faith. The potentates ride in, clean up 

The tarnished town, a sink of billyclubs 

And graft, and scrub the spangled bedroom doors—

They manage with panache and housemaid’s knees. 

The little children smile and pack their bags 

And hide under the porch until the bus, 

The friendly yellow bus with plastic seats, 

Opens its doors and swears it is today.

The Book of Simple

The Book of Simple teaches you how to make

Your gut behave. It tells a tale of long
And distant. How, without it, can you steep
Teabags of Life? Would you like her to be bleached
And buxom, do you need to make her love
The man you were, unlikely as that seems?
You've got to go there. Really. You go there.

Of course it isn't cheap, not having been
Online auditioned or a paperback
At Harold's Half-Price Inwits. There's a crone
In Crawford with a stack in her Tuff Shed,
Guarded by gargoyles and a papillon;
And drop-ins she doesn't like are mostly dead
And numerous. When Lifetime tried to shoot
A movie version there, the black was white.
I bought one at her jumble sale last May.
It changed me round. Now I can call to mind
The minor dramatists I never read,
And then some. And the foxes stop to stare.
They catch some scent, a brief response to pain.

It can't be memorized. It must be read
Each time as though from scratch. The crone once made
A golem in a golden-thread sombrero
Who danced at her command. The April rains
Reduced him to a plaster statuette.

Made in Crawford, it says there on the sole. 

Epic In The Making

  

This was the edict: When the snow first fell,

He headed for the High Country, to stay

Until the bears took out their winter trash

And mockingbirds regained their higher range.

Meanwhile, he’d cover one royal family

In hexametric verse—Plantagenets

One January, Hapsburgs, though he fell

Asleep, spilling his ink, in staunching them.

The lynx, extinct, as all good families knew,

Admired declamation, and he fed

The shrews his extra feet. I say, he said,

Attempting the Romanovs, when comets fell,

Or airplanes, on his field of vision, there

Between his clothesline and the Finland Train.

Pluvial Morphology

Someone has painted letters on the walk.
The rain invents a ouija board. It points
LQK ATT, precatory and sibylline.
And soon effaced in promiscuity.
The walk now stands for everything at once,
Like dreams and abstract artifice. The rain,
It raineth only some days here, a treat
Of dissolution. Carry me away,
Its strain, its burden. We must quite forget
We all go somewhere: somewhere in the sea
O REASON NOT THE NEED is spelled in kelp.
The silt holds every sound that can be said.

Cartoon Love

  

1

Ye Olde McDuck notwithstanding, swimming

in shekels never seemed much fun—the crunch

and jingle of a pool? No, maybe not.

But think about the Beagle Boys voyeuring,

the salivating nephew in his sailor

blues, the troika jabbering like woodchucks;

and every ducklette Duckburg knows is damp,

ready to peel her thong off in the bullion.

Throw the poolboy a grand gratuity

and drive Miss Daisy off to the cabana.

Under a smiley moon Donald sings love

songs to the jangle of the ukulele.

No one can understand a consonant.

Is pain more painful when you're bottom duck?

2

Beep beep. Boop boop. The flapper runs full tilt

at the canyon wall, perspective in her head

enough to carry her though paint and stone.

The coyote follows, thinking her the bird,

the acme of his hope, dinner. Sees stars.

They say that men get off on buxom drawings,

pulchritudinous bunnies, collagened.

Granny passes on bulldogs stuffed with pecs.

She's holding out for tabloid zillionaires.

You dream of Tweety with the light brown hair?

Consider life insurance and tuition.

The coyote runs, his legs a blurring wheel,

and falls for lack of faith, the canyon floor

rising. He passes the anvil on his way.

Classical Education

 Greek to me, it was just as though I read

A language I had never known, but wanted

To understand. Black squiggles on the page,

A scent of frat boys drinking beer on Sunday—

Pindar, Sophocles, and the Kappa Sigs.

I filled my mouth with pebbles—well, more like

Gravel: it lined the sea millennia

Ago, when I was still invertebrate—

Orating made me sound like I was mumbling,

Oatmeal and not Demosthenes. I thought

Of those of my friends who had studied Latin

While I picked Russian for its false prestige

And didn't learn even that. They could read Virgil

And think of Homer. I now read the funnies,

Laugh at them, too. I orated some oatmeal

And thought of slave girls, of the spoils of purchase,

How I could compliment in my own tongue:

Hey, baby, want to dance? I once knew Russian.

I thought, there must have been some Greek louts, too,

And they spoke Greek, even when they were toddlers,

But didn't say, It's all English to me.

They didn't know the stuff they didn't know.

