The Boy in the Iron PJs

  

Older by seconds, thus the King of France,

A wig so big the star can’t constellate.
(He hath decreed and fears nor scorn nor sneer.)
A lettre there, a duc by title here,
Leave to wear lilies on his velvet pants:
A little one, whose priors are his fate.

Pent in a donjon, eating mexicorn
From a melmac plate, his eyes like metal dust,
His prayers bouncing off the crumbly mortar,
He waits for the interminable porter
To celebrate the day when he was born
And let him dawn the elder, only just.

What We'll Always Have

  

Ah, zut, she said, we'll always have

Paris, where we were poor but brave.
And poor, I said. And sick of head.
You are not Gertrude Stein, she said.

Mais non. Agreed. The leaves were green
That spring. Horse chestnuts fell like rain.
I was not well. I know, she said,
I tried, and you were mostly dead.

Those were the goddamn days of yore,
I wrote. And yet you would not share,
She said. Too bad that we were bred
Gold to the bone, now flayed, now fled.

A Poem for the Girls Writing All Those Poems

  

So you picture yourself

in a cream satin t-shirt

writing a poem about

you writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

how when he breaks in

on you writing a poem about

writing a poem about

your cream satin t-shirt,

he’ll be so excited

about you so excited

about writing a poem

about him so excited,

he’ll shred the damn t-shirt,

sweep you and your poem

right off your futon

and someone will publish

your poem because it is

true as a t-shirt,

besides which, the paper

is cream, like the t-shirt.

And, smooth as it is,

the poem you’re writing

about writing a poem,

who needs the boy?

Or if he shows up,

while you’re still in your t-shirt,

all cream and all satin,

who needs the poem?

What If The Evil Twin

  

What if the evil twin prevails?

What if the Count of Darkness jails

The better half? And pulls his testes?

What if the loyal troupe, his besties,

Good and fidele as earth and salt,

Are swatted away? Then, oy gewalt,

There is the end of fairy tales.

The kingdom falls. The black barge sails.

Maybe a thousand years of briers,

Of root decay and stagnant fires,

A new-fledged bird will take the air

And chirp because there's no one there.

Homer Was Not

  

    Long, long ago, while humankind was still emerging from the Dark Ages, this appeared in the Denver Quarterly.

Homer was not Homer,

but a Homer whom

we, by mis-misnomer,

call a name the other's.

Histories assume

economy of mothers.

Fungible poets sink

into LaBrean bogs.

Editors may think

editees alive;

cockroaches and frogs

generically survive.

Word Problems

 

Let's say you had 2 monkeys and a fox 

7 bananas, and an ATV,
Or maybe a rowboat, and a ski chalet.
How many trips before you fall asleep,
Dreaming of Mr Dinkum’s science test
And the atomic weight of Super String?
Give up? One monkey’s grey, the other locked
In Booneville, where he learned the iron rule.
The fox clears out the tikihut and leaves
Scat on the rec room floor in thorns and thetas.
Then you remembered Mr D was dead,
Shot by his wife in 1983
For messing around in Chem Club Lab. The fox
Is wily, and you never stood a chance.

When Lions Come

  

This appeared in Orbis.

When lions come to the door to drag you out
into the street, they won’t want elegy
or meditations on the Elder Breughel.
It’s commonsense and die with them: plain speech
is what they have time for. They’re not chimpanzees.

In camps, if you make it there, interrogation
occurs in prose, in real time, not in feet.
Elephants can do prosody; lions think
elephants have gone soft, wasting their gifts
on rumination, wallowing, and tusks.

Under the klieg lights lions want the truth.
They won’t even tell you, Soon you can go home.
Maybe they eye a haunch and hum a little.
Confess the truth and change for death: that’s all
the deal they offer, all they need to know—

lions don’t hope. They are. No note is sent
advising your next of kin you have been laid
with wildebeests and zebras in the pit
where herbivores accrue, praying, say lions,
they could be lions next. Not bloody likely.

When It Was New

  

This house when it was new

was mine. Now we have aged

past midpoint. When I grew

that elm, I kept it caged

a year or so. It soars

and crowds the house beside,

as if the out of doors

were one great neighbor wide.

I guess we haven’t altered

because I went away,

nor would these roots have faltered

if I had chanced to stay;

and yet it seems it bided

until I turned my face,

like someone then decided

to let it have the place.

Arabica Nights

  

Scheherazade called last night, with a tale

Of buffalo and bitcoin. I hung up.

Her name is Scam; her voice is far away

From Rocky Mountain vowels, her face as pure

As real-life happenstance, as blank as pie.

Next time she calls I’ll ask her, Have you more?

More rocs, more executions, warranties,

Or current offers? I am Old King Cole

And full of expectations unfulfilled;

But I can see the chambers where you toil,

A studio walled in silk, and those are pearls,

And these are bread and swine, Scheherazade.

In Adam's Fall

 

Yes, it is autumn. You see the pale tinge

The leaves imply. They know what will come next,

But won't admit it. What's a leaf to do,

Feeling its death, but with no voice to kvetch,

No hand to raise in protest? It's a fair

Fall from here and will be crunchy then,

A lot of company, no one to say

There, there, we were quite green back then, you know?

Called Upon by the Professor

  

I was paying bills when Professor H.,

dressed in his salt-and-pepper tweeds, appeared

and clucked, too long a victim of catarrh

and clerical miscues. The wrong iota,

sense goes awry, the statement gets misfiled.