Under the olive trees they thought of maples

Not even a little, wished to grasp the form

Of The Infield Fly Rule not all, nor thought

Of leaving home for Hollywood. Not once.

That made them classical, even with acne,

Even when sure they were misunderstood,

Phallically challenged, or divinely sent

To free the boy next door from some damned girl.

Mendocino

 

Mendacious mendicants of Mendocino,

They partied hard, men all, until they failed

To do without their women, then they left.

Turned right, and marched into the hinterlands,

A mess of diphthongs, if I ever saw one.

The women hadn't noticed they were gone

And didn't feign that it was otherwise.

They'd all been cracking goobers, drinking tea—

Tea was what they called it— telling whoppers,

"Love makes the world go bonkers"— crap like that.

The men claimed they'd been powered by the Lord,

If offered sex, to cleanse the blackened heart.

No one believed them. No one even smiled.

Their hearts beat on beneath the soot and ash,

And Mendocino never noticed nothing.

Lente, Lente

As old as Moses, balm from Gilead

Can’t touch this, more like stale Rice-Krispie Treats
For knees, when I remember they’re my knees;
And still the angels whisper numbers, like
Da-dum da-dum dum-da da-da dum-dum.
I can make English of it, only barely.
Slowly, slowly, the horses of night arrive,
Tacked for a king in black, with golden reins,
The stirrups folded up across the saddle.
Believing that the fairy tales are true,
I bow and wait for one to speak, but can’t
Quite straighten up. Dum-dum dum-dum dum-dum.

Encyclopedia Bonus

 

        for Bruce Hartman

With every set they bought, we gave them coupons.

Each coupon let them write in with a question

which I would answer, drafting each an essay

I'd mail back. I can tell you all about

the difference between her parturition

and Mary's conception, who invented rock,

and how you really ought to say Uranus.

Omniscience means knowing where to find things.

Of course I found the ones who asked me "Why?"

They felt secure in asking why God made

liver flukes and whether predestination

required them ask me whether they

were bound to ask about predestination.

I didn't mind. I find no end in asking.

I learned to look it all up somewhere else.

That left me lots of time in which to read.

This Red Rose

 

from These Denver Odes

This red rose is perfect today,
Celinda. You, too. Its dewy
petals spread symmetrically
like—anyway, the rose unfolds;
and, at this moment, nothing could be
more like a rose than this rose. You, too.

Twilight soon. The chilly garden
will house a lesser rose, hunching
now, color leaching at its day's end.
You, Celinda, too. Forget-me-nots
last longer, stay neat. Prissy bores.

The Bear and the Goat will gather
over our houses after we
vacate them; and the rose knows no
second summer. You, too. Nor I.

The Museum of Science and Nature

 

Near the ceiling, mute in the dark, the columns

Still are complexly carved, no one to see

How pineapple chased pomegranate round

A checkered brede forever. Workmen died.

New stairs expose manual prayer made

Visible. God and joy, some mason said.

Do you want any more dumplings? asked his wife,

Reminding him that stone dead hath no fellow.

These lamps will help you trace and scrutinize

The capital embroidery, no record

Of labor's names. Perhaps, your program says,

Magic propitiates the gods of fruit.

Sad Stories/Death of Kings

 Let us not decorate the doom of kings

Whose bubbes forecast for them great events.

They mostly whined about the dearth of gold,

Misplaced dominions, and the gaucheries

Of bathrobes. Celebrate the concubines,

Whose cheeks, at least, were pink at either end.

A woman camped outside the coffee shop,

Atop a mountain of her own debris,

Swears she was once the Queen of Shangri-La.

No need to disagree. She crossed her heart,

Whispering to her phone, pennons at dawn

Creased by a zephyr, yaks upon the green

Below the castle wall, some blend of blue.

She's got a swatch she'll show you, the same shade.

When Lettuce Leaves

 

When rutabagas win the prize

    at flower shows, when tubers bat

coquettish eyes,

    I'll think of you, remember that

it all was well, we both were kind.

    When lovers cross their legs and read,

perhaps I'll find

    that you are all I ever need,

if dust greens grass, if darkness clouds

happy virgins in bed asleep,

if lost in crowds,

lovers recall they could not keep

some vow they made and feel just fine.

    When camels dance on tippy-toe.

When gum-trees pine.

    When lovers love, not just for show.

The Future of Eztinct Birds

Extinct, the birds are full of woe,

Serried like bowling pins.  How could

The nevermore be sad, dodo
A shadow in a shadowed wood?

Why do you say that I am real,
But we are not? You have my word,
I am as dumbstruck as you feel,
Singing the song an absent bird,

Succeeded, sang. If what we say
Endures beyond the tumbled trees,
We still would ride, like birds, away
Upon an undocumented breeze.

L'Eau Riders

  

"Il pleuve" is not the same

As rain come banging down.

The Seine is not the Strong

Brown God who came to town,

Arousing local song.

The worms rise, not the vers

De terre. It's just the way

Things are. The rainbow is

Our arch of triumph. Mud

Is everywhere the same,

The protein shake of blood.

Beaux Bois. e.g.

  

The trains still run through small, eccentric towns,

Mostly at night, the children, brave in their beds,

Dreaming of sleeping somewhere else, so young

They think that Indiana is escape—

Trains still pass by the silos, which are not

Mere symbols of desire, and they pass

What used to be a station, but is now

A home for unwed orphans, and they pass

Fireflies making fun of locomotives.

And nobody jumps the train. If it slows down,

That’s so the engineer can take a leak

On Illinois, grateful for the attention.

The children who wake up—well, more or less—

Will check if they are now emancipate.

They’re not; but tracks still run both ways at once.

Evening Soap

 

She wasn't even pregnant when she bore

Her brother's child (step-only, thus genteel).
What she had concealed, though, never was made clear.
She named him Topsy, he the ickle heir
To Gallantyme, the biggest ranch around.
(They hired their own weatherman and sent
Over to Ft. Lupino for their boots.)
Paterfamilias, he pitched a fit
And sent her out into a thunderstorm,
Where Little Escobar saved her and hers
And made them warm in simple peasant ways.
It took three days to track them to his hut.
Never was quite the same, some people said,
What with his herky-jerky gait. Not once
Did she look at PF. He took to drink
And fisticuffs. And that was the premiere.

Far From Lucky Fer

 

Lately, she said, I have been anywhere

But home. It has a name like Lucky Fer

Or Dottle on the Wold. I can’t recall.

Under the placard of the Wain & Wheel

I dropped a stitch; since, nothing’s been the same.

Except the weather. Only goats and old

Couples, planning their schedule of buffets,

Talk weather. I’ve not been home in a while,

There, where the ogres show off photographs

Of me in rompers, me in maryjanes,

Me at the top of Mt. St. My Backyard.

Fools and hearses live there. At my day school

The smartest girls are crying loudest. Roughs

Trade your pocket change for their oaths and blows.

Chickens display their legs; the best boys beat

Time with them. Down, they holler. Sweet, get down.

Bastard’s the town for me, a red-brown mess

Of clay and jalapeños. I have changed

My name for numbers. I am 26

This week. Next time it may be more or less,

The number of my blessings on the road.

Damme & Blast, still working on my wheels,

I won’t shove off tonight. Texas must wait.

Nightlife is like a punishment. I’ll sleep,

She says a bunch. Under the swinging sign

of Fills-A-Lot, she asked for regular

And washroom. She said, Knowing when you need

New belts and filters, all your fluids topped,

Is like a transplant: life beats in me yet.

She was on foot and headed to the east.

I been there, she said. I been everywhere.

And if you’ll cash my check, I will be gone.

Family Matters

What do you say to Ishmael,

The spurned child, the second best—

Sorry, lad, but your mom was just

A handmaiden, a tweeny like,

And Sarah was godawful pissed?

Father a race, why don't you? That

Would show him, Father of his kind.

They made it to Vienna, but

It's couches there, not ottomans.

One each. Don't pus. And Isaac, he

Got to be a major moral bit:

The proof of how you love someone

Is where you'll put the knife when told.

That ram was someone's Ishmael,

A woolly spot of sacrifice.

How many times did Isaac ask

His dad to have a catch, you think?

When cards arrived for Ishmael—

Birthday, Christmas, 4th of July—

Mom tore them up and threw them out.

Ishmael gathered up the bits.

Under Groby Great-Tree

 

This appeared in Iambs & Trochees.

This is the anodyne. It dogs
The hand that bit you. Reigning frogs
fall upwards, then, and abdicate.
This is the awkward watch, the late
piecemeal of time your father handed
off, before the day demanded
help, before the poison took.
Listen. Babbles. On Groby Brook
the paper boats all have departed:
sodden, sank, too heavy hearted
to arrive. The guests have begun
to wander off, and one by one
they seek release in solitude,
but not in love, nor meat, nor crude
imaginings of quick relief.
There is no pain beyond belief.
In Groby House, on unmade beds,
the servants set down weary heads,
and slowly the predicted dark
begins to cover Groby Park.

French 102

 

La plume de ma taunt,

In epigrams, is what I want.

Regime Change

 

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.