He raised a saturnine brow. “O loveliest

of trees,” he said and decrescendoed. No

spot of ink stained where he’d stood, no scent

of laurel filled the august empty air.

I turned myself to text and death, his two

permanent acquisitions. In the heat

the cherry blossoms fluttered, though no breeze

rattled my papers. Unhappiness, he said,

is best unspoken. Sweet are the uses of

pomposity. Pains and chains and silence.

The Sight of Snow

  

The fat squirrels have surrendered.

Nuts, I say: they had no other course.

The chickadees complain until they’re hoarse.

I feel for them as though they had been rendered,

Or would if I were nature’s friend;

But I’ve made other, safer plans for fall.

I shall not be at home when ill winds call.

Spring is the goal here; winter is the end.

The trees are sure they will awake.

The frozen grass has done it all before.

Clematis clings to hopes there will be more.

But they're all botany. There's no mistake.

No cyclic show for me; but, oh,

I think of warmth and someone whom I knew,

Someone who spoke in cadences, as you

Burst with excitement at the sight of snow.

The Arc of History

  

Phoebus in his coat and tie

Caught the barista’s wandering eye,

And all was won, and love was done,

And love produced an errant son.

And all the world was hot and dry.

A shepherd in a foundered field

Found him a maid and made her yield.

A golden age, by golden rule,

Began its rain, and it was cool,

Its prior mystery concealed.

They called it fable, called it lore,

The days of rain, the age of ore.

And all of those who came behind

Said it been by love designed,

And they were what had been in store.

The Desuetude of Mr James

Wry Mr James commits enomities

Of style with style. This late in life he knows

Embonpoint is a structural device,

The close that makes the man--his buttons need

Jumbo's dexterity to finish off.

He calls his flowers flowers: that's enough

For floribundant similarity;

But caution comes in shades, like purple light

Climbing a red-brick garden wall at dusk;

And he sees every tint, Adamic man

Mounting a stair which knows no period,

Only a pause, a lamp lit at each landing.

The Midnight Train

 

A lantern on a lanyard on the last

Train out of town to Anywhere at All,

Which happens to be east of Little Jugs,

Gives more illumination than you’d think.

A carrot and a stick and several shoes

Piled on the platform where the caboose becomes

Thin air; and you, you weren’t expecting that.

The elegance of emptiness does not

Include a carrot or a pair of heels,

But Anywhere at All will be amused.

A milliner’s, a pool hall, and a new

Patisserie, in case the gentry come.

A Church of Holy Holiness, a cow

Walking the streets, and then, of course, a bank.

Life can be fruitful, Anywhere at All

Instructs its children, who are dreaming of

A better world, offered in Somewhere Else,

To those catching the midnight train, which leaves

Tomorrow afternoon at 6:15.

Meet the Beetles

 

When I was young, there was abundant time,

The local trees insatiable, the bugs

Bigger than classmates. I remember names

Were things, as permanent as furniture.

Now I am not. Sequoias come and go,

And monuments are jittery. I see

What I have seen. I tell a bug, I knew

Your family. I made a Science Fair.

He is not much impressed, and he is dead

Or playing dead. And April's grass is green.

The Pisan Pantos

  

The rain distorts my make-up, blue
The color of my hair and eyes.
(My nose is red, my heart is green.)
A scenist has prepared the skies
Ingeniously. I’ve come into
My own here--Look! A human bean,

A roly-poly in a cage,
The Widow Twankey on her walk,
Wishing the weeds would grow so high,
I could ascend my private stalk
And put all heathen in a rage.
This dragonfly my private eye:

He boos and hisses, laughs and cheers
As I perform the buck-and-wing,
Magic to find the state a spine,
Alchemy in chansons I sing.
I hope the ingenue appears
To change my homemade ink to wine,

To animate imagined books,
A smell of candy from the crowd.
This fence is higher than my art.
The roly-poly laughs so loud,
Guards come a-runnng, Demos looks,
And here is where my poems start.

The Daisies Mown

  

from These Denver Odes

The daisies mown will blow again.
The moon pines not, nor is dismayed,
rejuvenating without pain;
once man into his grave is laid,

he is no more a man. His dust
may someday form some form instead.
It won't be he. The new moon must
return; but man, when dead, is dead.

So you, figured like Helen, bright
of eye, Celinda, will not see
how good you look, made up for night,
to be illumed like Semele.

The Expatriate

 

For extra credit he remembered much

That wasn’t worth remembering, forgot
The kinship he had promised to except
From discharge, and demurred at growing up.
It made him charming, like a short-term loan,
Lots of interest there, so he changed his name
To Amaryllis-in-the-Shade and wept,
Or said he did, at auld acquaintances.
The Times that try men’s souls, he did not read,
Other than archived, knew that butterflies
Were thinner on the ground than yesteryear,
But worms more frequent. Mr Lowly Worm,
There was a name for next week, if he made
Next week as Amaryllis-in-the-Shade.

Populist Politics

  

This is the country where a commandant

Discovered persiflage and flavored it,

Enlisted Cherokees for crowd control,

Good local color, founded an orphanage,

And called it Huxley on the Hill of Beans.

A modernizer, they say now, who stored

The name of every voter in a barn

Shaped like the Trianon, then burned it down

To prove he was sincere. From the insurance

He bought a trotter and a Brahma bull

With erysipelas and crooked horns.

They wouldn't get it on. He claimed a spread

Deeper in Texas than he ever went,

Who spent his twilight out on old Cape Cod,

A victim of the Zeitgeist and detente,

An advocate for antinomians.